Tag Archive: same


A Coincidence in the Garden (and on TV!)

Filed Under: Stories by Reader submission — 1 Comment
January 11, 2012

(Submitted by reader Joey D)

I was working in my yard and I came across several plants that I found very interesting and unusual. I knew they were “weeds” as I hadn’t planted them myself, but I had no idea what they were.

I picked one, roots and all and went into the house to see if I could identify it on Google. I walked in and a woman on the television walked straight toward the camera, holding the exact same plant and said, “This is wild garlic.” I gasped! It wasn’t even a story on gardening, but rather, it was a news piece on how difficult it is for the care-givers taking care of an Alzheimer’s patient.

[EDITOR: All right, all right, this one IS just plain eerie. Even I’d be pretty darn startled by it.]

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Busy Day for Toledo Family

Filed Under: News, Stories by Jarrett Kaufman — 1 Comment
January 4, 2012

(Link submitted by friend of the blog, Nancy Matson)

Families sometimes have strangely scheduled and often inconvenient birthdays. Sometimes people are born too close to a major gift-giving holiday, increasing the financial strain and reducing the flow of gifts. Others end up with family members closely clustered together, with the same result. But in one much happier reversal of Bleak Winters, a Toledo-area family experienced something much more precise:

FOUR birthdays all on January 4th, across four generations.

That’s right, Richard Stiff’s family started off the tradition with his (now-passed) father Marshall being born on January 4th, 1924. Richard, himself was then born on the same day in 1947, his daughter Julia following the pattern in 1978, and her daughter Kourtney following up the rear (for now) in 2011.

The family claims this was entirely unplanned timing and seems to enjoy the family connection, with various family traditions each year to celebrate the connection. Their biggest challenge appears to be simply the difficulty in finding appropriate birthday activities in the chilly month of January.

[SOURCE: Toledo Blade via Yahoo! News]

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Addressing a Coincidence

Filed Under: Stories by Reader submission — Leave a comment
October 26, 2011

(Submitted by reader Jeffrey Nuttall)

In April 2009, a friend was looking for a roommate, and, since I was planning to move anyway, I ended up moving in with him.  As it turned out, though, there were some odd coincidences involved with my new address.

First of all, I later found out that my parents had both lived only a couple of blocks away from that address before they were married — my mother to the northwest, and my father to the southwest.  I had had no idea that my parents had ever lived anywhere near there until after I moved there.

But the coincidence gets better: the street the address is on is called Willis, and the nearest cross street to the south is Rayen.  My father’s name is Ray, and his last initial N. — Ray N.  And my father’s middle name?  Willis.

[EDITOR: This one’s both one of the craziest stories I’ve heard, and requires the most effort to find. You have to jumble together and separate out some names, and the rules are a little loose and require some searching. And yet, when you put it all together and see it as a whole the end result is wicked cool. Which is one notch above “crazy cool,” and a couple below “slap-my-ass-and-call-me-mathilda” cool. There’s a whole scale. Trust me.]

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Anne Parrish

Filed Under: Historical, Stories by Jarrett Kaufman — 2 Comments
August 1, 2011

While American novelist Anne Parrish was browsing bookstores in Paris in the 1920s, she came upon a book that was one of her childhood favorites – Jack Frost and Other Stories. She picked up the old book and showed it to her husband, telling him of the book she fondly remembered as a child. Her husband took the book, opened it, and on the flyleaf found the inscription: “Anne Parrish, 209 N. Weber Street, Colorado Springs.” It was Anne’s very own book.

Courtesy of Listverse

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How do YOU know my grand-nephew?!

Filed Under: Stories by Wendy Hughes — Leave a comment
July 29, 2011

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.

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1000 Ways to Coincide

Filed Under: Stories by Wendy Hughes — Leave a comment
July 26, 2011

A coincidence of truly amazing proportions happened on a private mailing list. Two members of our group (Jim Underdown and Jeff Nuttall) posted requests to record Spike TV‘s 1000 Ways to Lie on a Wednesday night. I checked the listing, and there were several episodes that evening; it was an interesting coincidence that their performances were on the same series on the same night. 

There were not enough details in their messages, so I randomly chose to watch the one about Natural Born Liars. Jim had said the show was starting at ten p.m., but I have DirectTV, and satellite TV has a different schedule than cable, and at ten p.m., there was a different show on. Jeff had called me and told me that he played the husband of a woman who told him she was giving birth to baby bunnies… so that sounded about right.

I saw Jeff, and a few minutes into the episode, I saw Jim Underdown explain how people will do anything to achieve fame. 

Neither Jim nor Jeff had seemed to know that they were in the same segment of the same TV show.

As coincidences go, it was pretty amazing that two members of our group would be performing in the same brand new TV show, and not know about one another’s participation, and even have posted about it on our mailing list. As if that was not enough, a friend of another member of the group was the Supervising Producer of the show, and also unaware of the connection between the two performers.

 

Related:
Where everybody knows your name… 

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Got Smart!

Filed Under: Stories by Reader submission — Leave a comment
July 14, 2011

(Submitted by friend of the blog, Spencer Marks)

When I was just a wee lad, around 11 or 12 or so, I would go to my father’s office over the summer and work for him, doing little things, here and there. His office was on Wilshire Blvd., and our house wasn’t too far off of Wilshire, so I would jump on a bus to get to his office, and to get back home. One day, while I was sitting on the bus bench waiting to go home, there was this little old lady sitting on the bench next to me, and we started up a conversation. I asked her what she had done for a living (before she retired) and she said she had been an actress. I asked her if she would have been in anything I would have seen, and she said she had been in an episode of “Get Smart,” which to this day remains one of my all time favorite TV shows.

I asked her which part she had played, as the series was on every day (and by then in reruns), I had most likely watched every episode 3-5 times, and would know if she was lying! She described the scene, which I remembered, and I was excited to meet her! The bus came, and we continued to talk on the bus until I got off at my stop. I walked home the four blocks, and noticed from the TV guide that “Get Smart” was about to start in 5 minutes! I thought to myself, “Wouldn’t that be a GREAT coincidence if it was THAT episode?” AND GUESS WHAT?!?

It was a whole DIFFERENT episode! But it WOULD have been cool!

No, I’m kidding  … it WAS the episode, and there was my new friend! I was watching her just 15 minutes after leaving her on the bus (very much ALIVE, if any of you were wondering!) That remains one of the coolest coincidences EVER to happen in my life! Hope you all enjoyed it too!

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Bleak Winters

Filed Under: Stories by Reader submission — Leave a comment
July 14, 2011

(Submitted by friend of the blog, Susan Gerbic)

Both of my grandmothers died on the same day, December 18th; one in 1925 the other in 1954. We always thought that was odd, but still not quite that odd. Then when in 1996 my then husband’s grandmother died on December 18th we really starting questioning it. The remaining grandmother was still alive at this time. Three out of three, that’s really interesting odds. If I might add in one more, when we were telling my husband’s step-father of this coincidence, he went into another room and brought out his mother’s death certificate. Same death date, December 18th.

All the grandmothers in our family, biological and step had died, on the same day. This was all before 2000; since then the remaining grandmother has now died and she died in March.

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