Ever get this feeling...?

Usually it involves a new word or phrase. You learn the word--say, "shibboleth" for instance--and all of the sudden it's everywhere. Now, it's possible that you just never noticed it before, although you heard or read it many times, so it's impossible to know whether you're really seeing the word more now than before. But there are other interesting instances of this phenomenon, two of which happened to me personally very recently.

First, I picked up the excellent album And Don't the Kids Just Love It by the Television Personalities before embarking on a long road trip. Just two nights later, I'm sitting in a bar in Denton, TX, and lo and proverbially behold, the DJ plays "The World of Pauline Lewis" from that same record.

Then, just today, I was reading "A Capitalist Road to Communism" by Robert van der Veen and Philippe van Parijs, an article I printed from JStor before we left school because I'm a huge nerdpants. (And doesn't the University's free printing policy come in so handy for our intellectual stimulation, Austin-5000?) The authors basically introduce the idea of a Basic Income Grant (BIG) policy as a non-socialistic way to achieve communism. In the middle of reading this article, I took a break to check my email and the ol' internets in general. Over at Crooked Timber one of the commentators reviews Charles Murray's new book, In Our Hands, which leads to an excellent discussion in which selfsame commentator mentions BIGs and van Parijs himself, whom I had never heard of before today! All I'm sayin' is that coincidence is a mad weird thing, broheim.