Sadly, I’ve read that that bar burned down.
It did, and was rebuilt, but it never had the same panache.
Regarding the coincidence of lieu and I having been in the same bar: Knowing that he was in Alaska for awhile, and seeing how he posts on this board, I would have been astounded if he hadn’t been to The Birdhouse. Anybody who appreciated unrestrained drinking, carousing and absurdity all in the same place eventually made his way out there.
My coincidence isn’t so fun.
At about age 16 I was driving home well after dark. it was a 45 mph, 3 lanes each way suburban artery with almost zero traffic. I saw the traffic light a half mile up ahead go from green to red, then back to green after about 5 seconds. This was before demand lights were commonplace; this was a malfunction.
When I got to the intersection there was a pedestrian smashed in the crosswalk, and a skateboard nearby. Another car had already stopped to render aid. I stopped long enough to see they were helping, then announced I was driving to the fire station to get the paramedics. This was before cell phones.
I roared back to the fire station a mile away and turned in the alarm. The paramedics sirened back to the scene, but it was too late. The kid was dead.
The coincidence? In our suburb of 80,000 people embedded in the LA metroplex this was my younger brother’s best pal. He was 14.
I’m betting he saw the light go green and launched across the intersection only to have it switch immediately back to red for him. Meantime the driver of the other car, a hit and run, never even noticed the light go from green to red back to green. All he knew was he had a green light and a pedestrian appeared in the crosswalk, then thump!
The hit and run turned out to be another kid from the next town over who drove straight home in a blind panic and told his parents what had happened. Had the timing been slightly different, that could have been me making that newbie driver mistake and hitting the by brother’s pal on the skateboard.
I once drove unannounced to Prescott, Arizona to visit a friend. I didn’t have his phone number or know where he lived. I figured I’d “wing it”. I pulled into town, found the first parking spot I could, walked into the bar in front of me and he was sitting on the first barstool closest to the door.
It took 2 seconds to find him!
I must have slept through class the day ‘e’ was explained. Anyway, years later I used ‘e’ all the time and I asked the mathematician in the office next door to show me ‘where it came from’. She wrote out a graph and a simple formula (see Wikipedi).
That sheet of paper sat on my desk for weeks, then one day I crumpled it up and tossed it in the trash.
Not five minutes later an engineer from down the hall came into my office and asked, “Hey, Marion, do you know how to calculate ‘e’?”
I bent and reached into the trash, “Why yes I do…”
At lunch at a Chinese restaurant, a co-worker and I wondered why two of our instruments developed the same unusual problem on the same day. We figured there must be a common cause but couldn’t pinpoint it. As I wondered out loud how thia could happen, I broke open my fortune cookie. It read “There are coincidences.”
At lunch at a Chinese restaurant, a co-worker and I wondered why two of our instruments developed the same unusual problem on the same day. We figured there must be a common cause but couldn’t pinpoint it. As I wondered aloud how this could happen, I broke open my fortune cookie. It read “There are coincidences.”
I have friends on Facebook whom I don’t know, but have friended because we play the same Facebook based games. One day, one of those friends posted a picture, addressing it to a friend of hers, last name … Kitchen. The picture was a yearbook page which included a high school picture of my first cousin, who died years ago when he was young.
Turns out this woman whom I did not know, was my cousin’s daughter, and the person to whom she was posting the picture was her half sister.
I know OF them, but I had never met them and could not tell you their names prior to this.
Coincidence, I took a weeks vacation from my work back in 2012. The wife and I took a trip to Eureka Springs, Arkansas staying in a couple of their “Haunted” hotels there. After our stay, we left our last hotel to head back home. On the way out of town, on one of the main highway going through town we stopped at a convenience store to gas up and soft drinks around 11am. Just a normal routine while traveling. I went back to work the next week, had a Conversation with a coworker about my vacation. I told him where we went while I was off in Arkansas, when I mentioned Eureka Springs he started to chuckle. He told me that he was there with his wife and another couple. I said that was strange that we were in that same town on that day that far from home, he said no what was strange was that while he was in the restroom he ran into another coworker while at a convenient store. I said yeah thats very unlikely that they were there at that time, he said not as strange as when they exited the restroom they ran into another coworker. Neither I or the three other coworkers knew each others travel plans. I thought for a minute then asked which store and what time of day did that happen, turns out it was the same store only 30 minutes after I had left. Later during our shift i asked where did the eat at
While they were there? It was the same steak house I had been to the night before.
My wife was having a conversation with a co-worker of hers a few years back, and during the conversation she mentioned her son was getting out of the marines and returning home with a cat. She mentioned that the cat was given to her by a member of the embassy staff that was being reassigned and could not take the animal to her new assignment.
My wife mentioned that my sister also worked overseas with the State Department. Her coworker asked her where and she told her the country, but that she had just relocated from another embassy recently, which turned out to be the country her son was stationed at. She then asked my wife what her job was and it turned out she was the one who gave her son the cat.
I was on a first date at a restaurant in DC with someone last year who had worked with DC Councilmember and then candidate for Mayor of Washington, DC, David Catania. She had mentioned him several times in the run-up to our meeting in person and also during dinner. About 2/3rds of the way through dinner she waved at someone, and he came over to the table to say hi. It was David Catania. I picked the restaurant out of hundreds of choices, so it wasn’t something she setup or a place she knew he frequented.
I had been talking to distant relatives I’d never met with the intention of organising a reunion. One of them sent me a Facebook friends request. Not ten minutes later my brother phoned and demanded “How do you know (name)?”. I said “He’s Grandma’s sister’s grandson. How do YOU know him?”. Turns out they work together, doing the same role in adjacent buildings. They see each other every day and had hit it off so well that my brother and his wife were thinking about inviting him over to hang out one weekend. Now they’re not just mates, they’re second cousins.
I mention to my current boss that, after three years of total poverty, now that I’m making money, I still have a hard time spending and enjoying it. He mentions reading a book about a very rich woman who refused to spend an unnecessary penny and lived in abject poverty.
I say “You must mean Henrietta Robinson Green. She was my maternal grandfather’s second cousin, and I grew up hearing about her.” He did.
In the late 80s (ie before Google Maps), I was going to visit a friend from college who lived maybe 20 miles away on Long Island, think wall-to-wall suburbs. I pulled out my dad’s big county road atlas to look up where her street was. It was something like “Metropolitan Road, Freeport”. I went to the page showing how to find a street, and the example street, out of literally 10,000 in the atlas, was Metropolitan Road, Freeport.
I was talking to a woman at work, and accidentally called her by the wrong name. I wished the earth would open and swallow me up.
Then an earthquake hit.
Here’s a coincidence - that very thing happened to me while I was on vacation in Eureka Springs, Arkansas last year. I was walking down the street with some friends when I heard my name being yelled. Another set of friends was on the other side of the street. They had just decided to make a day trip to ES from where they lived in OK. I was on a girl’s vacation from the Kansas City area. 
My first geography lesson at secondary school, we did map reading. We were all handed a photocopy of an OS map of a random 5 mile square of English countryside, which was around 100 miles from the school.
It was of a scale where the individual houses were visible, including the house I lived in until I was 8.
Before moving to California, one of my friends casually remarked that her uncle also lived in California.
Months later I went on a blind date with a vaguely older gentleman. We had an okay time and I went back to his place to chat some more (no hanky panky, I swear). Who did I see on the mantle but a picture of my friend from Illinois! I was suitably squicked out but didn’t want to reveal why-- and of course we never went out again 
I was home from college one weekend, to visit the 'rents/cadge some free food/do laundry, and left later than I normally did to go back to school (about an hour and a half drive). I was a little bummed, because it was Saturday night and I knew I wouldn’t make it back to my apartment in time for Doctor Who on PBS.
This was back in the early nineties, before NuWho, when for Americans the show was just an obscure British sci-fi series that was only watched by dorks like me. This was also pre-DVRs and Netflix, so if you missed an episode, you were SOL until the programmers at PBS decided to play it again.
The deejay on the rock station I was listening to on the way back to school must have psychically divined my distress, and comforted me by saying, over the air, “It’s 10:15 here on Z93! But that’s okay - you didn’t want to see that Doctor Who rerun, anyway.”
How could I forget my craziest coincidence?
My grandfather died before I was born. Around 1962 or so. He was buried in a cemetery on Staten Island. My grandmother lived another 50 years until she died at the age of 104. She was buried in my grandfather’s plot.
When we went to the funeral I happened to notice the headstone facing my grandparents. The way it was laid out the two rows were facing each other so the feet would almost be touching. The name on the headstone was my ex-wife’s maiden name. The first and last name were the name combination as my ex’s brother. I knew he was a third. I sent a quick text to the ex and confirmed that was her grandfathers name. And her grandmother’s name was on the headstone too. So I was able to show my kids their other great grandparents grave at my grandmothers funeral. My grandfather and her grandparents were buried within feet of each other for decades before we ever met.