24.5.2009
Princess Eight
Another Royal Number Princess Eight Princess Beatrice, the first child of the Duke and Duchess of York, was born at eight minutes past 8 pm on 8/8/88. August End Actress Ingrid Bergman died on 29 August 1982, her birth date. Date with Death From Australia,, more unrelated but significiant events on the same date. On 24 July 1979 a gas explosion killed fourteen miners in the Appin coal mine. On 24 July 1980 as the townspeople of Appin were mourning the first anniversary of the disaster a rock fall killed two more miners. On 24 July 1991 3 more miners died accidentally. Australia's worst mining disaster was on 31 July 1902, when an explosion killed 96 miners. On 31 July 1972, 70 years to the day later, an underground explosion killed 17 men. A Living Death On 8 August 1991, the British hostage John McCarthy was released by his Lebanese captors. The date was the second anniversary of the death of his mother, who had died of cancer in 1989 after begging those who held him to free him so they could be reunited before her impending death. Her poignant wish not fulfilled. It would be hard to imagine that the date of her death had preyed on the minds of the desperate men who held him and influenced their decision to when to release him. Or did it , in a warped way? Later in the year, just 2 days before Dr. Thomas Sutherland was released by his lebanese captors (nov. 91) his father-in-law died from cancer. -We don't know whetheto celebrate or mourn, was the way Ms. Kit Sutherland, the daughter of the freed doctor, summed up the diabolical situation. Aiming for the Hole In Des 1991 in England, golfer Tony Wright died on the 14th green of his local golf course 14 months after his father Les collapsed and died and died at the same spot. Both men had been lining up for putts when they suffered heart attacks. Reaching the Score Swiss statesman Niklaus vo der Flue was fond of saying he would live exactly three score and 10 years. On his 70th birthday he died of natural causes. Pelé scores Ten Pelé, one of the world's most famous soccer players, was obsessed with the number 10. Playing for Brazil, he drew the no 19 jersey both times he played for that country's successful World Cup winning teams. When touring he stayed in room no 10 on the tenth floor and made sure the numberplate of one of his cars added up to 10. Numbers 'Rule the Universe' Humans have always used numbers as something more than simple figures for maths. The Chinese, for ex., consider that odd numbers connote day, white, heat, fire and sun; even numbers signify night, black, cold, water and earth. This symbolism points to myths and the numinous aura that Jung speaks of in his famous essay on synchronicity. Jung asserts in that essay that numbers have an unpredictable quality. However, he also calls them 'the predestined indtrument' for creating order or for understanding an already existing but still unknown arrangement of 'orderedness'. In this chapter we have seen evidence of these attribues and further evidence for his assertion that there is a link between numinosity and coincidence. As a result we can under stand how he came to believe in the same mysterious quality in other aspects of coincidence. Odd Numbers If the numbers of Pop star David Bowie's real name, David Jones, are calculated then he is a '1'. this suggests the private Bowie is much the same as the public Bowie. Ex-Romanian President Ceausescu's number is '8' , which can be indicative of a dramatic fall from power. Marilyn Monroe's key number is '2', the number of feminity. Cab Number Colin Archer drove a taxi cab for fifteen years with the numberplate T390. His private car numberplate was T390 and when he wrote away for a ticket for a senior citizens' week concert, he was sent a ticket numbered 390. The following year when he received his ticket to the concert it was again 390. The Fish-stomach Effect In the summer of 1979 fifteen-year-old Robert Johansen caught a 10-lb cod in a Norwegian fiord and proudly presented it to his grandmother for a family meal. Preparing the fish, Thekla Aanen opened its stomach and found inside a valuable diamond ring, a family heirloom she had lost while fishing in the fiord 10 years earlier. A 1980 report says Joseph Cross of Newport News, Virginia, lost his ring when it fell into floodwaters during a storm. In February 1982, a restaurateur in Charlottesville, Virginia, found the ring-inside a fish. In Britain on 28 March 1982, the Sunday Express and News of the World both reported that 2 years after farmer Ferdi Parker lost an antique wedding ring, a vet found it in a cow's stomach while performing an autopsy. Robert Ripley's Believe it or not says the wife of Howard Ramage lost her wedding ringin a drain in1918 and a Vancouver man f ound it 36 years later in the stomach of a fish and returned it to Mr. Ramage. A variation on the above items concerns Wallace Williams of Charlotte, North Carolina, who accidentally dropped his watch from a plane at 2000 feet and found it in his own backyard, still running. Good Bait Andrew White, thirteen was fishing with his family on Smiths Lake in Australia one day in January 1994 and dropped his green-coloured chewing gum overboard when it lost its taste. Within minutes his brother Greg caught a fish and when it was gutted back on shore they found inside the discarded wad of chewing gum. Rejection Slip On a Friday night early in 1992, a London publisher was dining in a Notting Hill restaurant when thieves broke into her car. Among the things stolen was a manuscript had big hopes for, although she had not yet told its author. Its loss was what most upset her about the incident. The thieves however obviously didn't think as highly of the manuscript and unknown to her , had thrown it over a wall before driving away. She spent a nervous weekend and in her office on Monday morning was trying to decide how she should deal with the problem when a call came from the author of the manuscript. In a voice tinged more with sorrow than anger, he asked the publisher: -Why did you have my manuscript thrown over my front fence? Overshadowed The pleasure of browsing through a bookshop was disturbed for me one winter's afternoon when I came across a novel called Walking Shadows. With a gasp that had heads turning in the otherwise silent atmosphere, I snatched the book from the shelf. The title had barely had a chance to sink in before I began turning the pages, looking for he quotation from Macbeth that had to be in there somewhere. Sure enough: Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more... For more than eighteen months I had been working on various drafts of a book and screenplay both entitled Walking Shadows. I too had used the Shakespearian passage as an inspiration, having come across it at some stage of the creative process and realizing how perfectly it wove itself into my plot. Some days after this encounter I had calmed down enough to realize I should have bought the 'other' Walking Shadow to discover how far the coincidence extended. When I did return to the shop, the book had lived up to its title and 'walked'. Nobody there seemed to have heard of it. Having been too upset to note the name of the publisher or author, or any other details, at the time, I toyed with the idea that I had imagined it... Unwellcome Coincidences One likes to have allies in adversity, souls who have suffered similar ill-fortune. So I was perversely pleased when I read an article by British author Susan Hill in the Spectator (18 Jan 1992), which was headed Novel and unwelcome coincidences. She had written a novel about the love of two young soldiers in the trenches of the Flanders in the WWl called Strange Meeting, which was published in 1971. She said: In that ultra-sensitive state immediately following on the completion and publication of a novel, I was plunged into depression when another about the love of 2 young soldiers in the trenches of Flanders, Jennifer Johnston's How Many Miles to Babylon?, came out shortly after mine. Still, she consoled herself, at least had come out first and in the 2 decades since has not been out of print. Years later she had an idea for a story which came to her all at once and so completely it did not alter in essential details from the first notes she made. It was to be some years before she turned the idea into a novel which she called Air and Angels. It was finished and sent to her publisher in May 1990. Set in Cambridge, circa 1912, the principal male character is a don and cleric who falls unexpectedly and passionately in love with a 16 year old girl. As well as being a theology tutor, he has a strong leaning towards the biological sciences and is a serious ornithologist and naturalist. Hill writes: One fine Sunday morning-I remember everything about it with astonishing clarity-we were having coffee at a café table overlooking the Royal Shakespeare Theatre and the River Avon at stratford, each reading a newspaper, when my husband looked up from his Observer and said quietly, -There is an interview with Penelope Fitzgerald here that you had better read. Alerted, though somewhat puzzled by the seriousness of his tone, I set aside my own paper and did so. I discovered that Mrs F. was about to publish a new novel called the Gate of Angels (note the similarity of titles), its hero being a clergyman with a scientific bent, who falls passionately in love with a very young girl. Its settings Cambridge, ca 1912. Hill points out the complete and absolute coincidence of the bizarre event. She and F. had met only once, briefly years before. They had never spoken or corresponded about their work, they had different publishers and neither had spoken publicly about their current work in progress. Again both novels were published and did well. Even with the hand of coincidence touching her WWl novel, then another novel, Hill was still not prepared for a third and far more grievous blow. She had always been fascinated by the Antarctic and in 1989 finally decided to write a novel about British explorer Captain Scott and his companions, who perished on a journey to the South Pole in 1912. Her notes took shape and she made plans to begin writing. Then, just before Christmas on the 8.50 from Oxford to Paddington I opened my copy of The Bookseller and saw an advertisement for a new novel by Beryl Bainbridge, called The Birthday Boys, based on the last voyage of Scott and his companions to the Antarctic. As with the previous incident, she had never met the author or corresponded with her and as far as she knows neither had made public details of their work in progress. She asks: -The moral? Well there isn't one, I suppose. Two year's work gone down the tube...She resolves, all you can do is grin and bear it, and adds: -I haven't read her book- I couldn't. Apt Author Round the Bend in the Stream, Sir Wilmot Hudson Fysh. Title Search Do we set out unconsciously to find things that are significicant to us, led by coincidence? Is that what I did when I came across the other Walking Shadows on a random browse through a bookshop, allowing the chance of coincidence to lead me on? There are variations on this. The other day I was doing some editing work and came across, the phrase 'demilitarized zone' in relation to Vietnam. I needed to know whether 'demilitarized' was unhyphenated and whether the words were treated as prper nouns. I checked with two books I thought would contain the phrase without finding it mentioned in either of their indexes. Then I took the large-format Chronicle of the 20th Century History from the bookshelf, lay it on the desk and randomly opened it on a page in the final third of the book. The first item that caught my eye was: 5 April 1968, Vietnam War. In Operation Pegasus a 30000-man US and South Vietnamese force lifted the 76-day siege of the 6000-man US Marine garrison at Khe Sanh... near the demilitarized zone... Eccentric Search Discussin random literary searches with Audrey Best prompted her to recall an incident which began when a cousin suggested she read a book, The Last of the Eccentrics, a life of Rosslyn Bruce, who was at one time the vicar of a small village near her childhood home. Best says she tried libraries everywhere for a copy without success. One Saturday morning, on leaving her local library she crossed the road and entered a large store. In the book department was a cardboard box full of cut-price books. Something prompted her to take out every book and thefinal one she unearthed was The Last of the Eccentrics.
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http://www.netsaga.is/media/files/s-dream.mp3
B. Palace announced the separation of the Duke and Duchess of York on 19 March 1992. On the same day six years before they had announced their engagement.