15 posts tagged “coincidence”

Few of you may recall that I actually started this blog as a way to catalog the stunningly high number of coincidental events going on in my life and in the lives of those around me. As is predictable, I found it too restrictive and as soon as I started paying attention, the number of coincidences started to dry up. Coincidental?

Anyhoo, here's one of late. Vrabel and I live next door to what is the most expensive piece of real estate in the city of Pittsburgh. I won't reveal what it is because then you'd know where we live and frankly I don't want your creepiness skulking around my front door, and most of you already know anyway so there's no point making a big hoohah out of it.

The construction is winding down, but we've begun to suspect that there are at least a few major things amiss in the execution of the approved plans. Vrabel basically got himself on the FBI watch list a couple of weeks ago when he dared to ask for copies of the finalized master plans (public records) at city planning. Not only would they not cough them up, they nearly went so far as to ask him to spread 'em and cough so they could feel him up before they let him walk out of there. Good thing he's a resourceful marine biologist with connections. We've laid our hands on the plans, and we were right. They are gonna be in t-r-o-u-b-l-e soon, and I sincerely hope that we come out of this with not only a couple dozen street trees, some new lighting, and hopefully some traffic calming work, but also a permanent parking space or two and free mocha lattes for life.

(Here's where the co.inc.ee.dinx gets going). So Vrabel gets a random e-mail the other day from a woman claiming to be doing a research project for school regarding how neighbors feel about the construction and the project, how it has impacted and will affect the neighborhood, yada, yada. He got this e-mail b/c he is the contact for our local neighborhood organization, but she doesn't know that he is 1) in the process of mounting a major vendetta against the project; 2) a trained marine biologist with expertise in this sort of thing; 3) well-versed in community planning and neighborhood groups. Nor does she (or so we hope) know that he used to date and live with a woman named Alexis Foster. Why does this last part matter? HER name is Alexis Foster.

Huh? Huh? Yeah, it's a bonafide co.inc.ee.dinx. You read it here.

As has been repeated numerous times in the past, this blog is also a vehicle to share tales of the infamous Viktor, a man who spent his career in the TV biz, coming of age in an era when small screen legends were being made and when legends of the big screen and the stage knew they had to get on the small screen if they were to survive. Not to mention an era where politics and elections changed forever because the majority of Americans actually got to see their candidates largely for the first time. The man has some stories, lemme tell ya.

Since retirement, Viktor has been astounded by (and astounding us with) observations of co-inc-ee-dinx all around. It's not quite as great as the number of times I've found random chicken bones littering the streets and sidewalks of Pittsburgh, not to mention other cities, which I will undoubtedly blog about at length in the future. But the man finds some startling parallels in his daily travels.

Vrabel and I and our pal Jed went to NYC this Christmas. We picked up a copy of the Onion Top 10 Stories of 2006 issue. I lent it to Viktor upon returning. He brought it back, spreading open the tattered pages to p.13 (of course), the Horoscopes. Entry for Taurus (yes, he's a Taurus):

After years of wandering purposefully through your life, a chance encounter this April will at last restore your faith in mere coincidences.

Hmmm. A satirical news outfit prints a relatively dead-on horoscope for a man who made his career in the TV news, but who now finds himself chronicling somewhat bizarre coincidences in life that are then used as satirical commentary.

It's been awhile since I posted on Viktor. For anyone who hasn't been reading my posts for very long, or who may not recall, I actually started this whole thing as a means to catalog the many and the varied co-inc-ee-dinx that Viktor experiences, since he won't start his own blog. Hence the name. So back to Viktor.

Cave-incidence.

 

Didn't have to start my mentoring so had some free, unscripted time. Pshaw!, and on such a lovely, frigid day.  Put on shades and headed for Northside, Simpsonia St., 36A,16D to find the Mattress Factory, down a cavern like alley replete with comic art on houses. $3.50 senior rate, V. only customer. 4th floor ineluctable rolling blue plastic fiber waves; inventive surreal exhibit: space ship cockpit, red florescent womb/cavern, monitors, tape decks, electrical veins, looped videos of 70's and centrifugal captains/electric chair. 3rd floor: Memory. Young woman 60's odyssey from toddler, teens, to psychic trouble concluding with suicide via a maze of small amateur home photos and printed autobiographical excerpted memoirs connected by hand-drawn blue magic marker circuits.  Also on the floor, a LED exhibit of large blue neuro-cells with nuclear 3" monitors playing looped home videos including one showing children playing "Here We Go 'Round the Mulberry Bush," which incidentally, is the the title of the rip-off of Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf play being performed by my character in the Television Man novel. Eh? [Editor's note: Television Man is a novel-in-progress by Viktor, recounting his over 40 years working in the TV biz.]

 

Go down to the in the lower level. Off the elevator is a two brick thick wall with a rough portal cut into it.  Inside is an installation by Nick Cave, not the musician, writer, movie producer, but a performance artist. His quotes on the exhibit, A Quarter Til Ten: "I think the basement forced me to deal with my sense as a black male. I really wondered why I am in a basement-on the bottom, underneath everybody." "These specimens have been set up in a way where it's ritual or a ceremonial experience."  In a fascinating floor display of exemplary bins there are five hands each with an iconic piece of life in the palm. 

 

61A to Squirrel Hill packed with smart students = stupid people who must board first bus despite a train of others immediately behind it. Stop at Manor Theatre to catch the opening of Pan's Labyrinth which I had missed; set in 1939 Franco Spain, plot involves guerilla warfare contrasted to mythical realm of Pan. Princess Moranna descends into underworld caves, finds faun, fairies and a gay ogre whose eyeballs are in the palms of his hands. (see above.) Trek down to the Squirrel Hill Theatre for Iwo Jima, WW II, Mt. Suribachi, Japanese embedded in caves cut into solid rock; finale hand to hand combat.

Trudge back to Forbes to catch 61B to Regent Square Theatre to see, Iraq in Fragments: civil war etc., in three parts, on three young boys, in Sunni, Shia and Kurdish areas, compulsory bombings, burials, but in Kurdistan the central motif revolves around a burning brick-making cave-like kiln. Theater filled with bus load of high school students and a dozen white male college students? plus the requisite "we're still alive" and sympatico old farts, excluding yours truly. Film, although somewhat constructed, casts a very different, ambivalent perspective than I expected on that fiasco re: nationalism, federation, US motives et.al. The way the smoke has to be, almost as dangerous as the IEDs. 

 

Troop back with college guys, they make an oblique right into Ryan's, to Forbes and Braddock, catch a 61A, on time!. 42S early? to Dormont for 11th hour, one mile hike home in 11 degrees temperature. Atria's is closed. Apocalypse Now!

 

Remember metaphor is X compounded to create Y.

I really wasn't trying to top Hotrod with this one, but coincidentally, this came across Treehugger recently.

Features: portable toilet with Internets access, but it's green, too. Based on a composting toilet- thus using no water. And in the ee-gads department, it comes with built in dietary advice (so it can work most efficiently, ahem). Built-in thermostat to automatically warm up the seat for you before you cop a squat.

I wish this were an Onion post, but it's not. Apparently Gates held a press conference to introduce it: "No longer will you need to watch the water climb to dangerous levels just to determine if you have a clog," said Gates. "The eToilet will detect that clog long before it's visible and will have it cleared before you even finish washing your hands."

I have no idea why Courteney Cox has dropped the Arquette moniker, because the twosome is producing their new show on FX together: Dirt. It's cool. Watch it. I am very much liking a serious, cunning, dare I say bitchy Cox. Far better than Scream, in which I felt she was good.

This is the time of year that I always get sucked in. American Idol comes back, 24 comes back, and now Dirt. (Not that I don't already have a repertoire- now it's just growing).

Explain to me why all the good TV is on FOX or FX despite the evil empire behind them? Discomforting coincidence. I admit I am not principled enough to avoid watching their series.

We've consistently increased the size of our Christmas tree every year. High ceilings makes it easy to do. Unfortunately, this year's tree was also DOA. Or just about. I blame it on the warm winter we've had. Nonetheless, it was a gorgeous tree (if I do say so myself).

So despite it being dead, we left it up (without plugging in the lights) until Friday. The plan was to load it into Brown Thunder and take it to Construction Junction to recycle it. Vrabel lugged it out to the front planting bed Friday night, so he could load it up Saturday morning. Come Saturday morning... no tree. Someone apparently really wanted a dead Christmas tree.

It's been an odd few days in Larryville. We woke up Friday morning to the Explosives Detection Unit and three patrol cars parked in front of our house. It seems someone had called in a bomb threat to the hospital construction site across the street from our house. The caller stated he'd left 24 pipe bombs planted on the site. Needless to say, it was an empty threat.

Maybe he decided to make off with our tree instead?

To begin 2007, I would like to humbly recommend to all a book that is remarkably researched and written:

I don't wish in any way to treat this book with levity, but it is simply filled with overlaps and coincidences and haunting reminders of the past and telling lessons for the future. I also want to share that I first started this book early last year, and simply couldn't get into it. Not sure why; it's just dense and detailed in a way that I found cumbersome at the time. I needed some distance. Coincidentally, Vrabel recently began to read another Maraniss book about Roberto Clemente, and then found my copy of Sunlight and sat it down in front of me. I decided to give it a second go, and plowed through the remaining 400 pages in about 8 hours. We'd also just been to see The Good Shepherd, which I highly recommend, so I was in the right frame.

It's a book we all really need to read, I believe. I've read many good books on the American-Vietnam War. This one, however, is one of the best.

Peace.

It's been quite astounding this past year or two to see the virtual avalanche of Republican "lawmakers" go down in flames due to a variety of scandals. Co.inc.ee.dinx or no: candidates and elected officials running on the party platform that assumes such piety and moral authority riddled with depravity of all sorts?

Just before the election, the local Pittsburgh CBS affiliate came up with some truly delicious information (this video is priceless) about U.S. Congressman Tim Murphy (R-18). (Hmm. Nothing on Murphy's site about his investigation. Not that this should be considered a co.inc.ee.dinx). I was hoping the DNC would pour some serious money into challenger Chad Kluko's campaign, because voters deserved to know the slug they were considering re-electing was (allegedly) gathering all sorts of detailed information on people living in his district, and then having his staff (Congressional, not campaign) do all sorts of campaign-related tasks using said information. I mean you know it's gotten pretty bad when someone working in your office goes ON THE RECORD on television and in the newspaper to point out the shit you are pulling leading up to an election. (Of course she was fired after the election; no co.inc.ee.dinx there. Could a civil suit be forthcoming? I wonder.) Unfortunately, Murphy won back his seat.

Let's keep fingers crossed that the federal investigation he's now under yields some results. A former (Republican!) state representative from nearby was put away last year for less than what Murphy (allegedly) pulled. It would be such a nice Christmas gift for Western PA.

Now here's an odd twist: Viktor lives in the 18th Congressional District; this is the same Viktor who may or may not have been leaving all sorts of disparaging, anti-Murphy literature behind on his many bus rides and in his many library books leading up to the election. Wonder how KDKA, where Viktor worked for 43 years, managed to get hold of those revealing and incriminating documents that led to the whole story blowing up in the first place? Dunno.

So obviously I haven't had much to say in recent weeks. Or maybe I've just been saying it all in some other medium. Or maybe my tricycle has a flat tire. Anyway, it's been some time since we've heard from Viktor, and that's been all my fault. He's been sending, I just haven't been posting. Co-inc-ee-dinxes have been happening all over the damn place, and I haven't been recording them.

This could be creating some rift in the fabric of the universe. I hope not. I have had a really bad krink in my shoulder lately, though, but I am hoping this doesn't mean the weight of the world is actually on my shoulders. Shudder.

Here we are.

Just couldn't resist this: Collecting coincidence.   At library to get copy of To Kill A Mockingbird for audition for the part of The Judge (for audition for Diary of Anne Frank). Diary character Dutchman Kraler, who I was originally considering, was described as rotund and ball. Editor's note: Viktor is neither rotund and he has a world-class head of hair. Pick up copy of Friedman's World Is Flat. Put on earphones for PRI radio and Feldman is talking to... Thomas Friedman, who has just returned from Shanghai. Friedman has just come inside from raking leaves. Feldman has  some of the same concerns you have about the book and the premise, outsourcing especially. Freidman in rebuttal talks about "insourcing," whereby UPS picks up appliances, TV's, and computers made overseas but employees in brown shirts and shorts repair them here; they also fill Nike orders; apparently Fed Ex and DHL have similar contracts. When questioned about China overtaking the U.S. as economic powerhouse, Friedman makes the point that China does very little  R&D and innovation and that the environment is its Achilles' heel; that pollution will choke their economy. He says he is going back out to rake leaves at the end of the interview.   Walking along Washington Rd. I come up to Pendale Towers. There is a gentleman boxing leaves; he is the maintenance 'man'. I remember him because he helped me move some of Bonnie's mother's things; he was wearing a 'brown' jacket. His name? No, not Tom, but Fred...Fred Man. Yikes!   I'll give you $5 if you know the name of the alley leading from Lincoln (school) to Overlook.   Walking down Overlook across from Perlick's a piece of cardboard is floating across the corner lot: a UPS  side panel.   Volta Way.   Do vindenia...

Oh wait, it was.

Can't help but note the latest Michael Richards gaffe. Seems he is claiming to be Jewish, so his previous rants on Jewish people in his act were nothing more than role-playing. Except that he isn't actually Jewish. Maybe he just did it for the jokes.