(297) Lightning strikes connect husband and wife. Piano mastery to begin the next day. Who Wants to be a Millionaire?



  • On October 19th 2023 at 19:38 I was proof-reading and, to some extent, expanding my book Bread and the Circus. Bread and the Circus eBook : Plaskett, James: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store  
    • It is about my own involvements with the TV show Who Wants to be a Millionaire? 
    I also had this playing in the background on Youtube - Surgeon Struck by Lightning : Discovers the God Energy (Near-Death Experience) - YouTube


    • Although I had a Yamaha keyboard, I rarely used it. But I had been experiencing the most compelling desire to make music, and found myself thinking very seriously about mastering piano to a high level. And, even perhaps the very next day, buying and installing a proper piano. Pedals and all!
    • My wife had, thirty years before, taught me how to trace out a few Beatles tunes. But only with the right hand.
    • Well, I had the thing on Youtube playing because it was about a near death experience. I had no idea at all that such an experience would lead to Tony Cicoria - Wikipedia developing any interest in the piano.
    • But, listen to Tony say at 18:50 how, after he was struck by lightning, he was ineluctably drawn to learn and play piano, but did not even possess one. And then the next day his baby sitter asked if she could store a classical piano at his house for a year.
    • As I was going through the proofs I reached the point in the first chapter where I quote from the email Av Rosen sent me about the TV News commenting that one was more likely to be struck by lightning than to have two people from the same family appear on Who Wants to be a Millionaire? -

    ´The American news mentioned that one is more likely to be struck by lightning than have two people from the same family make it to the finalist stage of the show. But, as Av commented to me, there had been more than one instance of the same person making it on to the show twice, and that could hardly be more improbable.´

    I am not entirely certain how far into the Youtube clip I was when the coincidence struck me. Certainly not before the surgeon got hit by lightning. But then I saw the parallels with his story. 
    It was his own mother he had been phoning. 
    His wife ran out to cope with him after the lightning struck.
    From the Hot Seat I had rung my wife as Phone a Friend. 

    And Av Rosen too related a happier ending, as a few months later he e mailed to say he and his daughter, had, whilst competing in an online Quiz, won $500,000!
    ...   ...   ...                                              Fast forward to February 13th 2024 when my piece arguing for a miscarriage of justice in the 2003 trial of Major Charles Ingram, Reasonable Doubt, was published in The Article
     Four days later, Raymond Keene had this piece appear there too     Shakespeare, Borges and ‘Plaskett’s  Immortal’ 

    "While seeking a game of epic Shakespearean dimension, to mirror the  seeming  quarkiness of Quantum Theory,I came across this death-defying feat by Grandmaster James Plaskett — “Plaskett’s Immortal”, no less. 

    "... Plaskett´s immortal, no less."
    Hmmm!?
    Could the surgeon´s story point to each and every one of us being "immortal"          


  • and "... no less!?"


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