Category Archives: Coincidence

The officer who refused to launch the missiles was LEO!

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"Turn your KEY, sir!"

“Turn your KEY, sir!”

Yes, this is about as insubstantial as a blog post gets, but I enjoy life’s little coincidences.

Friday, I was at one of the Relic Room’s monthly Lunch and Learn sessions, which I help publicize (and y’all should come check them out, because they’re all interesting). The speaker this time was Sumter attorney Frank Shuler, talking about his experiences as an Air Force officer serving in a nuclear missile silo during the Cold War. (Here’s a release about that.)

At some point, someone asked him about the sidearms he and the other guy down in the capsule buried 60 feet under North Dakota were required to wear while on duty — originally .38 revolvers, later changing to 9 mm semiautomatics. He said that they weren’t really for the purpose depicted in the movie “WarGames.” He was referring to this, the opening scene.

Well, this morning I was looking for something new to watch on the Roku during my workout on the elliptical, and I noticed something new on Amazon Prime: “WarGames!”

Actual missile silo blast door.

Actual missile silo blast door.

So I started watching, initially to see how accurate the depiction was, after what I had learned from interviewing Shuler and writing that release. And a lot of it was pretty much on the money — but one thing was wrong for sure: They showed the guys closing the massive, vault-style blast doors by pressing a button. In reality, someone had to pump the hydraulics on those doors, by hand, and it was a strenuous, tedious process — both opening and closing.

But then I noticed something that delighted me: The officer who refused to turn his key to launch the missiles was my hero, Leo McGarry!

Well, not really Leo, but the actor who played him, John Spencer. I’d had no idea, because when that movie came out, “The West Wing” was far from even being a twinkle in Aaron Sorkin’s eye.

It’s sort of bittersweet to see him unexpectedly. John Spencer was only 58 year old when we lost him and Leo simultaneously. But it was a treat. Especially since, as I think about it, what else did I ever see him in, but this and “West Wing?”

Of course, you know that Leo himself served in the Air Force, but not down in a bunker. He flew the F-105 Thunderchief with the 355th Tactical Fighter Wing out of Thailand during the Vietnam War. Which is the personal experience from which he was able to ‘splain military service and national security to President Bartlet…

I keep having these campaign flashbacks

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now

Yesterday, I was in Rock Hill on a video shoot for a client of ADCO.

When we had some time to break for lunch, Brian and I asked about where we might go eat where yours truly could find something I’m not allergic to. My best way of describing that sort of venue is “a meat and two veg place” — as opposed to a pizza place or a sandwich place, which have nothing on their menus for me. Basically, I need to go to a place that serves food like Mama used to make.

So we were sent to an old-school, down-home joint in an unremarkable strip shopping center.  It seemed that Fate was against our ever getting there, as Google Maps steered us completely wrong for awhile.

But Fate was just messing with us, just putting off the big reveal.

Earlier in the day, as we were pulling into town, I had thought to myself, “I know I was here during the campaign, but when, and what sort of event was it?” I couldn’t remember.

Now at lunchtime, as we finally turned into the shopping center parking lot and rolled past the Earth Fare that is sort of the anchor tenant, the lights came on and I said, “Oh. I know where we are.”

After we ordered our food (for me, a hamburger steak with fries and some speckled butter beans — with me, the plainer the fare the better), I stepped into the private meeting room toward the back and took the above picture.

Then I sent it to James and Mandy along with the picture below, saying, “Having lunch at The Little Cafe in Rock Hill, and having flashbacks.”

The below picture was taken at 9:22 a.m. on Oct. 31, the second day of the Saga of the “Bus,” the “Leave No One Behind Tour.”

We zipped in and out of these places so fast that they’re hard to recall now — until Fate decides to mess with me, dropping me into a place apparently at random and then saying, “Remember this?”

then

Coincidence of the day: ‘Lovergirl’

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Teena

Yeah, I know it’s probably not really a coincidence, but simply a matter of my brain being alert to something it would otherwise have ignored, but it impressed me when it happened.

Last night, I was catching up on this week’s New York Times crosswords. I zipped through Monday’s and Tuesday’s over dinner, and was doing well on Wednesday’s when I got stuck. So I cheated. I do that sometimes when I know there’s no way I know the answer, and that one word is creating a logjam that’s preventing me from getting several others. I’m not proud of it, but I’d rather do that than not finish the puzzle.

The clue was “_____ Marie, singer of the 1985 hit ‘Lovergirl’.” Five letters. I had no idea. I remember a lot of songs from that year — sort of a big year in the MTV era, as I recall. But not that one. So I Googled “Lovergirl” and found “Teena.” Yeah, I wasn’t going to get that one.Lovergirl

I bragged to my wife about how quickly I’d done the crosswords, but of course confessed that I’d cheated on that one. I said I didn’t recall her. My wife suggested that maybe she was a country singer, which would explain my not remembering. I said maybe so…

This morning, driving in, Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean.” (I suppose when I had last been in the car, I had gotten tired of some topic on NPR and switched to a commercial station.) Anyway, I got to noticing the rhythm of it, and tried to decide whether that was a human drummer or a drum machine. I decided I couldn’t tell.

Later, while I was eating breakfast, a speaker in the ceiling at Cap City was softly churning out pop music, and the room was quiet, and I heard an intro that caused my brain to go “another ’80s tune,” although I didn’t recognize it. But the genre was unmistakable. As I listened again just now, it seemed to me that someone was trying to sound like Prince.

A moment later, my iPad froze up in the middle of trying to read something, as it does sometimes, and I looked up in irritation, and heard, “I just want to be your lovergirl…”

WHAT!?!?!?

I queried SoundHound, and sure enough, it was “Teena.” I still didn’t recognize the song. As I listened, it sounded a bit more familiar, but there must have been a hundred unremarkable songs that sounded like that in the ’80s.

Anyway, it’s probably not weird, but it felt weird…

Yeah, I know this isn’t the most compelling topic, but it’s what I was thinking about just now, and it involved pop music, although not very good pop music, I admit…

I’ll post something more substantial soon….

Synchronicity — don’t tell ME it’s just a coincidence!

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album

OK, this is just way, way too weird…

Let’s take it step by step…

I wrote about some of the planet’s coolest people dying off in the wake of the election.

Norm Ivey responded that “I know that the election and the deaths of these artists are just synchronicity, but dang!”

I thought, “Just” synchronicity? Wait — doesn’t “synchronicity” imply that there is some sort of meaningful relationship? I decided to look it up.

As I went to another tab in Chrome to look up the word, I thought about responding to Norm, “Don’t say ‘Synchronicity!’ That would mean that, according to the Rule of Three, Sting is next!”

Wikipedia told me that no, Norm had used the word just right, saying it was “a concept, first explained by psychoanalyst Carl Jung, which holds that events are ‘meaningful coincidences’ if they occur with no causal relationship yet seem to be meaningfully related.” The key word being “seem.”

I scrolled down and read this wonderful example from Jung:

My example concerns a young woman patient who, in spite of efforts made on both sides, proved to be psychologically inaccessible. The difficulty lay in the fact that she always knew better about everything. Her excellent education had provided her with a weapon ideally suited to this purpose, namely a highly polished Cartesian rationalism with an impeccably “geometrical” idea of reality. After several fruitless attempts to sweeten her rationalism with a somewhat more human understanding, I had to confine myself to the hope that something unexpected and irrational would turn up, something that would burst the intellectual retort into which she had sealed herself. Well, I was sitting opposite her one day, with my back to the window, listening to her flow of rhetoric. She had an impressive dream the night before, in which someone had given her a golden scarab — a costly piece of jewellery. While she was still telling me this dream, I heard something behind me gently tapping on the window. I turned round and saw that it was a fairly large flying insect that was knocking against the window-pane from outside in the obvious effort to get into the dark room. This seemed to me very strange. I opened the window immediately and caught the insect in the air as it flew in. It was a scarabaeid beetle, or common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), whose gold-green colour most nearly resembles that of a golden scarab. I handed the beetle to my patient with the words, “Here is your scarab.” This experience punctured the desired hole in her rationalism and broke the ice of her intellectual resistance. The treatment could now be continued with satisfactory results.

— Carl Jung

Since I was rewatching “Grosse Pointe Blank” on Netflix over the weekend, when I read that, I thought to myself, That’s like “shockabuku.”

So I decided to look up “shockabuku” to see if it was a thing or just made up for the movie, and whether anyone else had connected it to the Jungian concept. Initial results seemed inconclusive. Then I modified to search for “shockabuku synchronicity.”

The fourth result on the search page said, “Dyad – Enclosed – YouTube Gaming.” Whoa! I thought. It happens that I’m working on a newsletter item for an ADCO client about the client’s organization using the “Dyad” organizational model — something I had never heard of before working on this. That seemed, you know, meaningful…

I clicked on “Dyad – Enclosed” and found it was a sort of techno music video. I was listening to Spotify at the time, so I ALT-TABbed over to pause that so I could hear the Dyad thing.

You know how it you leave Spotify running, when you go back to the app, the first thing you see is an ad? Yeah. Well, as I went to click on the “pause” button, I was looking at an ad for this new album by, well, guess who…

sting57th9th1472601281

I’ve been listening to Spotify for years, and I don’t think I had ever previously seen an ad for a Sting album. Nor had I typed anything into my computer about him, thereby causing some algorithm to show me this ad. All I had done was have that very fleeting thought, upon which I had not acted…

All of this, of course, took place in the space of about a minute, or two at the most, if you count the time spent reading that example from Jung.

I’m going to step off this merry-go-round now, very carefully… I need to get back to working on that Dyad thing…