The legendary coincidence my family talked about for decades was in the 90s my family had just checked into a hotel during a road trip. My mom asked what time it was (nobody had a watch or a phone to easily check at the time) so my thought was to turn on the TV and switch to CNN to find the current time. Literally the moment the TV turned on it was on TBS and a character in a TV show said “It’s 7:30” and it was literally almost 7:30 when that happened. My mom for years was convinced it was deliberately set up by myself somehow.
Ooh, that just reminded me of a spoooky time-related coincidence that happened to me. I couldn’t sleep and was watching “The Exorcism of Emily Rose” late at night. In one scene, Emily is sleeping in her dorm room at college when she has a possession-related attack of muscle spasms that horribly contort her body. The camera zooms in to her alarm clock to show that it’s 3:00 am (a significant time that comes up at several points in the movie- like the demon equivalent of the witching hour). I instinctively look down to a clock on a shelf below the TV-- an alarm-style clock with the same type of red digital numbers…
…and it’s also 3:00 am EXACTLY.
A trifecta would be if it was the episode with lots of Data angst asking “Why?”.
(Well, most of TNG has that…)
I was channel surfing late one night the '90s and came across the scene in The Terminator where Michael Biehn is banging Linda Hamilton.
I hit the clicker and the scene switched to the one in Timebomb where Michael Biehn is banging Patsy Kensit.
How often can things like this happen?
Ha, that’s a good one.
Not familiar with the movie ‘Timebomb’-- does that movie also have a time-travel component, or is it just about a bomb on a timer? If the former, there’s clearly a time-travel paradox involved allowing Biehn to be getting laid in two places at once. It’s a little-known fact that the remaining survivors in the apocalyptic future are 90% descendants of Biehn.
Not surprised you haven’t heard of it. Looks like it went almost straight to video.
Sounds a bit like Telefon with Charles Bronson back in the '70s.
Just thought of another one:
Last week, I saw Patty Duke in an episode of Hawaii Five-O.
An hour and a half later, I switched to the Game Channel. There’s Patty Duke as a panelist on Match Game '74.
How often do you see Patty Duke in anything she did nowadays?
Are you sure one of them wasn’t her cousin Cathy?
She was also on $100,000 Pyramid last week, so maybe there was another cousin? 
…or maybe you just have a lot of old TV shows on in the background while you’re working, like I do 
Sometimes I have music playing in the background, but at 66 I’m unlikely to get another chance to see all these shows from my past again.
This is the Lattice of Coincidence phenomenon, explained by that great philosopher, Tracey Walter, in his role as Miller in Repo Man:
We had the “11:59 incident”. In the late 70s several of us were at a friend’s house watching a movie, high as kites. He had one of those old clocks where the numbers flipped. There was a scene in the movie where a digital clock changed from 11:59 to 12:00. At the same time, we heard “click, click, click” as his clock flipped to 12:00. It was spooky enough that we talked about it for years.
It happens with “that guy” even more often. The other night I was watching an episode of Deep Space Nine. Brian George (maybe you remember him as Raj’s father on Big Bang Theory) played Bashir’s father. Less than two hours later he showed up on The Nanny, playing a butler even snootier than Niles.
Tonight at 20:00 on PBS: Geoffrey Hughes as “Onslow” in the Britcom Keeping Up Appearances.
Tonight at 21:00 on TVO: Geoffrey Hughes as “Vernon Scripps” in the police drama Heartbeat.
Minor correction: VISION TV (ch. 60), not PBS (ch. 61).
One fine Saturday when I was a kid, Phyliss Diller’s Rolls-Royce got stuck in the snow, and I brought her home to use the phone. She sits in the living room, and the cheesy afternoon Monster Movie was playing. The screen showed the title “Chiller Diller Matinee”. She thought that was hilarious!
She was on Super Password this week.
Watching Star Trek reruns one night, there was a Next Generation episode featuring Tony Todd as Worf’s long lost brother Kurn, followed by a DS9 episode featuring Tony Todd as an elderly Jake Sisko.
He was quite the crack up - probably did it to mess with you.