Citrus Synchronicity

So we were over at some friends recently and it was a hot and muggy Sunday. They offered us a refreshing beverage of our choice and we both chose ice tea. When my friend was handing my wife her glass, the TV was a playing a promo for the 1960 movie, “The Apartment”, starring Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine. At the exact moment when Jack Lemmon’s name popped on the screen, my friend (with his back to the TV) asked my wife if she wanted a lemon in her tea. True story.

Cheers...

Treasures from the Past

I've only found a few things in the used books that I collect for my library of classic fiction. So far, only 3 that I can think of.

1) Five $20 bills tucked into my $40 copy of Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment"

2) A New Rochelle to New York train schedule from 1974 used as a bookmark in a copy of Philip Roth's "Portnoy's Complaint". On the back is an ad for a realtor in Pelham, New York. (Which for synchronicity points made me think of a great Matthau movie, "The Taking of Pelham One Two Three" which was also from 1974.)

3) Last weekend, I was in a small town bookstore and picked up a 1954 copy of "The Scotswoman" by Inglis Fletcher. Tucked away in the middle of the book for hiding (like the money) rather than marking one's place was a letter. It had been mailed a long time ago because it was stamped in red, "Postage & Fees paid U.S. Department of Justice". The return address was a PO Box in Leavenworth, Kansas. It was in fact a letter from prison from an uncle to his niece.

Sun March 31st

Hi Kate -

Just a few lines to let you know I've arrived at my final destination. What a drag. Thank God I have only a short time to be here - am scheduled for the camp program - after spending 15 - 30 days inside these walls for orientation. Have already started to exercise and can feel the weight leaving me - Thank God - had to remove my beard which distressed me to no end - but it'll grow again. By the way, no matter what happens to Bill (if anything) while I'm away just tell Lucille you have no idea where I am - that you think I'm living in Calgary, Canada - that's way up in the wilds and I'd rather Blondie didn't know where I am. If anything should happen to Bill my presence certainly wouldn't bring him back to earth. Besides, he's pretty tough and I think he'll be here for a few more years yet. Hope you got all my things put away OK - try to keep my records (my classics) in their covers and ask the children to help. I'm sure they'll be glad to - Ha Ha! All of my addresses were sent home by mistake so I had to guess at your address - Hope George is able to do something with that Tobacco Road trailer. Have several more letters to write so will cut this short. Will write again after I'm out at camp. Say hello to all your family. Hope you got that silver shaker back from John got by mistake. Write if & when you get time - my address for the duration is on the envelope.

Love always from Uncle Bob

Goodnight Bob, Goodnight Kate, Goodnight Mrs. Fletcher and Goodnight Walter.

Cheers...

Frampton Comes Alive!

Tonight I've decided, after listening to it for the 3rd time this week, that Peter Frampton's all-time best-selling live album is on my top 10 list of albums or at least 1 of my desert island discs.

(It also gains minor synchronicity points for being released on my birthday...)

I just wanted to let you know.

Cheers...

Everyday Synchronicity

It's not everyday that I stumble across a word I've never seen before. Today, however, I stumbled on the word "quotidian", a word I swear I've never seen or heard, twice in totally unrelated readings. I know some will say, "After you read it once, you were sensitive to recognizing it the next time, like when you buy an orange car and then all you see on the road are orange cars." Others will just say, "Cool."

I like this definition from Wikipedia best:

Quotidian

The term "quotidian" derives from the Latin word for "daily" and refers to repetitive daily actions, events or routines - yet in typical usage carries a vaguely negative overtone. "Quotidian" is generally used to convey a sense of the mundane; that is, there is an implication of the 'commonplace' — often in the disparaging sense, and at the very least to indicate that there is nothing unexpected or surprising to be found in things quotidian.
In art criticism, "quotidian" refers to art works which reference mundane aspects of everyday life. When used in a negative sense, however, the word denotes art or any creative work that, while reflecting or incorporating everyday life, references something that is a very temporary phenomenon that will date the work. For example, the Train song "Drops of Jupiter (Tell Me)" incorporates a classic rock sound, but references Tae Bo, an exercise trend that was only popular for a short period in the late 1990s.

Cheers...

Running Synchronicity (Part Deux)

This was submitted by a running buddy of mine...

At the start of every race he has a tradition of listening to Jeremy Camp's "Trust in You." So at the start of his last race, he was using a new mp3 player that he had loaded with 200-300 of his running songs onto but hadn't set up any playlists yet. He turned it on shuffle and it played his song when he began the race. A week later, he's telling the story at home to his family and the song starts playing on the stereo. He had 3 CD's on shuffle play.

Here's my original running/music synch story.

Cheers...

Glasses, Nose & Mustache Synchronicity

So these three guys I work with, let's call them Sean, Geoff and Kerven (not their real names) are across the street at a pub having lunch. The conversation turns to an obnoxious former colleague, let's call him Barney, who Sean ran into at a training course in Florida or somewhere. Geoff says, "Wow, if I ran into Barney at a training class, I wouldn't go talk to him - in fact, I would probably whip out a pair of those nose and mustache glasses so he wouldn't recognize me." As he was saying this, Kerven noted that the TV behind Sean and Geoff was at that moment, running the Get A Mac ad featuring the actor portraying the PC disguising himself with....a pair of those nose and mustache glasses.

Geoff then says, "Oh crap. Don't tell Milton or he'll put this on his #@&*# blog!"

Cheers...

Man on the Moon Synchronicity

My son and 3 of his friends had a group project for Social Studies this week. The assignment was to pick an event of historical significance and then produce a video news story covering the event. The group decided to do a story on the first U.S. moon landing in 1969. They videotaped my son as President Kennedy giving the speech in which he throws out the familiar challenge, "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth." They went on to film the mission and landing on our trampoline in the back yard. I helped them transfer the tape to VHS last night and sent them off to school this morning to submit their project. The idea was that the class would watch everyone's news clips in class today.

This afternoon at work, I brought up my browser and noticed that my homepage, BBC News (of course) had a link to "This Day in History" next to a photo of JFK. I clicked on the link and discovered that he had delivered the speech that my son had shown in class today, on May 25, 1961. Check it out here.

Cheers...

Unpimp My Fargo Synchronicity

A friend of mine kept asking if I had seen the new VW ads for the Mark V GTI with the Unpimp My Ride theme ( you can watch them here ) and I had never seen them on TV. So he's over at my house and shows them to me on the Internet and we have a good laugh. Then we're channel surfing and we stop on the G4TV channel to watch a show from England called "Brainiac" where they do a pseudo MythBusters/Consumer Reports/Monty Python thing and 5 mins into the show they play one of the VW commercials we had just been watching.

A couple days later, I'm having lunch with another friend who had told me a couple of weeks ago that the movie "Fargo" was not based on a true story so I told him I had verified his statement by checking the trivia for the movie on IMDb. He said the Coen brothers were pure genius at marketing their product. I said, speaking of genius, have you seen the VW Mark V GTI campaign with the German scientist. He said he had only caught parts of it while channel surfing but recognized the guy as being one of his favorite bad guys in films. I told him I had no idea who he was. My friend looked him up on IMDb and found out that he is Swedish-born Peter Stormare and the number 1 rated movie that he was in was...."Fargo."

Oracle Synchronicity

My wife and I were having breakfast at the Boudin Bakery in San Francisco where I was attending the Oracle conference. The HR recruiter that I had been working with to fill a vacant position on my team called to tell me that the candidate that we had made an offer to had just accepted. I hung up my cell phone and went back to eating my croissant and glanced out the window at the street sign. The bakery was at the corner of 5th & Jessie Street. The candidate's name was Jesse and he was an Oracle database administrator .

Cheers...

Golf Synchronicity (Cont.)

My buddies and I have been going to Gaylord for over ten years to play a 4-man Skins golf game. This year we decided to break tradition and go to Lewiston and a resort called Garland. On Friday we usually try to get in 9 holes before dark so we went to the resort and asked if we could tee off on any of the four courses that were there. They asked us to play The Reflections course. A couple weeks later, I noticed that it had been awhile since I had pulled the pages off my golf course page-a-day calendar at my home office. This calendar has golf courses from all over the world. As I was pulling the pages off, there was a photo of one of the holes from The Reflections course. It was for the Wednesday before we played it.

Cheers...

Running Synchronicity

When I'm out running, I listen to my MP3 player in shuffle mode and I have around 125 songs loaded. The other day I was running my usual six mile loop around the lake and Relient K's "Falling Out" was playing. In that song there's a line "...and at every angle there's a Band-Aid." At the exact moment they were singing Band-Aid, I stepped on one that was stuck to the bike path that I was running on.

Cheers...

Manhatten Synchronicity

A golf trip I take every year is with a group of around 16 guys that go to Myrtle Beach. The cheap tickets we buy take us through New York's Laguardia airport. As our plane took off, I started paging through the November 2005 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. I looked out the window as we started to make a banked turned to the South and was treated to a spectacular view of the Manhattan skyline. When I returned to my magazine and flipped the next page there was an article on the statistics around the daily commuter traffic on and off the island of Manhattan. It included a map of the island that matched the overhead view I had out my window.

Cheers...

(FYI - I published this post from my Verizon Treo 650. To learn more, visit go.blogger.com)

Golf Synchronicity

A couple of Fridays ago, a colleague passed along the resume of a contractor that he was planning to bring in to do some work in his area. The contractor's name was Tom Watson. My name recognition trigger of course fired right away to the golfer Tom Watson. When I came home from work that night, I learned that my son had attended a nearby Senior PGA event and as I was reviewing the resume of Tom Watson the contractor that afternoon, he was having his hat signed by Tom Watson the golfer.

Synchronicity (cont.)
I have some friends that were celebrating their 40th birthday so we found ourselves at a local restaurant enjoying good food and fine wine until someone, in fact it might have been me, decided to order a round of "jagerbombs" which is essentially 1 shot of Jagermeister and 1/2 can of Red Bull. Although I had heard of Red Bull before, this was in fact the first time that I had ever tried one. Nine days later, I found myself on vacation with my family touring on a bus to the shooting locations used in the movie "The Sound of Music" in Austria. On our way to one of the remote lakes used in the opening scene, the tour guide says "If you now look out the right side of the bus you will see that we are passing the headquarters of Red Bull in Fuschl am See (pop. 1,344)."

Okay - here's a candidate for technology at it's best - Remote Chicken Petting.

Here are two movie related synchronicity events of late:

1) On Friday, May 6, I booked 4 nights at the Hilton London Hyde Park Hotel as part of our summer vacation. On Sunday May 8, I watched Moonlight Mile. In the beginning title sequence there was a splash screen for the film's production company - Hyde Park Entertainment.

2) On Thursday, May 5, I received the DVD of Pollock from Netflix. I ended up watching it on Wednesday, May 18. After watching the movie, I Googled for more info on Pollock and came upon a story from NPR that on May 10 it was announced that a friend of Pollock's had discovered 32 of his paintings in an old storage locker back in 2002.

I have a couple of synchronicity updates but first here's the coolest thing I've seen this week. The gang over at Google have a new beta for maps. It's the closest thing to using paper. Okay so here are 3 updates:

1) My son and I went on a campout the weekend after I posted the Wizard of Oz/Pink Floyd thing. On Sunday morning, the camp director was telling us how breakfast was going to work and she pointed to the cooks in the kitchen window of the dining hall. One of the cooks was a young guy wearing a Dark Side of the Moon t-shirt. I thought long and hard about whether or not to ask him if he knew about the whole Oz/Floyd thing and came up with what might have been his responses:
a) "I have no idea who Pink Floyd is. This was my brother's shirt."
b) "Why no, I haven't. Thanks for letting me know - I'll have to try that."
c) "Duh. Everyone knows that you can watch the Wizard of Oz and turn the sound off and play Dark Side of the Moon and have the music match what's going on."
d) "Dude, my friends and I did that last night!"

It was answer "d" that I was afraid of so I reluctantly avoided asking him although now I wish I had.

2) My daughter and I decided to go out for Valentine's dinner rather than attend the Daddy/Daughter dance this year. We went to one of our favorite restaurants, Rose's, and as we were walking in the door, we noticed a brass plaque that had engraved on it "In Memory of Jack and Emma Rose." While we were eating dinner, a family came in and sat next to our table. They had two girls and were on their way to a different Daddy/Daughter dance after dinner. One of the girls was named Emma and because she was going to the dance, she was wearing a flower on her dress - it was a rose...

3) I was asked to help interview two candidates who had applied as a Jr. High coordinator at our church. I found out prior to the interview that one of the candidates was named Christian and I knew him very well from his time in High School when I helped lead that group. So during the interview, I told him I always ask 3 questions; "What are your strengths, your proudest achievement and your passion?" Following his answers, another leader said that his boss has a question he always asks candidates because it reveals a lot about the person. He asked Christian what his favorite movie was. He answered "The Shawshank Redemption" because he said it was the first movie he watched that made him realize that movies could be more than pure entertainment but could actually have a profound affect on the rest of your life. Someone else asked when he had made the decision to focus on youth ministry and he said it was during his last mission trip to Trinidad in 2004. So a couple days after the interview, I get an e-mail stating that Christian has been offered and accepted the job. I started composing an e-mail to him to congratulate him and let him know I looked forward to working with him when I glanced at the picture on my desk next to my computer. It was taken during my second mission trip to Trinidad in 2001. It was taken from the 2nd floor of the church we were building looking down at me and a bunch of high school kids digging a drainage ditch in an old cow pasture. It's raining very hard and when we saw we were getting our picture taken, someone yelled "Do the Shawshank Redemption!" So we're all standing with our backs arched and our arms spread out and our faces catching the huge raindrops. And standing next to me in the picture is Christian...

In the past couple of weeks, I've experienced three bizarre synchronicity events. First of all, let me point out that I'm a Christian, and as such, believe that God moves in mysterious ways, answers prayers, performs miracles, etc. I don't believe in luck and do believe that coincidences are simply coincidental. Having said all that, I'm not sure where to file these:

1) I visited a used bookstore in town that I've always wanted to check out. It's been at least 6 months since I've purchased any used books to add to my collection of antique fiction. I came across a clean copy of Don Quixote by Cervantes and picked it up. A couple of days later, I decided to start reading it. A couple of days after that, I'm at work and I get a Yahoo! alert message in my inbox based on the name of the company that I work for. I check out the associated article which is from an Idaho newspaper talking about a competitor of ours opening up in a new market. The article references my company as the leader in this space which is what triggered the alert. On the same page is a headline link for "Don Quixote at 400" and it catches my eye. I read the article which says that the 400th anniversary of Cervantes' novel is to be celebrated on January 16, 2005. I started reading it for the first time on January 12, 2005.

2) I mainly use ICQ because most of the people I work with use it, but I have a friend that is only allowed to use Yahoo Messenger at his company. To make life simple, I had used Trillian, which allows you to have a single interface for multiple instant message solutions. The problem was that the free version used to randomly show you as "Away" so it was annoying and I abandoned it. A couple of weeks ago, I decided to give it another shot because someone told me there was a new version available. I installed the new version and found that one of the new features was integration with the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia. When a word or phrase matches an entry, it will be underlined and you can hover over the entry to get the definition. I was IM'ing with a colleague who was asking if I wanted him to share with a group that we work with some of the changes that we had been making to servers that they support. I said, "Sure - go ahead in the spirit of open communication." The words the spirit were underlined which I thought was odd. I hovered over them and the definition I got was that there was an old comic strip called "The Spirit" written back in the early forties. I had never heard of it so of course I Googled it for more info. One of the first hits was a headline stating the author of "The Spirit" had passed away on January 3, 2005. This was on January 14, 2005.

3) I took my team out for a Christmas lunch on Tuesday, January 18, 2005, and called it a "Procrastinator's New Year's Celebration" at which they gave me a gift card to Best Buy. Later that night, I went there to buy a few things that I wouldn't normally spend money on. One thing I wanted to get was Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" CD. (I have a list of albums that I used to have on vinyl that I'm slowly replacing with CD's and this was the next one on the list.) Unfortunately they were out of stock. The following Sunday, I picked up the book that we've been using for our 5th & 6th grade group at church, because I was on the schedule to teach the following Wednesday. The book highlights movie clips that can be used for drawing parallels to stories in the Bible and biblical truths and applications to daily life. I decided to go with the lesson that talked about King Solomon's choice to ask for wisdom to help him rule over Israel. The movie clip that went with it was from "The Wizard of Oz", where Dorothy meets the Scarecrow who thinks he isn't very smart because he doesn't have a brain. I chose this one because a friend had recently sent me a video clip of some William & Mary soccer players hitting themselves on the head with boards in a drunken state with the soundtrack playing "If I Only Had A Brain." Anyway, I asked my wife if I should rent the movie or if it was worth adding to our collection. She agreed we should buy a copy so I headed off to Best Buy to pick it up. While I was there, I decided to check again on the Pink Floyd CD. This time they had it so I bought it with what I had left on my gift card. The next day at work, I told a colleague that I had just picked up a copy of Dark Side of the Moon if he was interested in borrowing it. He said, "Cool. Makes me want to go down to the planetarium for a laser light show. Either that or play it while watching The Wizard of Oz with the sound turned down." ??? I went and asked my boss about this because he is wise in the ways of music and he said, "Oh yeah, there's something like if you start the album during the tornado or something the songs sync up with what's going on in the movie." A quick check of Google again and turns out people have been doing this for years. I had never heard of this before and yet I bought the movie and CD together the night before. The checkout girl at Best Buy was probably thinking I was pretty cool.

So I'll continue to monitor my 'synchronicity' events and post any further developments here. Stay tuned...