What Are the Odds of My Movie Marathon Coincidence?

[ThomasEdison]

When I was in the tenth grade in 1987 while I was walking up some stairs alone to get to class. The words "Two-Tall Jones" appeared in my mind like giant neon glowing letters. I began to ponder the significance of those words and what an odd name that was.
When school was over and I arrived home and flipped on the TV, Two Tall Jones appeared on "Different Strokes."

 

[Nick89]

I remember some really spooky coincidence when I was younger. I was walking home from somewhere (can't remember) when I met a group of my friends playing soccer on a small field next to some houses. They were playing 'foot-volley' (no idea if that's what it's called in english, but you basically have to keep the ball in the air and kick it over some obstacle ( a low wall in our case) to the other team. They asked me to join and try the kick off (playing it from your hand to the other side).

When they passed me the ball I noticed that I was about to kick the ball right towards a house, and I was afraid I might kick it too hard and smash a window or something. So I told my friends to anticipate that so they could catch the ball if it went astray. Exactly when I said that, with the ball still in my hands, the window I was trying to avoid hitting smashed into a thousand pieces. My friends were looking at me like I was a psychic or something (I thought I was too for a second there!), but apparently a little girl in the house had thrown something into the window by accident. That was freaky!

 

[leroyjenkens]

When they passed me the ball I noticed that I was about to kick the ball right towards a house, and I was afraid I might kick it too hard and smash a window or something. So I told my friends to anticipate that so they could catch the ball if it went astray. Exactly when I said that, with the ball still in my hands, the window I was trying to avoid hitting smashed into a thousand pieces. My friends were looking at me like I was a psychic or something (I thought I was too for a second there!), but apparently a little girl in the house had thrown something into the window by accident. That was freaky!

That reminds me of a time I was playing baseball in my friend's front yard. There was some new kid I'd never seen before pitching. He pitched a few times and there was something about his pitches that I didn't like.
On one of the pitches, I hit a foul ball that hit right next to the huge window on my friend's house. After that, I realized how stupid it is to play baseball right next to some windows. I knew someone would eventually break it. Next pitch I broke it.

 

[xunxine]

There was a test in school when I had to complete the diagram of refraction of light rays through the glass block with given angle of incidence and refractive index. Silly me, didn't bring the protractor that day, so I just drew the lines. When I got the test paper back, I was surprised that I got the marks for the question. I took out my protractor and was amazed that I actually got the angles correct! Lucky me!

 

[Nick89]

There was a test in school when I had to complete the diagram of refraction of light rays through the glass block with given angle of incidence and refractive index. Silly me, didn't bring the protractor that day, so I just drew the lines. When I got the test paper back, I was surprised that I got the marks for the question. I took out my protractor and was amazed that I actually got the angles correct! Lucky me!

I had something similar just recently. An exam asked us to draw the Feynman diagram of gluon-exchange between two quarks. I missed the one and only class where the teacher briefly mentioned Feynman diagrams (we didn't need to know much about them, only really basic), and I don't think I have ever seen the diagram for gluon-exchange before.

Long story short: I guessed something completely arbitrary, and it was correct except that I forgot to name the gluon. I still got full marks though.
Also, a completely unrelated story. I was watching my friend play a first-person-shooter game on my PC. He doesn't usually play those games, so he wasn't very good at it, but he was doing the best he could.
He was using a sniper rifle and just scanning through some windows at a very large distance, when he suddenly looked at me (sitting next to him), completely unable to see the screen, and said "watch this". He clicked the mouse button, and while he did that I watched an unsuspecting enemy walk by the window my friend happened to be aiming at. He got a headshot, without even looking at the screen, nor knowing that the enemy was even there.
He didn't even know he had hit something, and he had to check his score before believing that he had actually killed someone...

 

[leroyjenkens]

Also, a completely unrelated story. I was watching my friend play a first-person-shooter game on my PC. He doesn't usually play those games, so he wasn't very good at it, but he was doing the best he could.
He was using a sniper rifle and just scanning through some windows at a very large distance, when he suddenly looked at me (sitting next to him), completely unable to see the screen, and said "watch this". He clicked the mouse button, and while he did that I watched an unsuspecting enemy walk by the window my friend happened to be aiming at. He got a headshot, without even looking at the screen, nor knowing that the enemy was even there.
He didn't even know he had hit something, and he had to check his score before believing that he had actually killed someone...

Why did he say "watch this"?

Long story short: I guessed something completely arbitrary, and it was correct except that I forgot to name the gluon. I still got full marks though.

You labeled it and everything? Or you just drew the shape?

There was a test in school when I had to complete the diagram of refraction of light rays through the glass block with given angle of incidence and refractive index. Silly me, didn't bring the protractor that day, so I just drew the lines. When I got the test paper back, I was surprised that I got the marks for the question. I took out my protractor and was amazed that I actually got the angles correct! Lucky me!

That's like my dad telling me that my tire needs air and guessing exactly how much pressure was in it.

 

[Nick89]

Why did he say "watch this"?

Not sure how to translate this into text, lol. You know when you are about to do something that you never think will succeed, but you do it anyway? Like throwing a basketball backwards blindly and hoping it goes in? Then people often say something like "watch this" before they do it, just in case they actually succeed, to prevent people from missing the greatest achievement of their life. This was in the same league. Needless to say, he was amazed too.

You labeled it and everything? Or you just drew the shape?

I knew gluons are exchanged by two quarks which changes their color, but that's it. So I drew two parallel lines, labeled R and B (at the left) and B and R (at the right). I did not know whether labeling the quarks by their colors was correct. I did not know the symbol for a gluon (only for a photon), and I just drew the first thing that came to mind (like a stretched spring). I did not label the gluon (that would have to be |R anti-B> or something), but apparently he didn't deduct any points for that.

 

[hotvette]

Bumping into a high school classmate on a San Francisco street 20 years after HS and 2,000 miles from my home town.

 

[JaWiB]

During my freshman year of college, I was working on Mastering Physics (online physics homework, I'm sure some of you know of it) with another student in his dorm room. His roommate was there as well, but he wasn't taking physics and wasn't paying attention to what we were doing at all. When a tough question came up, we asked the roommate, "Hey, what's the answer to this question?" and without looking at it he blurted out a number, which turned out to be within the margin of error accepted by Mastering Physics. It was crazy considering the answer could have been pretty much anything

 

[renz]

When I was in high-school, I was playing this small forum where members share their drawings. I just came to US for less than I year. On new-year I decided to get together with five or six other students from my country that live in the same State. So we were talking late at night, and then this one guy showed me a photo of his girlfriend. He was talking about her and said her name. I felt like the name sounds familiar. I said that guy's name and his girlfriend together and realized someone in the forum said those two names before. So I called that guy by the name he used in the forum and asked if he knew who that is. He looked surprised and replied "that's me".

There are many other randoms events, but one that surprised me the most is this. I was trying to choose a pen name to use for my drawings. And after a while, I came up with one name randomly and immediately liked it. So I decided to used it. After a while after using that name, I found out that the word I used as my pen name has a meaning in another language that is the same meaning as my real name. And no, I wasn't trying to look up meanings of the word in different languages. I found out while reading a book, and it mentioned that word and it's meaning.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Not the "most amazing" by any means. The odds are 1:365, or 366 on leap year. But it got my attention.

About a week ago, on May 5th, I was looking for something and opened a small box that I hadn't open in years. Inside the box, on the very top, was a note from a man who had been my dearest friend for almost thirty years. He passed away a few years ago. I don't know why it was even in the box. It was a note indicating where he'd be staying when he came up to visit, about fifteen years ago. As I read it, I remembered that it was May 5th - his birthday.

 

[Mk]

Yesterday I was listening to Michael Savage on the radio (he was REALLY making a fool of himself that day).

He was speaking the phrase "lone ranger." I peered through the windshield as a car passed me in the left lane. The license plate read: LONE RANGER

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Yesterday I was listening to Michael Savage on the radio

Why?

 

[EnumaElish]

As my mind was "deciding" on posting this, my fingers were starting to type on the keyboard. Not only that, they spelled out pretty much the identical phrase that I was thinking about posting! "Man," what are the odds? (This has been happening to me at a spooking frequency, almost as far back as I can remember.)

 

[JeffJo]

When I saw this thread, I had to reply with my mind-boggling coincidence. It takes some setup because it is multi-leveled. It involves two friends, both named Mark C.

Although we met elsewhere as adults, Mark #1 grew up in a small town (near where I did) in Indiana, called Gas City. According to Wikipedia, it has a population of about 6,000 and "was first known as Harrisburg and ... became something of a boom town when natural gas was found in the area in 1887. The Gas City Land Company was founded on March 21, 1892 and the town of about 150 people changed its name to Gas City a few days later."

Mark #1 introduced me to model railroading in the NTRAK system. You build one or more 2'x4' modules, and can connect them via defined standards with other modules anywhere in the world, especially Europe. We also participated in another (unnamed for privacy) activity, where he was instrumental in leading me to become involved in a mailing list of experts from around the world. That's where I met Mark #2, who was a student at a college in England. Which is about all I knew about him.

One day I had two search tasks to perform on the internet. The first to find some information about the unnamed activity for Mark #1. While searching, I ran across Mark #2's home address. It was in a place called Huddersfield, which meant nothing to me. The second task was to look up information on the NTRAK system (so it was also related to Mark #1, in a way) to present to my son's Boy Scout troop. That went quicker than I expected, so I had some time left. I clicked on the "layouts" tab, and the very first one was from England. It was a mock up of the train yard, at Huddersfield.

I picked my jaw up of the floor. I now had to find out what a "Huddersfield" was, so I looked it up as well. It's a large town (about 150,000) near the center of England. But it is apparently overshadowed in fame by three much larger cities nearby: Manchester, Sheffield, and Leeds. I would likely have forgotten all this except for what happened when I described all that to Mark #2. He also explained that Huddersfield deserved more fame than it has, but unfortunately was not considered a "city" because historically, it never had a city wall. He knew such conventions didn't apply in the states, because on a trip he had once driven by a collection of 14 houses on the side of the road that had the audacity to call itself Gas City, Indiana.

Thus completing the circle. Mark #1 unknowingly led me to Mark #2's home town, and Mark #2 unknowingly led me to back to Mark #1's.

 

[CDTOE]

An old, but interesting topic. I had a lot of such experiences in my life that I'm still not sure if they can be attributed to coincidence.

The latest experience was a year ago. On an empty weekend, I decided to watch three movies, which are Wolf Creek, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Joy Ride. In the next weekend, I turned on the TV on a free movie channel, one of the few and the most famous one in my area, and surprisingly I found them showing Joy Ride with an announcement that they will show Wolf Creek and Texas Chainsaw Massacre next. I asked myself, how could that be a coincidence?