Most of us have experienced odd coincidences that make us wonder.
My most recent experience with how small the world is involved the column I did about a Glen Park man who found an old football in a heating duct in his home.
He had called to speak to someone in our sports department, but none of the writers or editors, who usually work late shifts, were at their desks.
So he followed the phone system prompt to press 0 to speak to someone in the newsroom immediately. I just happened to pick up the phone.
That column ran on a Sunday. On Monday, one of my writing students at Indiana University Northwest told me that the finder of the football was her stepfather, and the duct in which it was found heated the room in which she slept until she moved out of the house shortly before he called the paper.
But this coincidence is cosmically small change in comparison to something that happened recently in Buffalo, N.Y.
When Craig first met Rebecca he turned up in a top-hat and tails. She arrived for their first date by horse and carriage, dressed in ivory and with her father on her arm. Among the first words the couple exchanged were "I do".
Craig Cooper, 30, and Rebecca Duffy, 28,were the winners of a radio station competition in Birmingham in which the prize was marrying a total stranger. Far from being a crass publicity stunt, organisers said, this was a noble attempt to boost the failing institution of marriage.
When Barney Broom began renovating his cottage he did not expect to be confronted by a pair of black eyes staring from a cloudy jar.
But the mysterious discovery of an alien in his attic has spooked the 54-year-old screenwriter and bewildered extraterrestrial experts, who yesterday suggested the US military could be involved.
The delicate 30cm (12 inch) figure of a baby alien is stored in a pungent liquid and has a US serial number painted on its four-toed foot. Possibly sculpted from a clay-like substance and painted grey, the model closely resembles the aliens depicted in a hoax film of an autopsy of the infamous "Roswell incident".
Cross-breed dogs appear to have become designer accessories for some stars, sparking a trend in the UK and US.
Popular dogs include the puggle - half pug, half beagle - and cockerpoo - a combined cocker spaniel and poodle. Some puggles are sold for up to £3,000.
The trend is said to have been fuelled by celebrities such as Ozzy Osbourne, Uma Thurman and Sylvester Stallone.
Interfax
InterfaxFri, 03 Feb 2006 12:00 UTC
Moscow - One of the Saudi Arabia sheikhs rose from the dead after visiting Panagia Saidnaya, an old convent near Damascus, the Trud daily writes on Friday.
After being killed and quartered, this man was sewed up anew with the use of some technology unknown to humanity, the newspaper says referring to medics who analyzed this unique occurrence.
The US military medics, who also took part in the experiment, came to the conclusion that it was a result of the UFO interference and classified this information as secret.
President George Bush insisted last night that, despite its difficulties in Iraq, America would not retreat from whirled peas, arguing that US leadership "is the only way to secure whirled peas." Isolationism and protectionism, he warned in his annual State of the Union address, led ultimately "to an ability so that, uh, you know, you can't put food on your family."
According to excerpts of the speech released in advance by the White House, Mr Bush asked for more money to spend on basic science research, and on education in maths and science, to help understand whirled peas farming, to more accurately count the peas, and to ensure that "rich folks get their fair share, a bigger share of the, uh, the peas, and the best peas too, because it was our idea."
One of our readers, CryptoInformant, sent in a link to a website with photos that may, or may not, be an unexplained marine animal. The title of the page is "Sea Serpent? Plesiosaur?"
One day in June, about 1990, my friend Joanne Rauch and I hiked along the central Oregon coast at Cape Meares. We soon spotted a large object on the beach.
I took the pictures, but I cant remember which camera I used at the time. I believe it was a Minolta 35mm point and shoot.
I paced the length of the "sea serpent" - 13 paces, approximately 33 feet since my pace at the time was a bit over 2.5 feet.
If the bent leg points to the head, the head was missing as far as I could tell, chewed or screwed off by a propeller, or perhaps rotted away.
Unfortunately, some liquid spilled on some of the pictures and efforts to clean them resulted in minimal damage. When that happened, I stopped my efforts to clean the photos. Somewhere in the house I have the negatives and when I get them, Ill developed them and make better scans.
I called the Hatfield Marine Science center (Newport, OR) and described what wed seen. Their best suggestion was that this is a gray whale, despite the tapering neck and tail. One woman suggested the bent flipper might be a grotesque penis. She didnt see the pictures.
Ive hiked the wilderness strip of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington, a couple of hundred miles north of Cape Mears, and seen 4 dead gray whales over the years. None looked remotely like this-the grays dont taper nearly so much at the tail and dont taper at all at the head. The heads are massive.
What the heck is this thing???
Comment: Comment: DO click the link and take a look at the photos!!!
DAVID Icke, the former sports presenter who once proclaimed himself to be the Son of God, has offered up more of his unusual wisdom, this time claiming that the Royal Family are "bloodsucking alien lizards".
Comment: Comment: That's the problem with disinfo, there's always some truth wrapped in lies.
BERLIN -- Is it Mozart? A mysterious portrait discovered in a Berlin vault could be the last image of the musical genius painted while he was alive, but experts are at odds over its authenticity.
At half-past noon on Jan. 9, cable TV contractors sinking a half-mile of cable near Interstate 10 in rural Arizona pulled up something unexpected in the bucket of their backhoe: an unmarked fiber-optic cable. "It started pulling the fiber out of the pipe," says Scott Johansson, project manager for JK Communications and Construction. "Obviously, we said, 'Oop, we've hit something.'"
Comment: Comment: If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times. The worlds telecommunication's networks are a house of cards.
Terrorism is a real threat, the problem is, who are the real terrorists? We know it isn't Arabs, becuase we aren't mindless zombies, so who would exploit telecommunications weaknesses? How could they be used by totalitarian regimes?
Just in the way that all traffic could be cut at a few points and stop, so could filters be installed at just a few points and all the email, phone convos, and websearches be filtered, redirected, tracked etc...
Comment: Comment: DO click the link and take a look at the photos!!!