Category: Stories


Stranger Homecomings

(Submitted by reader Steve Gray)

While in graduate school at Harvard, I lived on the one-block-long Irving Street in Cambridge.

While visiting San Francisco I was at a party talking to a guy who, it turned out, lived on exactly the same one-block-long street at the same time I did, yet we never managed to meet.

The Odds Must Be Crazy…

I have a Three Stooges collectors’ plate that I see every day; the boys are preparing a Thanksgiving Turkey. You either love’em or hate’em — I think they were hilarious, but I think it’s comparatively rare to see their images or references to them.

Yesterday was a 3 Stooges 3-bagger. First, in the morning — I noticed in the Puzzler crossword puzzle I was working from the LA Times, the clue for the three letter word down is: Slapper in shorts, MOE.

Then, later in the day, my partner and I have been slowly Spring cleaning a spare room, and I noticed in a stack of posters a black & white poster of Larry, Moe and Curly in football uniforms, Larry holding a football on Curly’s head, and Moe about to kick the ball.

Finally, last night on MythBusters, during an episode about pain endurance, when the experiment was having redheaded people put their right hand in a fishbowl full of icewater, I could barely believe my eyes when a very brief clip of the Three Stooges slapping each other around was included in the “pain.” Nya ah ah!

Justin Time!

(Submitted by friend of the blog, Brian Hart)

My wife and I were driving to Hollywood and she put on a random Podcast of Terry Gross’s Fresh Air for us to listen to for the drive.  It happened to be an interview with actor/musician Justin Timberlake.  We got out of the car and started to discuss the only movie of Timberlake’s that we had ever seen, Black Snake Moan.  Walking to our destination building, I a saw a glint on the ground and stooped to pick it up.  It was a home-made DVD of…Black Snake Moan (below)!

Odds Blood, that was quite a coincidence.

ComiCon Encounter

(Submitted by friend of the blog, Brian Hart)

My friends Derek, Paula and I are waiting on line at San Diego’s ComiCon July 2010.  We are in line to see the Mythbusters Panel, the first time that all five Mythbusters are appearing on the same panel at ComiCon.  The hall holds about 2000 people and we are way, way in the back of that line.  It looks like we might not get inside.

The line slowly creeps up and they let the three of us in, probably the last few people to get in the room.  It is packed with over 2000 anxious, excited fans.  I look for three seats together, but only find two empty ones, literally in the last row.  Derek decides to sit on the floor and charge up his iPhone, so Paula and I take the last two seats.  We sit down, and in the row in front of us, in fact, in the very two seats DIRECTLY in front of us are our friends, Amy Davis Roth and Phil Plait!

What are the odds?  Crazy?  Crazier? Craziest?

Reading Aloud

(Submitted by friend of the blog, Spencer Marks)

Yesterday I was listening to a podcast, and trying to multi-task, and was also reading an e-mail while listening. My eyes rolled over the word “assume,” and just as I was reading that word, the speaker on the podcast SAID “assume” in the course of her speech. It wasn’t “close,” it was EXACT, like the speaker was reading the text to me! Of course, that was the only word that coincided, but it caught me off guard for an instant, like I had been listening to the e-mail, instead of reading it!

The First & Original

This coincidence story deserves a place of honor. It was this story on a group mailing list that triggered a member of our team’s idea of a coincidence collection which eventually led to… The Odds Must Be Crazy.

(Submitted by reader Donald Chesebro)

You know those unbelievable coincidences we always hear about and then dismiss skeptically?  It happened to me this afternoon.

A few minutes after my Packers’ crushing defeat in overtime (after a 17-point valiant comeback), I was humming a morose minor-key tune on my way to browse at The Iliad bookstore in North Hollywood.  When I entered the store, there was a sixties surf-rock instrumental playing on their stereo that had the exact same tune I’d been humming, at least eight bars worth, in its refrain.  I did not recognize the recording and did not know what the song or band was (it was certainly not a big hit record I was likely to have heard before), but I listened to the refrain the second time around and it was definitely the same tune I had been humming moments earlier.

Status and Likes

Yesterday, I refreshed my Facebook page when I opened it for the first time about 8 PM.

The Facebook Friend at the top of the page was Ben Radford whose status update was about TV shows of which he’s never seen a complete episode. The next one down was an unrelated friend of mine who was saying she now likes the magazine Skeptical Inquirer.

Ben is the managing editor of Skeptical Inquirer. Is that a coincidence, or what?

Chance Meeting in Vegas

(Submitted by friend of the blog, Brian Hart)

How are odds calculated in Vegas?  The only thing I know for sure is that the house will always eventually win.

My wife, Karen, and I stayed in Las Vegas over the Thanksgiving weekend at the Encore Hotel.  As we waited for the elevator in the lobby, which only served half the rooms at the Encore, we ran into 2 friends we know from Los Angeles.  Neither of us had any idea the other was in Las Vegas, let alone which hotel.  Both of us couples were staying at the Encore!  What are the odds of us meeting randomly in this elevator lobby?

Nineteen of the world’s 25 largest hotels by room count are on the Strip, with a total of over 67,000 rooms [source]
Total Number of hotel rooms in Las Vegas: 124,270 [source]
Total number of rooms at the Encore: 2034 [source]

Sounds like The Odds Must Be Crazy…

Dead Sea Stroll

(Submitted by friend of the blog, Brian Hart)

I was at the Hermosa Beach Crafts Fair with my friend John yesterday.  There were dozens of crafts booths and thousands of people.  During lunch in a small pizza place, we got into a quite friendly discussion of religion.  As we walked back into the fair and the the throngs of people, John asked me what I thought about the Dead Sea Scrolls.  A woman walking in the opposite direction stopped us and said, “What do you know about the Dead Sea Scrolls?”  We stopped and had a long conversation with her, and she turned out the be a biblical scholar, and had recently been to San Diego where there is a traveling Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit.

A hundred Shekels for anyone who can tell me the odds on that happening.  Dead men DO tell tales!

Meeting Roots

(Submitted by reader Chris C)



My best coincidence experience was when I was sitting in a staff meeting (group supervision for a psychological clinic that I was working at) and all five of the people in the meeting had lived, at one time or another in their life, in Lawrence, Massachusetts — including myself.  This was a clinic in Irvine, California.  We had all known each other for some time, were all students of the school, had enrolled at different times in life, had moved to California at different times and for different reasons, and it just happened to surface while sitting around chatting.