(Submitted by friend of the blog, Carrie Poppy, from Oh No, Ross and Carrie!)
I wanted to hear an episode of the Skepticality podcast because I’ve never listened to it. So I randomly clicked on an episode, and started listening. The interviewee was one of my closest friends! TOMBC!
[EDITOR: The friend’s name, presumably, was not TOMBC (our initials). If so, that’s an even bigger coincidence!]
(Submitted by reader Steve Gray)
A woman friend and I were visiting Naples, Italy. She was on the faculty at UCLA and I live in Santa Monica. She wanted to visit the Naples La Scala Opera house and hear an opera. I wasn’t really interested so we agreed to attend only the first act. We left at intermission and began our walk down the street.
Suddenly a female voice yelled, “Sylvia!” It was someone she knew from UCLA. (Remember, this is halfway around the world and the meeting was completely coincidental.)
The woman who called out was with her husband and they were walking toward the opera house. They were hoping to catch the second act of the opera. (Why they were going to only the second act, I don’t know.) We gave them our ticket stubs and went on our way, with everyone’s plans lining up as hoped.
[EDITOR: I sometimes like to do the above-mentioned trick with movies. Maybe that’s the reason I’m the only person I know who thought Mulholland Drive made perfect sense.]
A facebook friend Jana Morales noticed that I’d “friended” a man by the name of Trevor Jenkins… and she commented that I had friended her grand nephew! I asked if she was sure, and whether he lived in Canada, as that’s where my new FB friend is from.
It took awhile to find out, but it turns out that there are well over 100 people named Trevor Jenkins on Facebook, and they are not the same Trevor Jenkins. My new friend and I met on a bulletin board for science writer Gary Taubes, and we are both skeptics; my friend Jana’s grand nephew is the first other Trevor Jenkins that he has known of indirectly, ie known someone who knows someone who has the same name, coincidentally.
