Yeah. Right, pal. Drop a quarter. You’d be right there to pick it up wouldn’t ya? Ya probly got a billion quarters from suckers ya told that to. Ya vowel-deprived bastid!
During junior year of high school, shortly after getting my class ring (but before I had a driver’s license), we had a snowball fight on the way to the bus stop. Well, apparently the cold made my finger shrink a bit, as the ring (I discovered an hour later) must have flown off of my hand into the very deep snow. I gave a cursory look, but talk about your needle in a haystack. The entire park we were in was about two feet deep with snow.
Around a year and a half later (well into senior year this time), I was called down to the office of the school. I was the only senior with the initials that were engraved on the ring, so they knew that the one that was found was mine. However, it wasn’t in the park. They had found it in a photo mount factory a couple of miles away. Apparently, someone had picked it up, taken it with him, and went on to lose it himself. Someone else (honest this time) contacted the school and I got my ring back.
I love thinking about that. It was so cool to find something you had assumed was lost forever.
In 1983 the Grateful Dead played at the Richmond Coliseum. A good friend, Jack, and I both had tickets and planned to see the show together. I had to work earlier in the day, and Jack went down to the zoo…er…circus…er…Coliseum early to get a good head start to the festivities. Jack’s girlfriend, Carolyn, is also going, and agrees to stop by the apt. to pick me up.
When she arrives I ask her, “So, C., where are we supposed to meet Jack?” Her reply, “I don’t know…he just said we’d find each other.” Yeah…sure…two people (hopelessly tweaked on pharmaceuticals) trying to find another person (hopelessly tweaked on pharmaceuticals) in a crowd of 15,000+ other people (all hopelessly tweaked on pharmaceuticals). Oh, well. So much for the best laid plans…I’ll just have to enjoy the show by myself.
Across the street from the venue is a McDonalds, which at the time was doing a land office business (it was also staffed entirely by black peple who were having a REALLY rought time coping with the zombie hordes). I tell Carolyn I’m going to hit the bathroom. I’m in the stall, tending to business, but the stall has no lock. I’m sitting there, doing my thing, and guess who opens the door…Jack.
It holds the record for the most mind-blowing dump I ever took.
Really, isn’t anybody’s conception the most improbable event ever?
Just look backwards at your lineage, at all the branches of your family tree. The number of your ancestors doubles at each generation you go backwards.
Now, imagine that your great-great-great-great grandmother Jezebel had NOT met and mated with your great-great-great-great grandfather Jebediah, then you would not exist.
And everyone alive today has millions of these meet/not meet scenarios that made the difference between existing and not existing.
It’s truly mind blowing …
BTW, here’s a related (pun intended) Cecil column:
Two things-
Every year we have at least one garage sale. When I was 10 or 11 I decided I was “too old” for Raggedy Ann and Andy, so I sold everything I had. Well, nostaglia being what it is, I now look at everything Raggedy Ann and Andy whenever I go to the antique shops. Last autumn my family and I were in an antique shop approximately 75 miles away from where I grew up. LilMiss pointed out a RA&A transistor radio on a shelf. Cool! I had one of those! Pulled it down, opened up the battery slot, and my initials were in it (all four of them) in my mom’s writing. It’s now in my closet.
Met a guy online. Agreed to a date. He was okay, but slightly off (and not in a good way). As the date went on, he asked if I wanted to get stoned- I passed. Managed to get out the date, sped home. A month later turned on the news, saw his mug shot. He was arrested for multiple rapes. Turned out he would meet women online, drug them, then rape them.
I moved to California about six months ago. I had to sell my bicycle, since it’d be impractical to bring it with me.
I move back to Florida, same place, different neighborhood, and I’m walking down the street–and in someone’s yard, right there, was my bicycle. I laughed my butt off at that.
Another one: My friend fell through the glass window on top of a high school gym. His friend was up there with him too and being a big guy, grabbed onto his arm just before he fell about 40 or so feet onto the court. Pulled him right back up somehow. Unlikely because the glass broke and even more unlikely because to react that quickly and precisely and strongly is amazing.
Here’s one for the record books:
At age 19 I briefly dated a girl named Mary K (last name abbreviated). I was very smitten by this girl who was introduced to me by a mutual friend and we used to talk on the phone daily and for hours on end.
One evening I misdialed her number by two digits (unbeknownst to me) and got a girl who I assumed was Mary’s sister. Well it was Mary’s sister all right, but a completely different sister of a different Mary in a different home. I asked this girl “if Mary was there?” and sure enough a Mary whom I never met took the call. It took a couple of seconds and a few words exchanged before I realized I had the wrong house. Now if that’s now freaky enough here’s where things get weird:
This girl Mary, whom I never met and accidentally called, sounded pretty sweet so I turned on the charm and attempted to get to know her (let me remind you I was 19 at the time, you know, one track mind) There seemed to be an instant connection between us until she asked if I happened to be looking for Mary K. Shocked, I replied “W-W-Why yes, how did you know?”
“Mary K is my cousin, our phone numbers are identical except for last two numbers.”
I promptly ended the call with a short apology and a warm farewell. When Mary K, the girl I was dating and attempting to call that evening, learnt about my flirtatious nature it was the beginning of the end.
There has got to be thousands and thousands of Marys in this city and I end up accidentally calling AND hitting on a Mary that is related to a Mary I’m dating. What are the freakin odds on that? I haven’t dialed a wrong number since.
My jaw has absolutely dropped at some of these stories! Mine pales in comparison, but I think it’s worth sharing.
My freshman year of college, a younger friend of mine was studying for her learner’s permit test and would share little facts she found in the study guide. She commented one week how it said “most accidents happen within 25 miles of the home.”
A week later, I was two blocks from home and waiting through a yellow light to make a left turn. The light changed, I started my turn, and a car in the opposite direction ran the red light at 40 mph and smacked into my car, spinning me around. Once I got my bearings, I just let the car roll across the street…into thd local auto body shop. A lot of the workers were outside (it was July) and saw what happened so they all waited to receive me and the car. When I got out, they asked if there was anyone they could call for me so I gave them my father’s phone number, who was at home, again, two blocks away. The workers also called the police, whose station house was just down the block.
And while I was sitting there as the police officer got statements and stuff was being sorted out, my mom happened to drive by the accident site on her way home from work, saw me, and parked nearby and came over.
I refer to it as the most convenient accident ever. Oh and my mom was thoughtful enough to say “if it weren’t for the airbag, you probably would’ve flown through the windshield.” Thanks mom, thanks a lot. :-/
I grew up near a somewhat active earthquake fault. So in school we would have earthquake drills from time to time.
One day in 4th grade, we had an earthquake drill in the morning.
We had an earthquake that afternoon.
When I was going to law school in NYC I picked up a ringing pay phone in a bar.
It was my college roommate calling from Houston.
I nearly shat.
Well I threw this brick, which bounced around the space-time continuum and whatnot, in an attempt to prevent Jeff Gordon from winning this year’s championship, but instead of hitting Jeff’s car on Lap #12, it hits CAR #12 on a different lap in a different race (scroll down for mention, there’s video on that page too.) But that’s not an improbably coincidence, that’s just bad aim. 
But anyway…
A few years ago, I found a used CD by the band Iced Earth called Days of Purgatory. There was no booklet, but as it was a digipack, I assumed it never had one to begin with. A few weeks later, at a different used CD store 30 miles away, I find another CD by the same band, this one called The Dark Saga. It was rather badly scratched, so at first I wasn’t going to buy it, but at the last minute changed my mind, since Iced Earth CD’s are (or were, at the time) extremely rare to find used.
When I got home, I noticed that there were TWO booklets stuck inside the jewel case, one for the CD I just bought, and the 2nd for…the Days of Purgatory disc I had bought weeks before.
Still freaks me out when I think about it. :eek:
I’ll try to make this short, but may leave out some key details in that process.
When I was in my teens I saw a movie from the 1940’s that had a ventriloquist and his dummy getting into some weird situation where the dummy wound up being the ventriloquist and vice versa. Never knew the name of the movie. Never saw it again.
In 1989 (or so) I got one of those movie guides (Maltin’s, I think) as a Paperback Book Club offering. Spent most of a Saturday looking through it. Ran across an entry for “Magic” (which I had seen) and it said that even though this Anthony Hopkins movie was good on the subject, that an old post-WWII film had an even better (if not definitive) treatment of the theme. That movie was “Dead Of Night.”
I called BlockBuster to see if they had it. The nearest store didn’t but said they’d be glad to order it for $60. I called another store across town and they had it, in stock, available. By now it was 10:00 at night so we raced across town, went through all the paperwork to get a new BB card, rented the movie, and, on the way home, I tried to explain to my wife what all I had remembered about that movie I saw as a kid.
Got home, watched the movie, satisfied myself that this was the one although it had some things that were way different from what I thought I remembered. Must have fused similar themes from Twilight Zone or wherever.
Anyway, next day I took the rental back across town and decided to stop by the large bookstore next door. It’s our favorite book place. Going into the store I spotted a book on one of the tables outside, with the title “Dead Of Night.” Picked it up and read the blurb on the jacket. It said that the book’s title was taken from the 1946 movie of that same name, which was the “paragon” of the sort of tales in the book.
The weird part to all this is that within 24 hours, I went from not knowing the name of a movie I had seen (and mostly remembered) from decades earlier, to finding the movie, watching it again, and seeing a book by that same title.
It’s as close as I have ever come to having a “psychic” (or otherwise paranormal) experience. Not a lot, eh?
I was flying in a Cessna Queen Air with 12 other skydivers. There are no seats other than for the pilots and we pack ourselves into the plane just like giant sardines with funny hats. As we were about to turn onto jump run, I suddenly found myself (and everyone else) stuck to the ceiling of the plane. This was quite disconcerting for a moment but then we entered a state of weightlessness where we were all floating about the cabin in mid-air. I remember thinking “Hey this is kinda cool…way to go pilot!” Things werent quite so cool though, when our pilot pulled out of the dive and we all came crashing down into a jumbled mass on the floor of the plane. Ouch.
What I didnt know at the time was that we had just dove under the left wing of an L-1011 commercial passenger jet as it banked out of a cloud on its approach into SLC International. Our pilot / co-pilot later recounted the look of shock and horror they witnessed on the faces of the airliner pilots. That was when I completely realized just how narrowly we had avoided a mid-air collision.
Our combined closing speed was nearly 700 mph! It doesn’t take math to figure out that even a fraction of a second of hesitation on our pilots part, would have resulted in this incident being posted on CNN instead of The Straight Dope.
Everyone was pretty rattled at that point but we continued on to the drop zone and made our jump as planned. It was quite a relief to jump out of that plane…