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.