h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Sounds like a cheap crime thriller!

The year was 1995, the month was April. I had spent the previous 8 months travelling the world and broadening my knowledge of all things worldly prior to starting at university. In the middle of March i had been joined by a friend and we had taken in the joys of Hong Kong, Bangkok and all that they entail.

Accompanying me on my journey was a pack of cards, second only to the Passport in the Travellers Compendium of Essential Items. Said deck had seen good service over the months, filling many an empty hour with harmless thrills and breaking down more cultural barriers than Kofi Annan and his chums at the UN could ever dream of.

Dog eared and dirty, their box held together with stickless selotape and elastic bands, if every card could tell a story it would surely win the Booker Prize.

Through hell, high-water, hurricanes and dramatic onslaughts of the screaming trots, these 54 linen coated playing cards had seen me through it all. You can, therefore, begin to imagine my horror on discovering that on an Island off the East coast of Thailand, the King of Spades had fled the comfort of the pack for a life of solitary exile.

We searched high and low and contemplated contacting the Embassy but alas, our quest was fruitless; the King of Spades was officially Missing In Action.

As is the norm in such a situation, one of the jokers, doughty fellows that they are, Martyred himself in the name of the 52 and gave himself whole-heartedly to mimicking the king as best he could.

Imagine therefore my surprise when a month later in Sumatra just following dusk, I saw a playing card from the same make of pack as mine, lying in the dull arc of light cast by my increasingly speedy and out of control moped. Naturally I was drawn by this extraordinary vision but to find that the card over which I had nearly ridden was none other than the King of Spades was an as earth shatteringly strange coincidence then as it still is now ...

Well told story, 'tis pretty amaizing. Such a coincidence would probably have led me to crash the moped.

I've justbread somewhere that both the church and quatum physisists do not believe in coincidences.
Now there's a coincidence

I have no idea why a B inserted itself into the above post as in justbread instead of just read!

I've noticed that once you begin counting coincidences they happen all the time and therefor become suspiciously uncoincidental.

Very often my son will place items of music he quite likes on my computer
I awoke in the middle of the night after dreaming that my son was speaking to me in my office. In the dream he said "I think I'm begining to get it!"
I came down stairs and noted that he had indeed placed music on the computer and listened to it, but couldn't quite make out the words.
I went to have a hot bath. It was now 4am
I was reading and relaxing like you do, when a huge crash alerted me to the fact that I had been bashed heavily on my head and I was covered in broken glass. Looking up I noticed that a glass Chinese symbol mobile had jumped off it's hook after hanging onto the hook for two years and landed on my head.
Now I'm thinking, would that have fallen if I hadn't been unusually taking a bath at 4am?
When i was asked if it hurt,. I said "Well no actually it felt like I've just had a BIG idea and laughed.
I went back down stairs and listened to the music again, fo some reason I thought there was a 'message ' involved (OK we coincidence nuts are nuts!)
sure enough on listening to it more closely I heard ;
"I know the pieces fit because I watched them tumble down" by a band called Tool.
This is probably more of a 'strange' coincidence to me because my ex-husband, my son's father died last year

My friend laughed at this episode and said "Hey your feng shui must have had bad chi!
Or how about logging on to A friends reunited site and half an hour later you get an e-mail from a good friend you haven't spoken to in 20 years, because he was logging on at precisely the same time as you did. He says he was in London and a stranger told him about the site and I said 'Hey I was in London and a stranger on a train told me about the site.'
Mind you that King of spades thing takes some beating.

Hasslefree
Just(b)read your post and wondered if the 'b' was divine intervention (a la bread of heaven)?

I've just bred too, my son is nearly 3 months old.

3 months old?
Sleep NOW while you can.

Sadly not - he hasn't yet learned the value of sleep (except when it's midday and people are paying him attention) and has a scream so piercing that nurses passing the ward knew instantly when it was him. Think glass-shattering.

Incidentally, the reasons for the screams are...

(1) I'm hungry; or
(2) I need a nappy change; or
(3) I want attention; or
(4) I don't want attention; or
(5) I haven't screamed for a while, have I; or
(6) The screaming's upsetting me, make it stop ...
(7) ... but not by doing that. Try something else.

On the plus side, we've learned that the most effective way to make him sleep alot during the night is for him to sleep in our bed and me be demoted to the spare room - so one of us is getting a good night's sleep these days...