Fairly recently, I’d accidentally locked one of my cats in the bathroom with me and hopped in the shower, figuring she’d continue to enjoy being lazily draped over the bathroom counter while I went about my showering. Oh, how wrong I was.
She got it in her head that she was going to leap onto the high cabinet in the corner (about 3 ft higher than the counter itself). Well, she managed to make it but she kicked the plugged in hair dryer off of the counter and toward the shower, somehow managing to toggle the on/off switch, turning said hair dryer into high mode as it skidded within a foot of the shower.
Oh, you reminded me of another improbable thing, based off the movie Final Destination. In said movie, a group of kids from Mount Abraham High School (whose schoold colors are maroon and white) in the northeast US go on a plane trip to France, which then promptly blows up (the plane. not the trip.)
I not only attended a Mount Abraham High School in the northeast (with maroon and white colors, no less,) but just a month or so after the movie came out…yup, a group of kids went on a trip to France. Let me tell you, I have never seen a bunch of teenagers so scared to go to France before. of course, I was also set to go to Italy that same day, so I was still nervous about getting on a plane, I mean, a little *too[//i] much similarity for me. Luckily, no plane blew up. But if it did…damn.
I once acquired a deck of cards that where marked, so that by looking at the patterns on their backs you could tell which card it was.
I amazed a friend of mine with my eerie psychic ability to guess whatever card he where holding up, but he soon suspected that the cards where marked.
To prove that I where cheating he picked a card and didn’t let me see it at all, I randomly guessed at a card and by some luck got it right.
I didn’t push my luck by guessing at more cards but instead left him wondering how I did it.
I was living in San Jose. There was a Mexican takeout at the end of the block. One day I went in, went up to the counter and gave the clerk my order. He spoke back to me in a dead-on mimicry of my accent. It seemed horribly rude, and I told him I didn’t appreciate him making fun of me. He seemed surprised and assured me that he was speaking normally. I said, “Where are you from?”, and he said, “Joplin, Missouri”, which is my home town.
It was weird to travel 1800 miles only to find someone from home half a block away, but it was even weirder to learn that my home town has an unique recognizable accent.
Many years ago, my younger brother (11 years younger) and I were watching TV together. At the time, he tended to babble a lot, just saying random things for the heck of it. As I used the remote to surf through the channels, he suddenly said, “Do you know who I am?” An instant later, I switched to another channel, where a character on T.V. said, “I know who you are.”
The night after I graduated college I had a dream about a rusty quarter of the year 1980. The next day whilst walking along the beach I found a 1980 rusty quarter…
Next time you are at the beach drop a quarter in the sand…it usually automatically disappears because the sand is so soft. I liked that experience
My family was on a driving vacation and we were staying in Kansas City. Suddenly a tornado warning came on the TV, with a tornado reported at the intersection of Highway 40 and Noland Rd. My father’s face went white and he said “WE’RE at the intersection of Highway 40 and Noland Rd!” Sure enough, we looked out the window and there was a tornado not 100 yards away from us.
(That was one of my 3 up close and personal encounters with a tornado, and any one of them was enough.)
I once started a new job only to discover that I would be sharing an office with a friend of my high school girlfirend – a dozen years after we had graduated.
Recently something improbable happened, only obliquely to me, but somewhat interesting nonetheless.
When I drive to my parents’ home in York, PA, I usually drive down a rural stretch of US 219 south of Bradford. Out in the middle of nowhere, and I mean nowhere–the nearest “city” is Wilcox, population about 1,000, five miles away–is a bridal shop, set off the road about 50 feet. It’s located in a two-story house, obviously converted from a residential home. A few weeks ago, when a cousin of mine was married in a similarly rural setting, I mentioned the bridal shop in the middle of nowhere to my mom.
Two days later she called me with a strange and terrible tale. Apparently, in the middle of the previous night, the wheel of a truck barrelling down 219 had caught on fire and flew off the axle–hitting the bridal shop dead on. The shop burned to the ground, leaving 300 brides and bridesmaids dressless. Now, I’ve heard of tires catching on fire. I’ve heard of tires flying off of truck axles. But I’ve never heard of a flaming tire flying off an axle and burning anything down…much less a bridal shop out in the middle of nowhere, that I’d just spoken about the day before.
Some years ago, back in the day when I was a religious zealot (albeit a somewhat timid one, as we shall learn from my methods), I visited Lulworth Cove (a scenic spot probably about 100 miles away) for the day. Instead of taking in the beautiful scenery, I took it upon myself to perform a stint of what I then termed ‘passive evangelism’ - I collected a few hundred small, flat, pure white pebbles (which are common there) and wrote ‘Jesus is Lord’ on them in biro, then I left them in a small heap on top of a large flat rock. - I used to do this sort of thing with other common objects such as pub beermats etc.
(Please don’t ridicule me, I now realise how absurd a thing it was).
Anyway, a month or two later, I chanced to meet a Christian chap who lived just around the corner from my house, we were chatting over coffee and my sister decided to make fun of my habit of ‘passive evangelism’; this sparked the guy off into admitting that he did the same sort of thing - he started telling me about the time when he visited Lulworth Cove and found these lovely white stones; he and his family had collected up a few hundred of them and used them to spell out ‘Jesus is alive’ on a stretch of grassy bank. I was flabbergasted enough at this, but (and here’s the really spooky bit) when we worked out the dates, it turned out that we had both been there and done our stuff on the same day.
Twice in my life, I have been driving a car that has been attacked by a cow. Yes, a cow (not a bull). Both times, the cows meandered up to my car, went insane, shat on my car, then walked away as if nothing happened. I made sure to eat hamburger those days.
I was also mistaken for a bush by a confused woodpecker. Its feet/talons became stuck in my jacket and had to be manually removed. Oddly, it didn’t peck and let me pet it. After about 5 minutes it flew away. The weirdest part about all of this is that it happened in downtown Minneapolis.
I was playing Unreal:Tournament on my PC with my friend on a LAN in my apartment. I was pretty stoned at the time, sipping on wine coolers. I lost a game, dropping my head in a “sigh”, hitting the mouth of the unseen bottle on my desk right into the middle of my forehead, taking out a diamond-shaped chunk of flesh. I had a big red scar for a couple months, it was pretty ridiculous.
The huz and I were riding somewhere with my FIL when a squirrel darted into the road. I thought we had run over it, but it had run under the car, between the front and back wheels while we were moving.
When I told them what had just happened, my FIL said, “Did that happen AGAIN?!”
Mangetout I’d have thought the really improbable thing would have been the fact that you got a biro to continue to write on stone for so long; maybe I’m wrong about the evolution thing!
The stones in question were quite smooth, and it was a Paper Mate - if there’s anything I’d like you to take away from this it is that you should never skimp on quality.
Seriously though; there isn’t a speck of exaggeration or embellishment in that tale - I was looking around for the hidden cameras when he started to talk about it. Maybe it was a setup (his side of the story, that is - my bit I did by my own volition), but if so, whoever organised it never made the punch.
I got 2 stories: The first one is quick… my uncle was teaching me how to play poker and dealt himself, out of a shuffled deck, a royal flush, while not dealing anyone else a hand. Just straight up. Odds against: 649,739:1.
The other is very improbable and will take some explaining, but is worth it to read for the sheer unlikely variables to be so in harmony. My bro and I are driving in a 1996 Mazda B2300 (Ford Ranger). He is young and stupid and is driving on the off-ramp at about 85 mph. I am sitting in the passenger seat, but there is no seat but rather a bean bag in there (he thinks it’s cool). So, i have no seat belt on. We are about to go on a turn-around, which is going to the intersection, but then not going through it but turning left under the expressway and back the other way. The turn-around has a concrete wall that borders it, curving around the turn. The wall is also upward sloping as you go around the turn. My bro was bragging about his new ceramic brakes and wanted to show me as he slammed on the brakes. Of course, being a low performance vehicle without functioning anti-locks, the brakes failed and we hit the wall at about 35 mph skidding. Now, the wall at contact point was just about 2 feet high. The tires height was only a little higher than that, so there was no way we were going to roll over it, or was there? The wall was upward sloping at that point, and curving away from us. Now, the truck just happened to have this HUGE metal bar under the front-end, just before the tires. (We don’t know the purpose of this bar). The upward sloping and curving wall hit this bar and created a lift effect on the truck and somehow we bunny hopped the whole thing, going into traffic going perpendicular to us. And Rangers being the best built truck in the world, IMO, we drove away with no damage to the truck (except the bar was bent and scrapped) and no accident from flailing into oncoming traffic. Go figure! We both recollected that the truck got steeper than 45 degrees to the road at one point. If it weren’t for:
that huge bar under the truck (if the engineers who put it there didn’t think of it for some reason) and
if it weren’t for the precise slope and curve of the concrete wall matched with the height of the truck,
if it weren’t for the no traffic on the road,
my life would be very different today. We cannot even ascertain the purpose of that bar by just looking at it. We say that “Truck” grew it for us. Thank you, Truck.
In my youth (first round of grad school) I worked plain-clothes security for the Amusement Park That Shall Not Be Named. (Shaddup. The blood-suckers paid in American money, which I needed badly.) The hours were horrible and working conditions worse–same generous laws that “protect” seasonal, a.k.a. migrant workers–but that’s what it took.
So “America’s FunLand” had a very dubiously run safari area, complete with big cats–as in lions and tigers (no bears), oh my. Once in a while one would munch down on a careless worker or escape the double-fenced enclosures into the amusement park or farmland nearby. Oh my.
So a lion escaped. Keep in mind we’re talking a real, live, big HONKIN’ pissed-off lion, with teeth like knives. The park was evacuated, amidst cheery music and perky girls handing out refund coupons to disgruntled patrons. So the amusement park is empty, which is spooky as hell even without lurking lions; lotsa buildings, woodland, etc. We underpaid grunts are armed to teeth with 1. whistles that can’t be heard 5’ away and 2. radios with dead batteries. We were spaced out about 100’ apart and told to sweep the park–buildings, woods and rides, to look for the lion.
I made it about a quarter mile into the gig, creeping under the supports of a roller coaster, when knowledge finally dawned that I was absolutely out of my freakin’ mind to be doing this. It was right out a bad horror movie and I was doing it for real. “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty! OmiGOD…AARRuugh!”
Truly surreal.
Veb
[sub]For animal lovers, the lion was recovered safely. No lives were lost, animal or employee, though one of the suits dithering about ( safely behind closed doors) suffered a mild heart attack due to stress.[/sub]
That story seems pretty probable on the surface, but when I think about it, that is very unlikely. The fact that he would mention such a trivial little thing like that and the fact that your sister would mention the perfect thing to get him to say it. And then the obvious logistics of you guys ending up in the same place that day. That is pretty unbelieveable man. Wow.
It is worth mentioning that as young, enthusiastic Christians, it was not at all unusual for us to discuss tactics with other enthusiastic Christians, but it is quite remarkable that someone I didn’t know at the time (but that lived less than 100 yards from my home) went to the same fairly remote location on the same day and did a similar strange thing with similar rocks and that we subsequently met. Although it would be tempting to offer this as conclusive proof of the existence of God, there’s nothing about the whole thing that couldn’t just be bizarre chance - its a big world.
I was out smoking one night at work (I work midnights) and I heard a russtle in the bushes. I look over just in time to see a rabbit fly out of the bushes right into my ankle. It bouces off and kind of kicks at the ground, then dies. I then see a fox wander off in the opposite direction of me and the dead rabbit. How many people can say they killed a rabbit with their ankle?
