(11) Splash and TV names

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On September 26th 1985, I appeared as a co-presenter of a report on the world chess championship on BBC TV. Over lunch there I mentioned to William Hartston and Jeremy James that "plask et" means "the splash" in Swedish (and "plask" means "splash" in Danish and also in Norwegian).

Following on from that I mentioned the film Splash, which is about a mermaid, although I had never seen it.
On the way home I stopped off to call on some friends. They were watching a video of Splash. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splash_(film)

As an addendum to this example, I might add that I originally added it to a listing on May 26th 1987.
The previous evening I had watched an American TV celebration of a century of Hollywood. Whoopi Goldberg introduced a collage of clips of comedy films.

A brief clip from Splash was shown. In it a young man and the clothed mermaid were in a store with many TV sets on shelves. The man asks her to tell him her name.
She responds by saying that it is difficult to say in his language. He asks her then to say it in her own language. She responds by making a series of very high-pitched squeaks, which hurt his ears and cause many of the TV screens to shatter.
The next time that I saw that same clip was when watching a documentary on Tom Hanks on a flight from London to Bermuda on January 24th 1998.
I was going to Bermuda to stay at the very hotel where an eponymous chess event was to be held: The Mermaid Beach.

I also stayed there for a month the next year, along with National Geographic personnel, when searching for another amazing (and quite possibly mythical) sea creature. That search would be conducted aboard the vessel upon which Peter Benchley wrote parts of Jaws.

The name of the character played by Hanks in Splash (who himself chooses to transform into a merman at the end) is Allen Bauer.
Bauer means ´pawn´ in German.

Hartston plays a singular part in this blog, see, e.g. Part Two: The Narrative, Epilogues and Appendices http://james-plasketts-coincidence-diary.blogspot.com/2006/03/part-two-narrative-epilogues-and.html

Jeremy James and I did not come into propinquity, after we presented our last TV programme together, in 1986, until 21 years later when we each contributed comments, in rapid succession, to a piece at the Guardian Comment Is Free Blogs. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/apr/11/godandthelimitsofscience1
The thread was this -

The God question 

Inayat Bunglawala It is perfectly possible to reconcile belief in God with the findings that science has brought us. It addressed Richard Dawkins´ The God Delusion and two oppositional books in response.And, before noting this story in The Daily Mail of 2008, note the name Ms Hannah adopts in Splash, prompted by walking past a sign, is ´Madison´.http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1024352/The-amazing-water-girl-swim-mile-just-years-old.htmlAnd see that part of the film once more in a coincidental context on May 2nd 2012 in Entry (267 Living the Dream: A Coincidence Diary: (267) Short coincidences. With pawns which can move backwards and ...Q(b5) to f1, checkmate (james-plasketts-coincidence-diary.blogspot.com)) .