posted
I am currently taking Film Studies at university here in Stockholm. Yesterday I took part in the first half of this years' finishing tests, a comprehensive movie analysis. This semester it was "The Third Generation" (1979 Fassbinder).
The extremist career of the german terrorist faction Rote Armee Fraction or 'Baader-Meinhof' was a big inspiration on the film, in a extremely cynical, parodical way. I noted that in my analysis and then went home to sleep for a month. (for those so inclined one can also spot a young and cool Udo Kier in this flick)
Now, before watching this movie, I hadn't heard mention of Baader-Meinhof in many years. After reading MinutiaeMan's link on vacuum-effects on the website "Damn Interesting", I glanced at the "comments"-section for the vacuum-article, where a person notes the coincidence of thinking of vacuum-effects a few days earlier and then seeing it on this website he goes to. He is promptly pointed to "Damn Interesting"'s own article on the subject of coincedences, called "the Baader-Meinhof syndrome". *rimshot*
From the article;
quote:How the phenomenon came to be known as "Baader-Meinhof" is uncertain. It seems likely that some individual learned of the existence of the historic German urban guerrilla group which went by that name, and then heard the name again soon afterwards. This plucky wordsmith may then have named the phenomenon after the very subject which triggered it.
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The second item is not a coincedence of mine, but good all the same. This evening I went bouncing on Wikipedia, eventually looking up "Wendigo" for kicks. I bounced over to the wiki-page for the movie "Ravenous", famous for using cannibalism and the wendigo-theme in its story. It is said here that the events in "Ravenous" were inspired by 1: the tragic fate of the isolated Donner Party in the winter of 1846, and 2: by the story of Alferd Packer. I go to Packer's article, where it is mentioned early that he is "one of only two americans ever imprisoned for cannibalism", the other one being Albert Fish.
I read the entire Packer-article, then the Fish-article, and here's what happened. Leaving aside the fact that reading the story of Albert Fish disgusted me more than anything I've ever read about Manson or Bundy (especially Fish's letter to the parents of one of his victims), one item of special interest reached out to me. When Albert Fish was executed in 1936, legend has it that he was still alive after the first jolt and said to the warden "Is that all you've got?", whereby they jolted him again, finishing him off.
True or not, the first thing that came to my mind was Frank Miller's "Sin City", -$$$$$$$$$- wherein which the character Marv is electrocuted a first time and says the same thing. Nice touch, I thought. I recalled that cannibalism also featured heavily in the Marv-chapter of "Sin City", so obviously Miller is familiar with Albert Fish.
That's when it hit me, like Kobayashi and Redfoot. I jump back to the article of Alferd Packer (1842-1907), who like the Donner Party got stuck in a snow storm (and like Robert Carlyle's character in "Ravenous" he was the sole survivor). Packer was charged with killing and eating his five party members somewhere between February and April 1874. Then I check the names of Packer's party. They were Shannon Wilson Bell, James Humphrey, George Noon, Israel Swan and Frank Miller.
Registered: Aug 1999
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-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
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posted
I had a weird coincidence the other day, but it's much less extraordinary.
I was Googleing my website's address to see which other sites were linking to it. One of them, to my surprise, was Starship Modeller. That's not very odd in itself, but my link was one of only three on the "new links" page, the one directly above being the Harrow Modelling Society, which it seems is the modelling club in my town. I'd never heard of it until I stumbled upon the link, on a page of international website links, which coincidentally was above mine.
While Albert "How-sweet-and-tender-your-daughter's-little-ass-was-roasted-in-the-oven" Fish gives it twentythree needles to his pelvis (his pastime, can't condense it further).
Here's a third coincidence; after all that up there, I decided to keep going through the free HP Lovecraft short stories I'd discovered on WikiSource recently. I came to The Picture in the House and damn it if I didn't pull the short straw again.
It was good, though. "Sumthin' ta stir ye up an' make yer blood tickle!" *licks chops*
Registered: Aug 1999
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posted
I thought it was much too weird when you mentioned "Baader-Meinhof", until you explained that you had just read about it under the exact same circumstances I had. I don't think that counts as a case of it.
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
Sure it does, what kind of criteria are you thinking of? Are you going to go "theoretical philosophy" on me?
It's the more bizarre when the word that provoked the feeling was the word used by that site to define the phenomenon of that feeling. And using Baader-Meinhof to define it doesn't seem very widespread beyond DamnInteresting.Com, I did a search and came up with only ten hits, most related to the site.
Registered: Aug 1999
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"Sure it does, what kind of criteria are you thinking of?"
Well, I mean, imagine you're a student, and you learn about something in class. The next say, you hear another student talk about it, and you say "wow, that's weird ; I just learned about that in class yesterday". And the other person says "yeah, I know ; we're in the same class".
That would be kind of like our current situation. I would think it only counts when you hear about something, and then you hear about it again from an unrelated source.
Registered: Mar 1999
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