Its a small world,..42 years ago i was on a non commissioned officers course in the military college,..one member on the course "Patrick Cox" was nicknamed "the bishop",..42 years later i was talking to a member of the church next door to me and they mentioned that one of their bishops was coming to visit and his name was bishop Patrick Cox,..what does he look like i asked,..and i was shown a picture,..sure enough it was the same guy i was on the course with,..having left the army he became a priest and moved up in the ranks of the clergy. ====================================================== 39 years ago i was stationed in Cyprus,..i was often based in the communications center on one side of the island and would communicate with a radio operator on the other side of the island,.."Noel",..i knew his voice very well though had never met him. 20 years ago i was talking to a friend in the street and heard a voice i was sure was the radio operator based on the other side of Cyprus,..asked him would he be the same guy i always spoke to,..sure enough it was "Noel" we became friends and to this day we go fishing together. 14 years ago "Noel" told me his son was coming to visit him here in town and would i mind if they came to visit me,..his son took along his girlfriend,..(they have since married and have children),..they had tea in my house and the conversation turned to where his sons girlfriend was from,..oh i replied i had a business in that town and his sons girlfriend went very quiet,..hardly spoke after that,..next day i found out she was my step daughter who i had not seen for 14 years,..small world.
There is something called "six degrees of separation" which states that any two people can trace a connection through six people. I'm not sure how it works, and even if it works, but someone here can probably explain it. I'm glad you encountered old friends and acquaintances. Anyone who knows you (and Molly) would be blessed, even a bishop!
Hi Eileen,..Jane and Barb,..yes i heard of the "six degrees of separation",..but like you i don't know the ins and outs of it,..thank you Jane for the nice compliment,..lol even a bishop. ====================================================== Another little story, The last place i was stationed was in the next county,..as i was easy with figures i was collared to make out the payroll which after payout had to be returned to the chief cashiers office and a driver or dispatch rider delivered the payroll,..i was always aware that in that office the woman who dealt with our payroll was named "Noreen Egan",..the only occasion i made the delivery myself was due to my having to go to that barracks to see the Legal Officer,..on visiting the cashiers office i asked for Noreen Egan,..a woman in her late 50's appeared,..i asked her did she ever live in a place named Glasnevin,..she did,..and did she live in Glasmeen road,..again she did,..then she asked my name,..when i told her she replied,..oh you were a little brat when you were young,..she used to babysit for my mother and of course i was the baby,..i was 30 years old when i met her in that office.
I hope Noreen thought you'd improved since her baby sitting days with you Philip. They say the world is a small place and, in your case, it certainly seems it is. I wonder how many old friends you'll bump into over the coming years.
Way cool, Philip. Now, did your step daughter remember you before the conversation? or was she as clueless as you up to that point? I am terrible at remembering faces, but voices? they tend to make more of an impression.Isn't it funny how our brains all work differently.
Hi Eileen,..oh yes She did think i got a lot quieter lol. ====================================================== Hi Carolyn,..i was told later that she felt she knew me from someplace but could not place me but when i mentioned i had a business in her town she knew then,.. though she didn't let me know. With me Carolyn i remember faces,..voices but not names lol. ====================================================== Thanks Cheryl,..glad you enjoyed them stories. Anyone got any "Its A Small World",..stories.
Philip.. I don't have "it's a small world story", but since I've moved back to my childhood home after being gone for over 30 years, I run into old classmates/friends at the post office, grocery store, etc. What amazes me is that some people recognize me right away and call out my name... even those who didn't seem to know I existed back in the school days. They say "you haven't changed a bit". Then, I think to myself "Dang... you got old". LOL Then we exchange stories and hugs and it's all good again.
Hi Cheryl,..it really makes you think when people who really were not in your circle back then recognize you now,..even more so those who didn't seem to know you existed. ======================================================= Another short "its a small world story". The girl "Noreen Egan",..who looked after me as a baby lived next door to another woman who babysat for my mother,..this woman was older and more strict,..i didn't like her ,..she got married and had a marriage name not common in our area,.."Littlewood",..we moved house from there when i was 13 years old,..24 years later i was a member in a club and one of the committee was a woman named "Littlewood",..there was a dance there once a week and i often had a dance with this woman,..one day she invited me and my girlfriend to a party in her house but forgot to give her address,..i found it in the phone directory very easy as she was the only "Littlewood",..and i told her this also mentioning that i knew a "Littlewood" way back 24 years,..well you guessed it of course it was the same woman who did the baby sitting,..she told some stories about me that i didn't remember myself,..like i refused to eat a boiled egg mashed up with a blob of butter when it was in a mug,..that i thought it was doctored with medicine,..(my mother used to stick laxatives into rice crispy's cereal)
A small world indeed Philip! Great stories. But I am envious. I have moved away from where I grew up & thus never encounter anyone from my childhood. Facebook helps with that though.
I got curious. Googling "six degrees of separation" provided all kinds of entertaining reading, none of which explained the term. I did however learn all about the play, the song lyrics, the movie, and most interestingly, the Kevin Bacon game (Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.) Further investigation and an alteration of my search criteria led to the the following fascinating info: Six degrees of separation is the theory that anyone on the planet can be connected to any other person on the planet through a chain of acquaintances that has no more than five intermediaries. The theory was first proposed in 1929 by the Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy in a short story called "Chains." In the 1950's, Ithiel de Sola Pool (MIT) and Manfred Kochen (IBM) set out to prove the theory mathematically. Although they were able to phrase the question (given a set N of people, what is the probability that each member of N is connected to another member via k_1, k_2, k_3...k_n links?), after twenty years they were still unable to solve the problem to their own satisfaction. In 1967, American sociologist Stanley Milgram devised a new way to test the theory, which he called "the small-world problem." He randomly selected people in the mid-West to send packages to a stranger located in Massachusetts. The senders knew the recipient's name, occupation, and general location. They were instructed to send the package to a person they knew on a first-name basis who they thought was most likely, out of all their friends, to know the target personally. That person would do the same, and so on, until the package was personally delivered to its target recipient. Although the participants expected the chain to include at least a hundred intermediaries, it only took (on average) between five and seven intermediaries to get each package delivered. Milgram's findings were published in Psychology Today and inspired the phrase "six degrees of separation." Playwright John Guare popularized the phrase when he chose it as the title for his 1990 play of the same name. Although Milgram's findings were discounted after it was discovered that he based his conclusion on a very small number of packages, six degrees of separation became an accepted notion in pop culture after Brett C. Tjaden published a computer game on the University of Virginia's Web site based on the small-world problem. Tjaden used the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) to document connections between different actors. Time Magazine called his site, The Oracle of Bacon at Virginia, one of the "Ten Best Web Sites of 1996." In 2001, Duncan Watts, a professor at Columbia University, continued his own earlier research into the phenomenon and recreated Milgram's experiment on the Internet. Watts used an e-mail message as the "package" that needed to be delivered, and surprisingly, after reviewing the data collected by 48,000 senders and 19 targets (in 157 countries), Watts found that the average number of intermediaries was indeed, six. Watts' research, and the advent of the computer age, has opened up new areas of inquiry related to six degrees of separation in diverse areas of network theory such as as power grid analysis, disease transmission, graph theory, corporate communication, and computer circuitry.
There was also this interesting graphic. As I'm a very visual person, it helped me process the information a little more easily. [/img]
