Fake colonel 3:11

At around 6:40 this morning, I checked for new comments on this blog and found a long two-part comment from Debbie (Ra1119bee). She opened with:

Once again speaking of the eclipse, fake colonels and Ohio . . .

"Fake colonels" is a reference to my March 15 post "Merry, Pippin, Mary Poppins, secret names, golden straw, square heads, and fake colonels," in which one of the coincidences noted was "a non-colonel being addressed as a colonel" in two different narratives I had just encountered. The most famous "fake colonel" -- possibly the most famous "colonel," full stop -- is undoubtedly Colonel Sanders of KFC, who bore the title "Kentucky colonel" but did not hold the military rank of colonel.

Much of the rest of Debbie's comment deals with a dream she had about the number 113, and she also repeatedly mentions 3:11 -- the same number in reverse -- as the time when the upcoming solar eclipse will come closest to totality (99%) in the Ohio town where she lives. Then, on the rather insubstantial grounds that the Hebrew word for "falsehood" appears exactly 113 times in the Bible, she links that number and its mirror-image with the "fake colonel" idea:

I now think the odd connection of Willimington's totality timing (3:11) and the 'fake colonel in Twilight Zone's The Parallel and the Carbon Copy (Carbondale)s syncs have connections to my Number 113 dream.

Okay, that's not the most convincing connection ever, but the sync fairies apparently liked it. Right after reading Debbie's comment, I decided to check the Google News feed. This is something I essentially never do, but I had a sudden whim. Near the top of the feed was this:

Google News feeds are personalized, and its quite possible that the high ranking of a "colonel" story was influenced by the recent comment on my Google-run blog and thus not a true coincidence. It's still quite a coincidence, though, that a news story about a doubly-fake colonel -- a "Kentucky colonel," not a real colonel, and a statue, not a real person -- was published just 18 hours before I read the comment. Also, the next item in the feed is about an upcoming rare astronomical event, the sort of thing Debbie had tied the fake colonel to. The real coincidence, though, came when I clicked on the "Curse of the Colonel" story and saw this:

The statue of Colonel Sanders was dredged from the Dotonbori River on March 11, 2009 -- 3/11 or 11/3, depending on where you're from.

Note added (10:15 a.m.): This is insane. In a comment below, Debbie gives more details about her 311 dream:

I went to a young couples home. The women was youngish but her husband was a bit older. She was Asian, I think, and he was a white man with blonde hair . . . I recall I kissed him and he held his right hand out to me and I clutched his hand. For some reason as he got up to leave, his right arm came off !! and I was still holding his hand and his arm!!!!!

The statue of Colonel Sanders was missing a hand when it was recovered from the river. Why was it thrown into the river in the first place? Back in 1985, Japanese baseball fans were celebrating a big win. They called the name of each player on the team, and then a fan who resembled that player would jump into the river. When they got to the MVP, American (now an Oklahoma State Senator) Randy Bass, there were no look-alikes among the fans, so they grabbed the only bearded White guy they could find -- a plastic statue standing outside a KFC -- and threw that into the river to represent him.

The White man in Debbie's dream was blond and was living with an Asian. Randy Bass has dirty blond hair and lived among Asians for many years, becoming the most famous American player in Japanese baseball. (This story of a successful baseball player who was a different race from all his teammates is perhaps a nod to the recent Jackie Robinson sync theme.)