Snapshots: A Coincidence Diary

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 Professor Colin Blakemore´s piece at The Guardian ´ s    Comment Is Free  section entitled Science is just one gene away from defeating religion http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/22/genetics-religion Professor Blakemore  Colin Blakemore - Wikipedia  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 ...

(Permit me to explain this coincidence by noting that I put up this Blog in March 2006 and gave it the original title of ´ Living the Dream ´. I only altered that to ´ Snapshots ´ in October 2025.) 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryan_Appleyard  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 your...

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  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tkmje83iCA0 The gnosis I sought I ...

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...

Late on January 27th 2009 I was exchanging e mails with Candice Temple (See Entry (88) The evidence for the NDE (james-plasketts-coincidence-diary.blogspot.com)  In one she sent me a link to a video of a performer on a recent British TV programme about Dancing On Ice . I replied that I was unenthusiastic about trying to dance on ice but that in 2008 I had for my first time skated, at a nearby rink, and added that I might well do so again this very week "... with a girlfriend". I then referred her to Entry 119 here where she could see a photo of myself with my erstwhile ice skating girlfriend: Rita Koen. I then decided to check out that entry again for myself, and so, for the first time in some days, logged in to this blog. As I did so I saw that a note said that one new comment had been left and that I had the option of deleting it or making it publicly visible. It was at Entry 119, from someone styling themselves DiDi and only the first ten words or so were visible to me at...

On May 1st 2004 Jonathan Rowson  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Rowson who had purchased from me a copy of Coincidences shortly after its publication in 2000, asked me when Coincidences Two would be coming out. Later that same evening, Daniel Gormally  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Gormally whom I knew to have leafed through somebody else´s copy but who had not himself bought one, asked me the same question, although he subsequently claimed not to have known that Rowson had asked it previously. ...   ...   ... On August 4th 2008 I spoke by phone with my brother Neil and happened to mention the coincidence with Paula Yates buying the house next door to us in Hastings as detailed in Entry 166.  Living the Dream: A Coincidence Diary: (166) Paula Yates and family and friends. And from the Third to the Fourth (james-plasketts-coincidence-diary.blogspot.com) "Put it in your book," said Neil, to whom I had given a copy of Coincidences fi...

Explanation Some of these examples already featured in my book, Coincidences  (2000, Tamworth Press, ISBN  0 9509441 6 5)  Although even some of those have been substantially amended before I here blogged them. And I have omitted from this Blog four coincidences from that book. My book was reviewed by  Amazon  purchasers here - http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0950944165/202-5062432-1652660 and less favourably here - http://www.eadon.com/coincidences/coincidencesaz79plasketreview.php But I have also here blogged over two hundred new coincidences. ...   ...   ... Blind The Spring blew trumpets of color; Her Green sang in my brain -- I heard a blind man groping "Tap -- tap" with his cane; I pitied him in his blindness; But can I boast, "I see"? Perhaps there walks a spirit Close by, who pities me, -- A spirit who hears me tapping The five-sensed cane of mind Amid such unguessed glories -- That I am worse than blind. Harry Kemp  188...

On September 9 2007 I was chatting with Andy Kitchlew https://www.facebook.com/groups/1471764889800279/user/712262330/ on the Internet Chess Club http://www.chessclub.com/  whilst I used the handle Parsifal and he his real name. I mentioned something very peculiar which had happened to me on the ICC at least five years earlier. There were over 20,000 registered handles at the club. One evening, in a distracted manner, I began typing in random small letter sequences just to see if any happened to be real registered handles of any ICC members. To find out any information which members might have chosen to reveal about themselves you typed in "Finger so-and-so", e.g. http://www.chessclub.com/finger/Parsifal Almost all drew blanks. But then to my astonishment I found that typing in the computer command " Finger dmmg "  not only hit upon a real handle but the accompanying note said that it was that of Andy Kitchlew! ...   ...   ... On September 9th 2007 I at l...

V At 10:46 a.m. on September 25th 2007 I contributed, as Parsifal , to a thread entitled CHANGE + ADAPT OR BECOME EXTINCT at the General Chat section of the torrevieja.co.uk forum. imyaman Posted: Sep 25, 2007 7:34 am Recently, I saw a discussion prog on TV, relating so called global warming to consumption. Thats the fart of a cow contained more CO2 than your cars emission for one day not to mention all nuclear explosions & wat effect they've had etc. That these new criteria were being put down to consumption by an ever increasing population world wide demanding more from a finite resourse, there was something that came to mind viz our animal kingdom. That is survival. Races, species, plants etc all become extinct if they dont adapt & have new species or survival of those that can adapt to new environmental conditions. If this were the case, why get involved in other countries problems who have failed to adapt? Should we be sending missionaries etc or leavce to their...