Coincidences, and Regular Incidences

Of all the absurd things that could happen, Albert Camus died at age 46 in a car accident on this day in 1960.

"There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night."

(Albert Camus dancing in Life Magazine is the night.)

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“Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.”

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William Faulkner wrote in his obituary:

"When the door shut for him he had already written on this side of it that which every artist who also carries through life with him that one same foreknowledge and hatred of death, is hoping to do: I was here."

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I am very impressed with the conversational tone of the book Zuzu wrote for science class on praying mantises. 

"An adaptation is a part of a praying mantis's body that helps it survive, like camouflage helps the praying mantis hide. Oh and speaking of camouflage it actually helps the praying mantis blend in with stuff. Also the wings, yep wings help the praying mantis fly away really fast, if a praying mantis needs to get away. Praying mantises legs can also really help because two of a praying mantises legs can attack while four can walk. Can you believe it? A praying mantises arm can help because they have sharp blades on it. Now that's what I call cool!"

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Food for thought. From the Cheyenne Regional Medical Center- "No one who is fully vaccinated is in the ICU, on a ventilator or dead." 

In my experience, those who catch it without the vaccine who get it bad then desperately wish they got the vaccine. Why only afterward?

January 4, 2022

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It's funny that Ted Cruz is leading Trump's voter fraud effort. Trump accused HIM of fraud after he won the 2016 Iowa Caucus. Cruz knows better than anyone that this is just what Trump does... he assaults election integrity because he can't handle his negative emotions associated with losing.

January 4, 2021

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From Existential Comics- "Remember, you are not so much breaking your New Year's resolution, but exercising your radical freedom to not be bound by past choices."

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Whenever Gretel helps with some chores she gets a bunch of change (she's not as into dollar bills which lack clinkiness as they fall into her bank.) Yesterday she found 6 cents and gave it to me for some unspecified reason, which might be the most adorable display of altruism the world has ever known.

January 4, 2017

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If you're the type of person who thought it was something special that January 2nd was a palindrome (01022010)... then brace yourself! 2010=1+2-(3-4-5)*6*7*8-9

January 4, 2010

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Speaking of the coincidence of Bazo's return, this popped up in my history. 

COINCIDENCES

The biggest coincidence of my life happened today

But before I tell you about it, I'm going to run through a quick history of the biggest coincidences of my life up until now. 

-Working at a mindless job putting washers on bolts for hours, I flipped a big half moon washer about 5 feet up in the air held out a bolt and it landed exactly on it. First try! 

-I called a friend I hadn't talked to for over a year. She called me back later but something seemed strange about the conversation. I asked her if she was returning my call and she said she wasn't... she didn't get the message I called. We picked the same day to call each other. 

-I bought a car from Matt Usner with 100,000 miles on it. He put 60,000 on it, and I ended up putting 60,000 on it. It only let each of us sit one time... at the exact same exit on I-70 in the middle of Ohio. 

-Yuletide and I were about the cheapest people on the planet. One day on a whim I decided to buy him a MASH book. When I got home it turned out he decided to buy me a Star Wars patch. After living together for years we each picked the same day to buy each other something, for no reason. Another time we each went to Angry, Young and Poor separately on the same day and bought the same belt. That's the only thing I ever bought there, and he never paid any money for clothes either. 

-While living with Leon and Zerbe, I mentioned that I was going to see my mom the next day because it was her birthday. Zerbe said he was going to see his mom the next day, because it was her birthday too. Leon looked at each of us like we were pulling his leg. It turns out that the next day was also his mom's birthday. Is your mom's birthday November 25th? If so, you can join our club. 

-Also with Leon, we went out to hike in White Sands New Mexico, forgot something in the car and went back. Whoops, I locked the keys in the car. And another whoops, I forgot to lock the car! Two mistakes canceled each other out, the car was open with the keys in it.

-Once I was at the store and heard someone cough in the aisle next to me. It was just a very slight cough but I recognized it as my dad. 

-Driving back from St. Louis I decided to see a Phillies game in Pittsbugh. As I was waiting for it to start my uncle and cousin walked right past me. Somehow we met at the same game 300 miles from where we live. 

- I remembered another coincidence. While working as a surveyor's assistant, I was explaining to a friend one night how to survey. I picked three random elevations as examples... the benchmark above sea level, the reading of the survey poll on the benchmark, the reading of the survey poll on the new stake...that gives you the elevation above sea level of the new stake. I made up hypothetical measurements to explain and the next day right of the bat we hit each of the three, to the hundredth of an inch. So unlikely!

-When we moved into 21A we bought a refrigerator. Over the six years we lived there we totally covered it in stickers. The day we moved out we took all the stickers off, and the refrigerator stopped working.

-When I bought The Sopranos box set, the guy at the post office had to go in the back and get it. There's no way he could have known what was inside the package, but when he returned from the back he was whistling Don't Stop Believing by Journey, the song that plays during the final scene.

-There was also a day at work where the number 666 popped up like 8 unassociated times. Hmmm.

-Marion Cotillard... I imagined her playing John Dillinger's girlfriend in the screenplay I was writing, looked her up on imdb, only to discover that somehow she was playing Dillinger's girlfriend in an upcoming Michael Mann movie about him that I didn't know existed.

Man, I know there's another big one but I can't remember it. Can you? 

Anyway, today's coincidence... Sloth told me that he ran into a girl who used to work at the co-op. He said I'd never guess what she was doing now. He said it was crazy. He told me he'd give me his last paycheck if I guessed. 

B- OK, let me think. 

S- But it has to be exactly right. 

B- Wait are you going to sign the check over to me.

S- Yeah, you'll get all the money from it.

B- OK, OK... she's training show dogs. 

S- Nope. 

B- Give me one more chance. 

S- OK. 

B- She's a trapeze artist. He looked at me kind of weird. 

S- She's in trapeze school! I'm glad I said you had to be exact. 

We debated a bit and it was mutually decided that you aren't a trapeze "artist" until you graduate trapeze school. But wow! Two tries. I'm dying to remember that other big coincidence. I know I have a list somewhere. Feel like sharing any of your coincidences?

Jan 4, 2010

Postscript- I remembered it! My friend Gordon wrote a film that then got turned into the film Summer School. He didn't like the film. He said that he put a lot of heart into it, but it got it turned into a surface level summer joke movie. One Saturday afternoon it came on TV and I told Emma that Gordon wrote it. After the credits the phone rang. It was David calling me to tell me that Gordon had just died. I hadn't seen him in a couple years.

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You don't see that too much anymore these days.

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After having been kidnapped and sold into slavery in the American South, Solomon Northup who wrote Twelve Years a Slave regained his freedom on this day in 1853, after having been kidnapped and sold into slavery.

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On this day in 1903, the elephant, Topsy, was electrocuted by the owners of Luna Park, Coney Island. The Edison film company recorded the film, titling it, Electrocuting an Elephant.

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On this day in 1954, a 19 year-old truck driver named Elvis Presley paid $4 to record "Casual Love Affair" and "I'll Never Stand In Your Way" at Sam Phillips' recording studio. I think it was worth the investment. Then again, perhaps it cost him his life.

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The NASA Mars rover, Spirit, landed successfully on Mars on this day in 2004. Here's a sad comic about it, until you remind yourself that robots don't yet have feelings. (They don't, do they?)

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Isaac Newton is believed to have been born on this day in 1643. 

"I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."

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James Bond was born on this day in 1900. No not that one! The famed ornithologist.

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Floyd Patterson, who fought Muhammad ali, was born on this day in 1935.

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Doris Kearns Goodwin joined us on this day in 1943.

"Good leadership requires you to surround yourself with people of diverse perspectives who can disagree with you without fear of retaliation."

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Phillies legend, Charlie Manuel, was born on this day in 1944. I remember the first time I saw him and thought, "This guy???" It turned out yes, that guy! He led them to 5 straight NL East Division titles (2007-11), 2 NL Pennants (2008-09), and a World Series title in 2008. He has the most wins (780) in Phillies franchise history, and is a member of the Phillies Wall of Fame.

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Former Padres and Giants second baseman, Tito Fuentes was born on the same day.

"They shouldn't throw at me. I'm the father of five or six kids."

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Henri Bergson left this one this day in 1941. 

"Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought."

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T. S. Eliot left us on this day in 1965.

"Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go."

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Iron Eyes Cody left us on this day in 1999.

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NPR- Could It Be? Spooky Experiments That 'See' The Future

Spooky indeed!

http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/01/04/132622672/could-it-be-spooky-experiments-that-see-the-future

January 4, 2011

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Alternet- Are Americans Too Stupid for Democracy?

Haha- 38% of us failed the standard citizenship test in a 2011 poll. Great question- are Americans too stupid for democracy? Better question- are we too stupid to know we're too stupid? When the bottom 10-15% think they are above average we've got some serious problems!

http://www.alternet.org/belief/are-americans-too-stupid-democracy-0

January 4, 2015

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Mother Jones- Here’s How to Save Obamacare

Great info on a complicated issue.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/11/save-obamacare-donald-trump-repeal-gop

January 4, 2017

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Hollywood Reporter- Critic’s Notebook: ‘Frontline’ Delivers Dark Psychological Portrait of ‘President Trump’

Oh my God, I'm watching this immediately.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/critics-notebook-frontine-delivers-dark-psychological-portrait-donald-trump-president-trump-960?facebook_20170104

January 4, 2017

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No matter how good of friends two people are, they can't attend each other's funerals.

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Diogenes of Sinope... when some one reminded him that the people of Sinope had sentenced him to exile, he said, "And I sentenced them to stay at home."

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Dorothy Parker said of drama critic George Jean Nathan, “look as if they spelled out their reviews with alphabet blocks.”

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Maimonides- "Every man whose character traits all lie in the mean is called a wise man."

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Einstein, in a letter to freud, "Man has in him that need to hate and destroy."

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Eugene O'Neill- "It's just Beauty that's calling me, the beauty of the far off and unknown… the joy of wandering on and on — in quest of the secret which is hidden over there, beyond the horizon?"

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Lev Shestov- “Read what Dostoevsky has to say about normal men, and then ask yourself which is better: the painful convulsions of a doubtful awakening, or the grey, yawning torpidity of certain sleep.”

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Cicero- "Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others."

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Leonardo da Vinci- "Nothing strengthens authority so much as power."

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Kipling- "Take everything you like seriously, except yourselves."

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Salinger, Catcher In the Rye- "I am always saying "Glad to've met you" to somebody I'm not at all glad I met. If you want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff, though."

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Henry Miller, Plexus- "If I were reading a book and happened to strike a wonderful passage I would close the book then and there and go for a walk. I hated the thought of coming to the end of a good book. I would tease it along, delay the inevitable as long as possible, But always, when I hit a great passage, I would stop reading immediately. Out I would go, rain, hail, snow or ice, and chew the cud."

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Sedaris- "I'd tried to straighten him out, but there's only so much you can do for a person who thinks Auschwitz is a brand of beer."

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Sarah Vowell, Take the Cannoli- "I have a similar affection for the parenthesis (but I always take most of my parentheses out, so as not to call undue attention to the glaring fact that I cannot think in complete sentences, that I think only in short fragments or long, run-on thought relays that the literati call stream of consciousness but I still like to think of as disdain for the finality of the period)."

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Bergson again- "The idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of possibilities, is thus more fruitful than the future itself, and this is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality."

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Hitchens- "I have met some highly intelligent believers, but history has no record to say that [s]he knew or understood the mind of god. Yet this is precisely the qualification which the godly must claim—so modestly and so humbly—to possess. It is time to withdraw our 'respect' from such fantastic claims, all of them aimed at the exertion of power over other humans in the real and material world."

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Newton again, "Truth is ever to be found in the simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things."

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Asimov- "Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right."

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A fellow who's surname was Hunt 

Trained his cock to perform a slick stunt: 

This versatile spout 

Could be turned inside out, 

Like a glove and be used as a cunt.