Living the Dream: A Coincidence Diary

On July 14th 2004, James Sorrie chipped in at the same thread at www.quizzing.co.uk as features in Entry 210 with this question: What are the odds of the two finalists, Pat and Astrid, in last night's show choosing the same combination ( 5681 ) as they did? He was referring to the qualification procedure on The Vault http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vault_(game_show)  where nine players each choose a four figure number, and those closest to the (unknown) one chosen by the host computer, qualified. His question sparked off a mathematical debate, but they eventually settled on the figure of 1 / 278.199363120753 Next day " dicko " added this - ... ... ... In response to the question about the telephone contestant, there were 4 questions that an ant could have answered, then the fifth was "what is the largest tiger ?". It took my search engine 5 seconds to come up with Siberian. Plenty of people would have known this, I suspect, so whether they wanted the prize to...

In early August 2004 a nurse from Scotland won the highest ever prize offered on ITV´s The Vault quiz show: £1,000,000. To do that she had to successfully answer six questions down a telephone line - the answers to two of those having already been given earlier in the show. At the quizzing.co.uk site certain voices were raised suggesting that some of the big TV quiz shows were deliberately excluding some applicants. I did not believe that for an instant, and noted, for those who were determined to see conspiracy everywhere, that the first winner of the million on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire ?, Judith Keppel, was married to a man who had written comedy scripts for Jasper Carrot, and Carrot is a director of the company that made WWTBAM? On June 16th 2004, I had chipped in at a thread at the quizzing.co.uk site - Posted by PLASKETT More re innocence and coincidence There seems to be some disagreement about this. ... ... ...The Peerage seems to think them still man and wife - ... ... ....

On May 30th 2004 I started to watch our video copy of The Exorcist . It reminded me of how Murray Sharp had told me that in the early 1990s he was renting a London shop to an actress called Linda Blair. I had reasoned that it had to be the girl who played the central character in The Exorcist . That triggered the memory of his having told me that he was also renting another shop to the British actress, Amanda Barrie. I switched the video off and rewound it at the scene where the words " Help Me " appear on the skin of the character Regan, played by Linda Blair. For she is possessed by a demon. Later that help does appear when Father Damien Karras, who, after showing some scepticism that this is a genuine case of possession, has been summoned to her bed to witness this manifestation on her skin. He assists with the exorcism to rid her of the demon. As a consequence of my halting the video, ITV came up on the TV screen. It was a programme called Hell’s Kitchen - a reality TV t...