It’s International Cheetah Day. Doesn’t everyone celebrate?
Re: birthdays…
I was born on my Godmother’s daughter’s 20th birthday. 30 years later to the day, my cousin’s first grandson was born.
It’s also Extraordinary Work Team Recognition Day. I guess some managers bring in doughnuts and coffee, and others, well, have different ways to celebrate.
My wife and I own and manage a business together, so… yes.
Years ago I was listing to an NPR report on the mass shooting at a movie theater in Colorado. They mentioned the name of one of the victims, who happened to have the exact same first and last name as my childhood friend’s sister. Now, her first name was a pretty popular girl’s name in the 1980s, but the family’s surname was very uncommon. I don’t think I’ve ever met someone with that surname outside of that family.
As you might imagine, it was pretty disconcerting to hear the name of someone I know mentioned as the victim of a mass shooting. While I have lost touch with this friend, my parents are still in contact with his parents, or at least they’re friends on Facebook. So I’m fairly confident that if my friend’s sister was actually dead I would have already heard about it before then. But it was a really freaky coincidence that one of the victims had the exact same name.
Statistically, in a group of 23 random people – a classroom, say – the odds are 50% two of them will share a birthdate.
Bumping into your neighbor in Prague, unless you’re Czech, not so much.
I had one happen to me just a few months ago.
I was in line at the airport in Geneva (Switzerland) at the end of a ski club trip and saw a very familiar face up ahead. I remember thinking that I didn’t realize that she was on the trip, but there were ~35 people on the trip so thought nothing of it.
A short time later, in a different line at passport control, she called out my name. Turns out I knew her from a different ski trip with a completely different ski club, and that she was familiar because I had last seen her a few weeks earlier in Jay, Vermont.
She was on a different ski trip entirely (with friends, not a club) in France that involved flying out of Geneva on the same flight I was on.
And her parents were on my next ski club trip a week after that to Banff in Canada.
I also routinely run into acquaintances and co-workers at Walt Disney World. But I’ve decided that that’s not as much of a coincidence as I might think, considering the numerous acquaintances I have and the thousands of people I walk by every day there.
I was born exactly one year after my grandfather died.
My mother died on that same calendar day, on my 30th birthday.
mmm
I was reading aloud “The Deathbird” by Harlan Ellison. When I reached the precise moment in the story where the Deathbird destroys the Earth, our poster of the Apollo 8 Earth photograph detached from the wall and crashed to the floor.
This makes me think of a more poignant series of coincidences for me: I met my girlfriend a few years ago on a ski lift in upstate Maine. We both live in New England (in different states) and have each lived here for about 30 years.
But in talking, we discover that we are both originally from Houston, Texas. And we both attended the same small university in Texas at the same time (for about a year of overlap).
Not only that, we had both previously been at the same ski resort in Maine the same week three years before we met.
So we just missed each other at widely spaced distances and times over the course of decades before finally meeting.
Jeeze. “So, other than that how was your birthday, Mr. Mustard?”
That’s great! What about 3 people standing in a doctor’s office on that very date? Cuz that was the interesting story I was sharing.
But thanks for trying to statistic it away. Sorry if it’s not Prague.
I apologize for the Prague hijack 
I think I’ve told this one before, but I started a new job in Boston in which three of us were managers in a department. After a few months of getting to know the other two, I get into a conversation with one of them and discovered that his wife not only went to high school with my wife on a German Army base, but they were both cheerleaders on the same squad. Weird.
As for running into people out of town, I went to Panama City Beach (from Memphis) for spring break in 1974 and ran into my pot dealer on the beach one afternoon. 
This is probably too weird to believe, but I was googling lawn mowers, and all of a sudden my facebook page started showing ads for lawn mowers!
Crazy, right?
A good man to find on spring break.
Not a coincidence. He was just following his client base!
I love a good coincidence. I am a data analyst and frequently point out to people that they have to be careful not to ascribe significance to things that may be merely coincidence. There are so many data points in life that the number of them isn’t surprising, it is the fact that there aren’t more that is. In fact, I think there are more if you pay attention.
A favorite that happened to me involved an Aldi reusable shopping bag. I had parked in a large parking lot near an Aldi store that I had never used before. I grabbed one of the several cloth bags out of the car and trekked across to the store. When I got near the store I realized that the whole parking lot belonged to Aldi and the store was packed with long queues at the checkout. So I decided I didn’t need anything that urgently and turned around to head back to the car. As I did one of the 2 women behind me said, “Oh, I left the bag in the car I will have to go back for it.” And I said, “Here have this one,” handed it to her and walked off. I don’t think I have ever walked to the front of a shop and decided to not go in before or since.
One time, many years ago, I was visiting home and, as I was leaving I remarked to my father that I was going to stop on the return trip at a sale I had noticed in the town an hour away. I wanted to buy a stopwatch. My father said that he still had the one that he had used to time the swimming when I competed as a kid. He had no use for it and gave it to me. It was still attached to the chain to hang it around his neck. I put it in my pocket.
On the way home I stopped anyway to check out other stuff at the sale and grab a coffee. I was sitting at an outside table at a cafe in a shopping arcade. A few yards away was one of those kiddy rides where you put in a coin and the child can pretend to drive a train. A woman approached with her 2 daughters. She was explaining to them that she only had enough coins for one ride and she would have to guess when half the time was up for them to swap. I said to her, “You won’t believe this but, for the first time in my life I am sitting here with a stopwatch in my pocket.” So the older daughter wore it around her neck, listened to it and watched the sweep hand absolutely fascinated while her sister rode. Little sister wanted to wear it while big sister rode. Equally amazed by a simple old school Breitling stopwatch.
We were watching a good show on TV, when “We interrupt this program for an important News Item”- “I said- :this better be important, like the Pope dying.”
“Pope John Paul 2 has died today…”
Damn.
If they still had them, I would choose another , er, um, ahem “world leader”.