Living the Dream: A Coincidence Diary

In the earliest hours of Boxing Day 2009 I was looking up details of St. Crispin and his patronage of shoemakers.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crispin  I was moved to do so because of a lingering interest generated by my £250,000 question on Who Wants to be A Millionaire? some four years earlier. (See Entry 224) I then thought about looking up more details of the astronomer Shoemaker, after whom, I understood, the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 had been named. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Merle_Shoemaker http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/sl9/news81.html I discovered facts about him that surprised me by their significances, not least in the context of the next question I was to face on t h e show; the one which stopped me - ( Which of these astronauts has never set foot on the moon?) - and also relating to the Entry http://james-plasketts-coincidence-diary.blogspot.com/2006/03/part-two-narrative-epilogues-and.html . Eugene Merle Shoemaker (1928 – 1997) was best known as an astrono...

On the early evening of December 16th 2009 I checked the Statcounter statistics for this blog and saw that someone in Beirut had very recently accessed it by putting the origin of christmas for veni vidi vinci into a search engine.  My own Blog was the first hit thrown up by that implausible, Lebanese search. I noted the fourth was - http://www.berkshirepublishing.com/blog/?p=654 and browsed it briefly. I was surprised by how frequent a misquotation this seems to be. (Although I had noticed one other occasion when my blog had been thrown up by a similar search.) In Entry 44 here the misquoting was deliberate. And that TV Channel 4 News report chose to phrase it "Veni, vidi, da Vinci".  Living the Dream: A Coincidence Diary: (44) Veni, vidi ... da Vinci? (james-plasketts-coincidence-diary.blogspot.com) I left a comment about the misquote and pointed the owner of the Berkshire Publishing Blog, Karen Christensen, to my blog.  About five hours later I turned to the Chess...

On the afternoon of October 31st 2009 I found myself making a comparison between the reaction of Raymond Keene to a knight manouevre executed by Aaron Nimzowitsch and inserting the odd, perhaps rare expression learnt in a foreign language into one´s attempts to converse in it. The move N(g3)-h1 was eulogised by Keene in his 1973 biography of Nimzowitsch. He wrote that when he first saw the game in which this retreat was executed (the knight quickly re-emerged via f2 to play a key part in his victory) he was so impressed that he kept trying in his own games to create situations in which he too could play N(g3)-h1. That, to say the least, could not easily be effected. In the thousands of games that I had played I did not think that I had even once played N(g3)-h1 and, apart from the Nimzowitsch game, could not think of any other where I had seen it deployed. I later determined that this was the game http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?/gid=1007481 Knights are hardly ever sent into c...

On the morning of June 5th 1991 I was selling advertising space for Cornhill Publications. I began introducing myself for the first time to sales prospects as ´James Marsh´. Many salespeople used pseudonyms, although in my few months in that job I had never before adopted one. The name was partly inspired by Plaskett´s meaning ´marsh dweller´. That afternoon through the hubbub in the office I heard colleague Tim Preston ask to speak to "... your President, James Marsh." It transpired that out of the hundreds of potential leads he had chosen to call one with which he had no previous dealings and their President was James Marsh. ... ... ... Some months later I had a dream which was ´scripted´ around an episode of the 1970s BBC drama Colditz which I had seen in the early 1970s. http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Colditz_(TV_series ) The series was set in Colditz castle which was being used by the Germans during the Second World War to house hard case P.O.Ws. My dream was framed around an...

V A codicil to Entry (6) http://james-plasketts-coincidence-diary.blogspot.com/2006/03/6-shambolic-wogans-winner-pennies.html happened in September 2009. Derren Brown performed a TV stunt in which he appeared to have predicted the 6 balls drawn in the National Lottery. I contributed to various threads about it at the guardian.co.uk Comment Is Free site. One, by Vicky Frost, invited readers to vote on how he could have pulled it off. I chipped in with a post which became, at 16 Sep 09, 11:01pm, the penultimate - Vote: How did Derren Brown do it? http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/tvandradioblog/poll/2009/sep/10/derren-brown-television?commentid=a90557e8-53e7-42f9-857c-988eb9899cb1 Quite late on September 9th I posted at Vicky Frost´s CiF piece of September 7th re Derren Brown´s staking his career on predicting the lottery. I pointed out that it had been done before and gave a link to Entry 6 at my Blog. The number of hits the Blog got that day was over 1400. It was averaging l...

On April 23rd 2008 I turned the key in the door of my parked, dark blue, Hyundai Accent, stepped inside ... to find a mysterious magnetic religious icon on the dash. I also then noticed it was in a far more spruce condition generally. This was not my car! Although mine was parked just 10-15 metres further along this road in Cartagena city centre, it was a car of identical make and colouring and, somewhat disturbingly, my key opened it.

I gave a fiver to a mendicant couple in Southend at Easter 2007, the first occasion that I gave more than a few coins to beggars. A day or two later my (somewhat scruffily attired) wife and son dined at the El Descargador restaurant in La Union and, to their great surprise, when it came to paying the bill they discovered that it had already been paid for them by an anonymous couple at an adjacent table, who had since departed. On March 21st 2009 I contributed five pounds to a minibus fare in Leicestershire, although, in view of the number of passengers, I needed only to contribute just over a pound. The next day I hopped in a taxi for the return journey to the same railway station with someone whom I did not know and he offered to pay the entire fare of 5.80 Pounds. I insisted on chipping in about half. On March 23rd 2009 I returned to a girl at a Bureau de Change at Luton airport an extra 10 pounds she had mistakenly given me, adding that I did not want to get her into trouble. A cou...

Circa 2:30 a.m. on June 24th 2009 I was seriously thinking about putting something on Facebook about the cute, minor coincidences of my names being Harold James and Harry Potter´s names being Harry James with us sharing the same surname initial, too. Also, due to a fall down the stairs on May 18th 2009 I had acquired a similar zigzag mark on the right forehead, the same place as his! I had already posted a small reference to those on Twitter on June 15th 2009 - Last dressing off... got a true Harry James Potter scar now.. and in the same place. Just as well my name´s Harold James Plaskett...!?¿ 10:06 AM Jun 15th A few minutes later my wife, who had recently returned home from a concert, shouted out that she had just noticed that amongst those who had begun to follow her on Twitter during her three hour evening out was none other than the actor who plays the boy wizard: Daniel Radcliffe! (... or someone masquerading as him!?) And this without her having herself followed him first......

In the summer of 2008 I suffered a severe, public low blood sugar fit or hypoglaecemia attack. Following some days of observation in hospital I was released and advised to have my head checked out (they had already ascertained that there was no alcohol nor trace of drugs in my blood system) to see if epilepsy or some other disorder might be involved, and so in December 2008 I went to the same nearby hospital for my first ever electoencephelogram. It was conducted by a woman. The results showed nothing unusual. But when I saw a doctor afterwards about them at the Neurological department of the Naval Hospital in Cartagena, she advocated a CAT Scan, just to make absolutely sure all was okay. This I had at the Hospital Virgen de la Caridad in the last week of January 2009. The results I was told would be sent to my GP... or at least that was what I, with my imperfect Spanish, understood the hospital personnel who conducted the scan to be saying. I noted that all of them were women. But the...

On the morning of February 27th 2009 I at last got around to making amendments to my essay Playing The Game   (The link to that essay is now defunct.) The alteration I made was to include the text of an e mail that I had sent to Bob Woffinden and the Ingrams on May 10th 2008, and which I later forwarded to Jon Ronson, as a codicil to the essay´s first point. On each occasion I had headed the e mail Another Such Cough . It read - As a further illustration of what I am getting at, at a car boot fair this morning a stall holder brought up with me the subject of Ingram´s win and mentioned the signals "... whenever the guy coughed ". At the adjacent stall was a lady, a smoker, who had earlier that morning, with myself, helped herself to one of the first guy´s chips. At the word " coughed " she coughed. She never coughed again the whole morning. I pointed this out to them. A few minutes after I did so my wife drew my attention to something which she had just spotted in Th...

In the early hours of February 22nd 2009 I made a contribution to a Blog of Professor Colin Blakemore´s at Comment Is Free entitled Science is just one gene away from defeating religion http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/22/genetics-religion Professor Blakemore argued hard for a materialist view of everything and suggested that we may soon nail the genes that force so many to take religious ideas seriously. ... at Cambridge... I walked to lectures past the Cavendish Lab... One day, scrawled on the wall, was... "CRICK FOR GOD". No surprise that pivotal advances in science provoke religious metaphors. Crick and Watson's discovery transformed our view of life itself - from a manifestation of spiritual magic to a chemical process. One more territorial gain in the metaphysical chess match between science and religion . Charles Darwin's theory of evolution was certainly a vital move in that chess game - if not checkmate . In an interview for God and the Sc...

My Statcounter showed that at 7.20 a.m. on Feb 15th 2009 someone in Tokyo had put Chess Dream-A into a search engine. The 2nd and 3rd hits were of my Blog. But the 8th was - Thought Experiments : The Blog: Living the Dream - [ 翻译此页 ]It's as if she has awoken from a dream, a rather pleasant dream, ... (Why couldn 't it have been chess , where I might have turned my obsession to account, ... www.bryanappleyard.com/blog/2008/07/living-dream.php - 27k - (The Link is now defunct.) I was intrigued and followed the link to discover Bryan Appleyard's Blog. I had no previous idea that he was a Blogger. Five hours later on February 15th 2009 I jokingly sent him this e mail in which I pretended annoyance - Sir! I note a Blog entry of yours of July 18th 2008 headed Living The Dream. You have stolen the title of my Blog! I shall write to The Times... Disgusted,Cartagena The next day I actually looked at The Times on line and saw an article headed  The guide to the 100 best blogs: P...

At 9.20 a.m. on February 9th 2009 (the 25th anniversary of my commencing a diary) I was reading an interview with Jeremy Paxman in the online edition of The Guardian . http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/feb/09/bbc-television At the same time I was musing on how gnosis was the only really important thing. I was thinking of saying to an interviewer - maybe even him - that above all political comment, all art, all efforts to find justice, all criticism of neo-Darwinism and of the philosophical arguments for God´s existence this was really the only thing that mattered: direct experience of the Divine. Spiritual consciousness. Gnosis. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnosis When I had my first experience of higher consciousness, in June 1986, I found, as I reviewed it immediately afterwards, the Elkie Brooks song No More the Fool was playing in my head. The gnosis I sought I now had. I knew... and for the rest of my life would be a knower. I thought of an image that had ...

On the evening of February 8th 2009 I was reading from and contributing to a blog at the Guardian´s Comment Is Free section. It was by Sean Clarke - http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/06/atheist-bus-religion ?   Take a punt on Pascal's bus ' Join my campaign for a middle way in the atheist/theist bus debate. You have nothing much to lose, and plenty to gain  Saturday 7 February 2009 10.00 GMT You wait ages for a bus-based theological advertising campaign, and then two come along at once. But I think it's time for a third. If Blaise Pascal were in charge, the ad would read something like: There might be a God after all. Maybe you should factor that in. The original atheist bus campaign irritated detractors in its own camp due to the word probably:  "There's probably no God, so stop worrying and enjoy your life."  It was, said the hardliners with open contempt, an agnostic bus campaign. Then came the Christian counterstrik...