After work yesterday I stopped at my favorite beer place. A couple of guys said that I just missed my brother. Well, my brother has been in the place, but he currently is living in Germany. Also, my brother looks nothing like me.
Then the guy returned. Turns out my gf and I talked with this man at this bar a few weeks ago. I would have never thought we looked alike (I’m much more handsome), but everyone in the bar talked about how we could be twins!!!
Every now and then I see someone who I think looks like me.
But years ago, my mother sent me the front page of a section of the newspaper. It was me. I was at a petting zoo with my daughter. Except I don’t have a daughter. And I haven’t been to that zoo since I was a kid. But it was undeniably me.
I hope that this guy never commits a crime, because if I get called in for a lineup, I’m a gonner.
Just as you could recognise your own twin. The people who are amazed that you didn’t notice ‘the guy who could be your twin’ are the people who don’t know your face as well as the person who’s had to stare it in the mirror every day since they were born.
(I suppose some member of some uncontacted tribe, who do not have pools of clear water in their vicinity, might let their twin go unnoticed)
Oh, yeah, I would. I have very distinctive features. I once worked in a doctor’s office with a woman that looked just like me. Patients would tell me they saw me here or there, and I’d be like, “Oh, that must have been (her).” One time I saw my mother’s twin at a local grocery store- I came thisclose to walking up to her and asking her what she was doing here, since she lives 3,000 miles away. I just barely stopped in the nick of time to keep from embarrassing myself.
I’d been working in an international project for about two months when someone called me “Pat”. No, sorry, I’m not Pat, nor was I a consultant working on the Accounting parts of the project: I was an end-user working on the Quality parts.
Eventually I moved to being, in the same project, a consultant working on the Quality parts. Now and then someone else would mistake me for “Pat, from Accounting.”
One day I was walking down a hallway in the company’s Home Office when I saw what would have looked like a mirror at the end of the hall, except I did not have clothes like those she was wearing. My “Pat from Accounting, I suppose?” and her “Nava from Quality, I suppose?” were simultaneous.
She’s Black Irish from Ohio, I’m regular-colored Spanish from Spain, but we looked very similar, moved the same, had similar voices and even had similar medical histories - and senses of humor :D.
Amazing story about two Indonesian girls on the BBC World Service this week. They were adopted in 1983 by different Swedish families. One of the families - in Indonesia - got a taxi to take their newly adopted daughter to Sweden and the taxi driver said “what about the other one?”
Last year one of them got curious and tracked down her sister. Turns out they only lived 40km apart. And they were twins. And the adoption papers indicated that their biological father was a taxi driver…
Anyway the reason I mentioned this is that when they met they thought they might be sisters, but it was only after they got a DNA test that they discovered they were identical twins. (Also they’re gorgeous.)
Me and every other big guy with a beard are considered twins in this world. I don’t have a full beard often anymore, and it’s all gray now, so there’s less of that. I don’t have great facial recognition ability, so I wouldn’t recognize my own twin, but me wife points out people sometimes.
Worse than someone who looks like me is someone who sounds like me. ***Nobody ***sounds like me . . . until my aunt heard a guy on the radio in Florida. She said she had a hard time convincing herself that it wasn’t me.
I saw a picture of one of the Occupy Wallstreet protestors who could have been my brother, easily.
But thats nothing compared to the fact I did find an exact clone of myself, it was a picture of a woman in 1930s Germany in a book. I’m a man mind you, but this woman was me facially and hair wise at least, she even had a light moustache:eek: My wife keeps bringing this up at the oddest times claiming it creeps her out.
For years, people asked if my sister and I are identical twins. This has led to the both of us scoffing at most people’s ability to distinguish siblings vs. (identical) twins.
Based on that, I’m not sure if I would have recognized the doppelgänger that I had in college. I went to a very large university. Friends started saying they’d seen me here and there but I didn’t hear them when they called - except I wasn’t at the given location at that time/day. Said “twin” also had the same style of jacket, also rode a bicycle, and also wore a helmet when biking. I referred to her as the “evil twin.”
A couple years later, my sister enrolled at the same university. She also started getting confused with the “evil triplet” by her friends, including her then-boyfriend. I’m pretty sure they weren’t mistaking me for her, but since my sis has a very common name, I’m not sure I’d even blink if I heard someone calling it from across the street.
So, I’m not sure if I would recognize my twin, but I do suspect that my “twin” really wasn’t that identical to me.
I’ve never met my own twin but I’ve known a pair of brothers who were so identical they could have been twins. They were adults who lived in adjacent houses with their families. One brother’s wife admitted to me that sometimes the only way she could tell her husband from her brother-in-law was that her husband wore glasses.
I get that “I saw your twin” thing all the time but I’ve never seen any one that made me stop and think “that guy looks like me.” In the movies, when someone sees their double they seem to recognize them as such immidiately. I don’t think I would get that. I mean, I watch George Clooney movies and never got that seeing my double feeling, so is supect it doesn’t happen.
I’m not sure I’d recognise someone else’s idea of my ‘twin’. I think a lot of the time, when people who don’t know you intimately say ‘I saw your double!!’, they actually mean ‘I saw someone who shares the most distinctive two or three features that I associate with you!’ The two people don’t actually have to look alike - just share those salient characteristics.
I was out once with a gang of people, two of us got separated from the rest, and when we got back together, the others told my friend they’d seen her exact double in the chipper OMG!!! We went down to the chipper to check it out, and it turned out that the two girls looked nothing alike. Both of them had long blonde hair and glasses, and they were short and kind of chubby, but that was it. No facial resemblance at all. But the others had only seen the ‘short-cut’ features that they associated with her - not the actual person.
It was very strange. It made me wonder how many people actually see me, and how many just see ‘smallwithshortredhair’ and never actually look at my face.
Hollywood’s next mashup: Freaky Friday meets Fargo!
There’s a guy in the courthouse where I work who looks kinda sorta like me, and several times we’ve been mistaken for each other. He and I have discussed it, but we agree we just don’t see why people would think we look that much alike.
I’ve gotten the “she’s your twin!” a lot - apparently, I have a really common face. When I’ve had the chance to see the person, usually it’s as other folks said: they have one or two salient features like mine (similar glasses, blonde/blue eyes, similar haircut, similar clothes, etc.) There was one person who gave me a kind of uncanny-valley sensation, and she felt the same way about me, but it still wasn’t like looking in the mirror.
Then one day, I was playing Fallout 3, and a minor character appeared on the screen and my jaw dropped and I just stared in amazement. She was me in video game form. My sister came into the room and did the same thing. Then I called to my husband, “Hey, look at this chick…” and he also stared and said, “That… looks exactly like you!” Then I posted it as my facebook profile pic. Some people said something like, “Weird outfit! When is that picture from?” and others noticed it was an illustration and said, “How did you do that?” or “Who did your portrait? It’s really good!” But it was obvious to everyone that it was me.
On the other hand, when I see actual identical twins together (like the ones in jjimm’s link), I sometimes have trouble figuring out whether they’re actually identical or just similar-looking. I once had two coworkers who each had an identical twin, and the twins visited the office on separate occasions. One, I totally mistook for her sister, the other, I just thought, “Oh, this must be Leah’s twin.” I don’t know why it’s sometimes more obvious than others.
I also have a newspaper photo of someone who looks exactly like me, right down to their body language. This person was arrested at street demonstration about forty miles away, , so I know they are a liability.
But you’re looking at this all wrong. This person is your ticket. Find out where they bank and what stores they visit. Commit a crime close enough to that area that people who have seen them before will see you and identify the other person.
When people point it out to me I’m usually like, “yeah ok I can see that.” But I don’t think I ever saw someone and thought, on my own, that they looked exactly like me.
It used to happen all the time that people would say they knew me from somewhere else but couldn’t remember where. Of course, my basic visible attributes are so common that I could have been marketed as “generic Caucasian type.” Doesn’t happen now, though. Middle-aged people are invisible.
I had it happen once at a club in NYC in the late 80’s. A girl in the crowd looked over at me and her jaw just dropped. “Hey”, I thought, “that’s a pretty good reaction!”
Then she grabbed this guy she was hanging out with and turned him around. Complete doppelganger – the hair, the way we we’re dressed, everything. We looked exactly alike, and spend the rest of the evening hanging out together being asked if we were twins.
Never saw him again, fortunately. Guy was a major asshole.
