I’m sure we’ve all had them. I call them “Plate of Shrimp” moments, after the scene in the movie “Repo Man” where one of the characters is philosophizing about the “lattice of coincidence” that surrounds us. (“You’ll be thinking about a plate of shrimp, then someone will say ‘Plate’, or ‘Shrimp’, or ‘Plate of Shrimp’.”) So what kind of weird coincidences have you experienced?
I had one last night. It was the night of baseball’s All-Star Game. It was also the tenth anniversary of the day my dad died. While the game was starting, I was sitting there thinking about my dad, who spent much of his life traveling as a sales rep. When I was a kid, during the summer he would take the family along on one of his business trips as a little mini-vacation, and it always seemed to be during the week of the All-Star Game. So I have these memories of the whole family sitting in a hotel room at the Holiday Inn in Louisville KY eating a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken and watching the All-Star Game. And as I’m thinking about this, a KFC commercial comes on! (The one where the family is passing the bucket of chicken around the table and the little kid is saying “Don’t take the drumstick!”) That was kinda weird…
I had one just today. I was looking on the IMDB for actors who have played supreme court justices (don’t ask) and was reading about the 1981 movie First Monday in October and I specifically thought “I had forgotten Barnard Hughes was in that movie”. A couple of hours later I signed on to the SDMB and one of the first threads informed me about Hughes’ death.
And now that I think about it, I was reading the IMDB entry on Doc Hollywood earlier today as well, although I hadn’t specifically thought about Hughes’ role in that movie.
I had something very similar to Little Nemo’s experience last summer.
I’d been searching for information on YiP, which was a sort of absurdist humor clique I was part of (using my old alias DragonLord) way back, which was original started by a user named Milky Puppy. We were all sort of friends and had parties together and had a homebrew magazine going for a while. I browsed there for a while, and then thought I’d go and revisit the BBS Documentary website to see what was going on with the project, wondering if maybe he’d been to Toronto yet and if he’d interviewed anyone I knew. (Director Jason Scott had originally contacted me like 3 years ago to be interviewed when he was in Toronto, but it never actually happened so I wondered whatever became of the project) Turns out it was released on DVD. I spent some time there, and then went over to The Internet Archive to check out what they had. Turns out Jason had uploaded a number of completely uncut interviews from the documentary – and the first three listed there were of Milky Puppy.
Unfortunately that was also where I learned that Jeff (Milky) had passed away a mere month before I went researching all of this. Dammit…
About 5 minutes ago, My Mom was asking me to search for a friend of hers online. His name is “Lowden”. I was watching TV and questioned after her how it is spelled, “…is it L-O-U-D-O-N?” Just then some Nascar or Nascar related commercial was coming to an end, and Flashed “LOUDON” across the screen and the narrator beckoned to join them at “Loudon”.
It was pretty weird… and the commercial was on right after Nightmares and Dreamscapes- “Crouch’s End”.