Wapsi Square Forum

So i was talking to Kate about Gilbert & Sullivan; i mentioned that i'd quoted from Ko Ko recently in something i was writing.

I mention here that today is 5 June 2017. This will later be Significant.

That led me to recall a couple of performances on G&S i'd seen - one in Greenville SC of The Mikado, with a neat little bit of business with Ko Ko's sword during his introduction, and another bit of business in the Hallmark Hall of Fame TV version, with Groucho as Ko Ko and some business with an axe.

This in turn led to my thinking of Yeomen of the Guard, of which i saw a wonderful live performance here in Atlanta in the 80s ... and i discovered that Kate had never even heard of Yeomen.

Though to be fair, as a fan of the Saint, she has encountered one of its songs...

I told her that Yeomen is not as light as other G&S, and that it's closer to opera than most operettas, and could almost be described as a tragedy.

I mentioned that there's at least one filmed version, with Joel Grey as Jack Point.

I decided that she needs to see it.

So i came to the computer, fired up Netflix, and searched Yeomen of the Guard.

I got a hit, clicked on it, and i saw this:
Note the bottom two lines.

I had forgotten that it was in my queue, much less that it was at the top.

Weird.

That's called a senior moment - much like when random boxes of finely-crafted engineering bits show up at my door and there's the following mental conversation:

"Reminds me - I need to order X to do Y."

and X is in the box. it's even worse when the conversation happens on the same X twice in a week...which has happened.

Just Old Al wrote:That's called a senior moment - much like when random boxes of finely-crafted engineering bits show up at my door and there's the following mental conversation:

"Reminds me - I need to order X to do Y."

and X is in the box. it's even worse when the conversation happens on the same X twice in a week...which has happened.

The point is that i put it on the queue months ago, and it came up with no relation to Netflix...

AnotherFairportfan wrote:The point is that i put it on the queue months ago, and it came up with no relation to Netflix...

The "law of small numbers" makes this sort of coincidence not just possible, but statistically inevitable.

Figure that once you'd put in into your Netflix queue, it was likely to become available within a year (probably less but let's use that number). Assuming random distribution, there'd be maybe 1 chance in 400 of it being shipped to you on any given day (as we can probably agree, 2017 is turning out to be a very long year). 400 is a relatively small number.

I'd suggest that once you raised the subject of G&S at all, the chance of your bringing up Yeomen of the Guard at all was fairly high (after all, you had been interested enough in seeing it again that you'd added it to your Netflix queue, even if you didn't consciously remember that). Let's say 1 chance in 2 for this. And, since you're a G&S enthusiast, a discussion involving G&S was probably likely to happen at least once within that 400-day window.

So, on any given day that you happened to raise the subject of G&S with Kate, there'd be one chance in 800 that (1) you'd mention Yeomen of the Guard and that (2) this turned out to be the day Netflix shipped that DVD to you.

Not particularly small odds, even assuming that Netflix shipment times are completely random (which they almost certainly are not).

The thing is, we "walk past" chances of about this magnitude every day. When we don't get a "hit", we don't notice - we don't even realize that a low-probability event has just slipped by. If you hadn't happened to mention Ko-Ko and get on the subject of G&S, the shipment on 6/5 would have had no particular significance to you. You wouldn't have thought "Gee, isn't it strange that I didn't discuss Yeomen of the Guard with anyone, on the day that Netflix finally got its thumb out and shipped me a copy?"

When we do get a "hit", we notice - it stands out as "weird".

It's also possible that your mention of Ko-ko to somebody was spurred by your own subconscious thinking process...

Netflix queue... Hey, I put Yeomen of the Guard on my queue a few months ago... average waiting time... hey, I may be seeing some Gilbert and Sullivan in the near future!

Even if you weren't consciously aware of any of this "background thinking", it may have brought the whole topic of G&S close enough to the surface, that a quotation from a G&S character seemed particularly appropriate to you at the time... and this might even have stimulated your decision to mention G&S to Kate later in the day. That would reduce the odds against a statistical "hit" even further. Depending on what you know of the schedule on which Netflix ships stuff to you from your queue, your "background brain" may have actually reduced the odds of a hit to 1 in 50 or even less than that.

Our brains do a lot on our behalf that we are rarely conscious of.

I was quoting a Mailing Comment i'd made to someone in SFPA last month - he was talking about when he collected his insurance funeral benefit, and i pointed out that he wasn't gonna collect his insurance funeral benefit.

"As Ko Ko says to Nanki-Poo about the fireworks after he's been executed: 'You won't see them - but they'll be there'."

SO i told Kate about that, then i mentioned various productions i've seen (as i said) - including that Hallmark Hall of Fame one where they had to rewrite a lot of the vocal parts because Ko Ko was written for a baritone and Groucho was a tenor.

And then i talked about other G&S i've seen, filmed or live - Pinafore and Yeomen, mainly...

The only thing I know anything about any of this is an old episode of 'the West Wing'...