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Strange Coincidences?

Or the steam shrunk the felt. I'd love to go to that, I can definitely see my youngest child dressed in such stuff, wouldn't need much encouragement at all :cheer: party person !
 
Here's a minor coincidence from a couple of years ago. I was in the pub with a slight acquaintance, watching the football as you do, when a random man struck up a conversation with us about the game. A little while later, I referenced the fact that I was called Howard. The man, slightly surprised, then revealed that he was also called Howard. My friend, who I didn't know so well at the time, then revealed that his middle name was actually Howard too. Now I have only ever known one other Howard in my life and yet here by some chance cosmic alignment three Howards somehow found themselves together. Okay, it's not the Twilight Zone, but I'm guessing this hasn't happened often in Howard-related history.
 
OrsonSwells said:
Here's a minor coincidence from a couple of years ago. I was in the pub with a slight acquaintance, watching the football as you do, when a random man struck up a conversation with us about the game. A little while later, I referenced the fact that I was called Howard. The man, slightly surprised, then revealed that he was also called Howard. My friend, who I didn't know so well at the time, then revealed that his middle name was actually Howard too. Now I have only ever known one other Howard in my life and yet here by some chance cosmic alignment three Howards somehow found themselves together. Okay, it's not the Twilight Zone, but I'm guessing this hasn't happened often in Howard-related history.
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Were you all of a similar age? Parents often name babies after people in the news so your name might've been in the air back then.

Friends of my old dear reckoned they couldn't come up with a name so they used those of the offender in a famous murder case at the time. I dunno what the name was but it's two first names together, like (but definitely not as it was in the '50s) Harry Roberts which would become Harold Robert.

We have threads on names.
 
escargot said:
Were you all of a similar age? Parents often name babies after people in the news so your name might've been in the air back then.
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Actually we weren't. My friend is almost ten years younger than me and the random chap was, being kind, perhaps ten/fifteen years older. So it was quite a range of Howards age-wise. I was definitely named after Howard Keel, but I doubt the other chaps were.
 
OrsonSwells said:
Actually we weren't. My friend is almost ten years younger than me and the random chap was, being kind, perhaps ten/fifteen years older. So it was quite a range of Howards age-wise. I was definitely named after Howard Keel, but I doubt the other chaps were.
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Well, bless your beautiful hide!

I'm 60 next year and as a teenager I knew several Howards. Dunno if they were named after anyone but it was not a rare name.

(One of the Howards was a boyfriend for a while and about 15 years ago he tracked me down, when his marriage broke up. You can imagine how flattered I was. We lost touch again and I learned last year that he'd died, tended lovingly by his second wife.)
 
Was having lunch with my youngest's inlaws.
They were saying that when they were in America having a meal, the people at the next table asked if they were Australian.
When they said that they were they told them they had just been there to their daughter's wedding and named the town where it was held.
After hearing the sirname my daughter's M.I.L said that her brother was a friend and had been to that wedding.
 
escargot said:
Friends of my old dear reckoned they couldn't come up with a name so they used those of the offender in a famous murder case at the time.
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IMHO, naming one's child after a famous murderer is stranger than experiencing a convergence of Howards, but it's not a coincidence, so I must apologize with once again for going off topic in my post . . .
 
I have a couple.

I like the radio 4 sketch show John Finnemore’s Souvenir Programme and have all the sketches which I listen to regularly on random (don’t tell the producer he spends hours putting them in the right order). Anyway I was looking at John Finnemore’s blog where he was putting up pictures for a advent. One of them was a picture he had drawn of a man in red trousers and the comments were talking about the sketch where they sung about wearing red trousers and I was thinking how I hadn’t heard that for ages. Next time I started listening to JFSP on random the first one up is that song and there are 328 sketches all together and my phone doesn’t remember from last time as I regularly get the same ones.

My other strange coincidence.

My grandfather was Polish so on Christmas Eve we have a Polish Christmas Eve Supper of Borscht (Beetroot soup) with Uszka (small ravioli like dumplings with mushroom and onion inside) and for main the wonderful pierogi (a larger ravioli type thing with potato and cheese). Anyway as I was walking home from work tonight I was reminiscing about turning up to my grandparent’s house on Christmas Eve and smelling it all cooking and how I missed them. When I smelt something that smelt like the pierogi, it was very odd. I was nearing our neighbours house and they are Lithuanian so they could possible be cooking up something similar but it was very odd I got that smell just after I had been thinking about it. My grandpa never lived to see the day you could buy pierogi in Sainsburys, we have it a lot easier now
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On the subject of names 4 of us use to hang out together at school. 3 were called Pete and the fourth one John Smith. When trying to chat up girls (and always failing) we introduced ourselves and left John til last. Usually he got "suppose your name is Pete too" "No its John Smith" Usually ended up with much eye rolling and back turning on the part of the females.
 
Ok...so my main subject of contribution to these threads over the years (though not now for a while) has been my fixation on precognitive dreams. At the height of my interest in recording them I bought and commented here and elsewhere on a book by an american called Andrew Paquette who had been logging such dreams of his own for over 20 years. His reports were both clearly sincere but also way out there compared to mine..his dreams went beyond glimpses of the future but involved oobes, seemingly witnessed, meeting people in real life from dream world, and entering other realms for which he developed an entire topography.

There is a Facebook group dedicated entirely to posting comic book covers. Yesterday I commented on one of the posts. My comment was liked by two people. I recognised the name of one of them. It was Andrew Paquette.

Bear in mind I've never had nor attempted any connection or communication with him, so this is pure "coincidence". 7 Billion people in the world. What are the chances.
 
PeteS said:
On the subject of names 4 of us use to hang out together at school. 3 were called Pete and the fourth one John Smith. When trying to chat up girls (and always failing) we introduced ourselves and left John til last. Usually he got "suppose your name is Pete too" "No its John Smith" Usually ended up with much eye rolling and back turning on the part of the females.
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I've mentioned this before, I hope it bears retelling -
Years ago a friend of mine, a Mr Ball, was booking a minibus for his stag night. The nominated driver was his good friend Mr Allcock.

It went roughly like this -
Minibus hire man: So, who's driving?
Groom: Mr Allcock.
Minibus hire man: And your name again please?
Groom: Mr Ball.
Minibus hire man: Allcock... Ball... Allcock and Ball? All cock and ball? Fuck off.
 
Someone has sent me this link to a young Richard Dawkins proving the meaninglessness of Coincidences. At least that's what the headline says. He appears to be unclear what he's debunking...the significance/improbability of coincidences themselves or the purported successes of psychics. He seems to flip willy nilly between them. Personally his experiment makes little sense and supposes too much (ie that coincidences are uncommon to the indidivual), it seems to me. But essentially its a law of big numbers argument. How the endless subdivision of "either/or" groups of two is applicable to real life examples is not obvious to me.

 
gattino said:
Someone has sent me this link to a young Richard Dawkins proving the meaninglessness of Coincidences. At least that's what the headline says. He appears to be unclear what he's debunking...the significance/improbability of coincidences themselves or the purported successes of psychics. He seems to flip willy nilly between them. Personally his experiment makes little sense and supposes too much (ie that coincidences are uncommon to the indidivual), it seems to me. But essentially its a law of big numbers argument. How the endless subdivision of "either/or" groups of two is applicable to real life examples is not obvious to me.

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As Mandy Rice-Davies put it once, "Well, he would say that, wouldn't he?"
 
I think a more succinct way of summarising my objection with the big numbers argument is that its demonstrating the inevitability of coincidence AS A CLASS OF THING happening in the world overall. (And wrongly supposes a small effect in a big world)...but it says, and can say, nothing whatever about the inevitability/significance or otherwise of any specific coincidence in the life of any given individual.
 
It is impossible to do any meaningful maths on this issue because we don't know how many people experience them, how many coincidences they have, we don't know what percentage reports them, and we don't know how many people have them but simply don't notice -- I have seen coincidences happen to others and they either don't know how unlikely they are or just don't care. I think some coincidences do reflect significant hidden patterns of life. The big numbers argument reminds me of the hypothetical monkeys typing randomly the entire works of Shakespeare. Someone (I think maybe Fred Hoyle) did actually do the maths and found that even if the entire known universe was full of monkeys, typewriters and paper, they still wouldn't have written more than a few pages of Shakespeare even after 14 billion years.
 
Well yeah, coincidences are meaningless but they amuse us. I often find that there'll be several in a day, which is a coincidence in itself: but again, meaningless.
 
Meaningless? I think that like time slips, glitches in the matrix, and other Forteana, they give us a hint that all is not what it seems.
 
Carl Grove said:
Meaningless? I think that like time slips, glitches in the matrix, and other Forteana, they give us a hint that all is not what it seems.
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That's what THEY want you to think.
 
gattino said:
Ok...so my main subject of contribution to these threads over the years (though not now for a while) has been my fixation on precognitive dreams. At the height of my interest in recording them I bought and commented here and elsewhere on a book by an american called Andrew Paquette who had been logging such dreams of his own for over 20 years. His reports were both clearly sincere but also way out there compared to mine..his dreams went beyond glimpses of the future but involved oobes, seemingly witnessed, meeting people in real life from dream world, and entering other realms for which he developed an entire topography.

There is a Facebook group dedicated entirely to posting comic book covers. Yesterday I commented on one of the posts. My comment was liked by two people. I recognised the name of one of them. It was Andrew Paquette.

Bear in mind I've never had nor attempted any connection or communication with him, so this is pure "coincidence". 7 Billion people in the world. What are the chances.
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People and names are frequent topics of coincidences, aren't they? I recall that when Vallee was researching Messengers of Deception, he started focusing on UFO cults organised around the ancient figure of Melchizedek. In the same week he hailed a cab in LA, got a receipt for the fare, and when he looked at it later, found it signed "Melchizedek". He checked the phone directories, and that was the only Melchizedek listed in LA. This started him thinking seriously about coincidence, and he eventually developed a theory:

If there is no time dimension as we usually assume there is,
we may be traversing events by association. Modern computers
retrieve information associatively. You "evoke" the desired records
by using keywords, words of power: you request the intersection
of "microwave" and "headache," and you find twenty articles
you never suspected existed. Perhaps I had unconsciously
posted such a request on some psychic bulletin board with the
keyword "Melchizedek." If we live in the associative universe
of the software scientist rather than the sequential universe of
the spacetime physicist, then miracles are no longer irrational
events. The philosophy we could derive would be closer to Islamic
"Occasionalism" than to the Cartesian or Newtonian universe...

I think this could be a good model for coincidences, and other Fortean stuff. It is a bit similar to Colin Wilson's notion of "library angels," who provide documents and books when required by a writer. I have experienced similar things myself.
 
Over breakfast yesterday I got my usual fix of the Fortean Times Forum and, after checking for new posts overnight, did a quick review of the Time Slips thread. I spotted my post in which I had declared the Victor Goddard incident as the one I found most impressive.

Anyway, time to drive to the station and around 07:25, my car radio came on tuned to my usual news and sports channel BBC Radio 5 Live. I caught the tail end of presenter Nicky Campbell interviewing someone about pensions or Brexit and heard him say "Thank you very much for your perspective on that. That was Vic Goddard."
 
Next time you switch on the radio, Subway Sect will be playing...
 
That's twice now in recent months there's been a weird synchronicity between something I've been doing and the very first thing I hear when I switch the radio on (specifically BBC Radio 5 Live).
Bumping my post from August (although my Indian takeaway coincidence from a few days after that was the most striking):

On my train journey back from work last night, I finished the novel I had been reading all this week. It's the debut novel from G.X. Todd and is a post-apocalyptic yarn called 'Defender'. The twist is an original one - that the apocalypse starts because people around the world start hearing voices in their heads, often compelling them to do bad things.
I read the last page just as my train pulled into my station. Walked back to my car and turned the ignition. The radio came on (BBC Radio 5 Live) and the first words I heard were "voices in your head" . It was an interview with someone running a support group for people who hear voices.
Nice little apocalyptic coincidence I thought!
 
I've been playing the PS4 game LA Noire for a few weeks. (I recommend it!) One of songs on the great soundtrack is Louis Jordan's Ain't Nobody Here But Us Chickens which really stuck in my mind. Anyway, I finished the game one evening last week and almost lamented not hearing those songs again... and then when I turned on 6 Music the next day, what is the very first song I hear? The very same. And I'm guessing it's not played on there often!
 
gattino said:
Someone has sent me this link to a young Richard Dawkins proving the meaninglessness of Coincidences. At least that's what the headline says. He appears to be unclear what he's debunking...the significance/improbability of coincidences themselves or the purported successes of psychics. He seems to flip willy nilly between them. Personally his experiment makes little sense and supposes too much (ie that coincidences are uncommon to the indidivual), it seems to me. But essentially its a law of big numbers argument. How the endless subdivision of "either/or" groups of two is applicable to real life examples is not obvious to me.

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I'm sure I'm nowhere near as clever as the Dawk, but his simplistic little experiment, based on a limited number of subjects, which he reduced by 50% with each toss of the coin, proves nothing except that dividing any finite number of integers by 2 will always lead to 1.

Coincidence is something very different. Where an inevitable result is apparently replaced by an exceptionally improbable occurrence.

I'm sure his maths and other credentials are impeccable, but he seems to have lost a sense of speculation and wonder somewhere along the way.
 
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blessmycottonsocks said:
I'm sure his maths and other credentials are impeccable, but he seems to have lost a sense of speculation and wonder somewhere along the way.
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That's what I like about weird coincidences - the sense of speculation and wonder. Hit the nail on the head there bless.
 
My best for a long time....listening to "Tomorrow Never Knows" (Beatles) while gazing blankly through the window. The song gets to the line "It is knowing", and snowflakes begin to fall. :)
 
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