Mundane potential explanations include:
[ul]
[li]It wasn’t a real shop at all - maybe a back-projection on a full-window screen for some art project[/li][li]Some sort of ‘pop up’ novelty event, possibly related to charity or someone’s birthday[/li][li]Something related to a movie or documentary[/li][li]It was closing down and this came to finality in the interval between when it was first observed and when jtur88 returned for another look[/li][li]Yeah, some sort of weird memory thing where it wasn’t where it was remembered to be.[/li][/ul]
Did it have any kind of structure? It looks a bit like a big old blob of gelatin - maybe someone ditched a piece of ballistics gel in the lake and that’s what was left.
Looks a pretty close match - I’m used to thinking of frogspawn as being distinct separate small globules with black dots in the middle of each, but I guess it varies a fair bit by species.
One day I had noticed the clock on my wall stopped working. At the time, I figured the batteries had just ran out.
It wasn’t until the next day I got around to changing them. Only now I notice my clock is working again. And not only is it working, it’s telling the correct time!
So that means my clock stopped working for EXACTLY 24 hours!
I wrote a story outline once in a universe where the world was not the same for everyone - and this was the reason for a whole load of things like:
Why people argue about facts
Why it’s easier to show someone the way to something than it is to give directions
Why your keys aren’t where you left them
Why there are places that only some people know about - or aren’t always there when you go back to look for them
Why introverts are invisible at parties
With the way the media has fragmented and how the Internet lets everyone pick and choose their sources of information (and encourages distrust of established authorities), we’re about to live in this world for real if we aren’t already.
Richard Feynman has a “mysterious clock story” in Surely You’re Joking. I think it may be the reference version of such stories.
(Mild spoiler: when his wife died, he found her bedside clock in the hospital stopped at exactly the time of her death. Ooooh, spooky… except that it was an old-fashioned flip-number digital that was prone to stopping, and it’s very likely that when the nurse turned it to read the time of death, it did so.)
But then, every so often, reality takes the fun away.
I told my wife about this thread, and she related a story from her sewing group.
A woman bought a Bernina sewing machine from a small town store. Years later, she needed a replacement accessory. So she went to town but could not find the store where she thought it was. But she did find a store featuring Viking. The owner swore that her store never sold Berninas, and that there were no other stores around, and not one place with Bernina anywhere. But the woman HAD the Bernina. She bought it there (or so she thought). So where did it come from?
So the lady started to drive home, figuring she’d have to mail order the part. She turned down a different street, and right there was the Bernina store!
A parallel universe? A ghost store? Nope. When the woman told the Bernina store about her experience, the owner said, “The Viking owner does that all the time. She hates us!”
I was also thinking that people file things differently. Like, you ask about that “jewelry store” you went to, and they say there is no jewelry store. But if you asked them about the antique store (that also sells jewelry) they’d know exactly what you were asking about. When you say “jewelry store”, there mind fills in images of Jared or something, a big fancy store. But the store you went to was funky and small, so it doesn’t some up in a brain search for “jewelry store”.
You know the saying: “Even a broken clock is right twice a day”. Really, the odds for the right time within a precision of minutes are 1:1800, so no big deal.
Correction: Sigh, that’s what I get for being a smart aleck ;). Confused seconds in an hour (3600) for minutes in a day (1440). So the odds are even better at 1:720.
New Year’s Day, mid-1990s. I was the least hungover person in the house, so I was designated to go out and get orange juice and hot 'n sour soup. I went down to the parking garage and saw an SUV idling, with a man and a woman sitting in it. Didn’t think anything of it then (apart from looking out in case they were trying to get out at the same time as me), but when I came back after half an hour or more, they were still sitting there. This was in Los Angeles, so there’s no way the engine had to be warmed up before driving. They can’t have been jump-starting it, since it was not hooked up to another vehicle. And they were staring straight ahead, not making out or even apparently talking, so it can’t have been an assignation.
So I went up to the driver’s side window. “Uh, just curious…you’re not committing suicide, are you?” No, they said, so I went upstairs. Still don’t know why they, especially two people, were idling for so long, but at least I don’t have it on my conscience.
About 20 years ago my wife and I were helping to decorate our church for Christmas. It turned out so nicely that I took pictures of it. After we got home we couldn’t find the camera, and thought it was still in our car. I checked the interior of the car then, and as least one other time since then, and couldn’t find the camera.
Our only plausible explanation was that one of us may have dropped it, unnoticed and unheard, in the snow and someone may have come along, picked it up and made off with it.
Fast forward about 15 years…We keep our crockpot - in its box - in a cupboard. When my wife was taking the crockpot out of the box she found the camera inside the box. We have know idea why it would have been in there. We hadn’t taken the crockpot to church, and even if we did it would have been the crockpot itself, not in its box.
A cluster of lucky finds all matched together. When we lived in Jordan, we went up to the national forest the weekend before Christmas. The national forest, in that desert country, was about a half acre of scraggly remnants of the great cedars of the Lebanon, carefully preserved. The maintenance people had just been through trimming low hanging branches from walkways, so we picked up a 5-foot long cedar branch to take home for a Christmas tree, otherwise unobtainable except at obscene cost. On the way home, we stopped and picked up a chicken on the side of the road, apparently fallen off a truckload bound for market. A few miles further on, there was nice cabbage on the shoulder, also spillage from a market truck. So we got home and trimmed our tree and enjoyed a nice chicken and cabbage Christmas feast, all courtesy of some mysterious providence.
This was in Los Angeles, so there’s no way the engine had to be warmed up before driving. They can’t have been jump-starting it, since it was not hooked up to another vehicle. And they were staring straight ahead, not making out or even apparently talking, so it can’t have been an assignation.