The Po Show

Somebody Help Me Out Here

I've been going nuts the last few days, trying to remember what you call it when you hear or see something unusual, and then *almost immediately* afterwards, hear or see it again. You know, when through sheer (and no, it's not serendipity I'm thinking of) coincidence, you hear the same phrase, the second time directly after the first. There's a WORD for this!

I have had three incidents of this phenomenon in this *week*. In the first, the kids were watching Fairly Odd Parents on Nick, and Timmy's grandpa was talking about popular things during the '20s, one of which was Banana Oil. I was reading a book on the couch next to them. **LITERALLY** the next paragraph I read contained a reference to banana oil! WTF? How often do you hear the words **banana oil** used???

The next happened the other day, when I walked through the bedroom while Ross was watching a movie. Woody Allen called Wallace Shawn a homunculus. I then returned to my book, in which a character called another character a homunculus! How often do people call each other a homunculus?? Plus we'd just been to the American Museum of Natural History *that day*, and had SEEN representations of homunculi!

The homunculus episode made me think of the previous episode of [whatever the hell you call it when this happens]. And, because I am old and senile, I could not remember what the phrase had been that had been repeated. I remembered it was from Fairly Odd Parents, I remembered that I had then read it in my book, but WHAT had it been?? Instantly obsessed (who me?), I started skimming the book, trying to find the reference. I could picture which side of the page it had been on, the approximate size of the paragraph it had been in, but I couldn't find it. I kept pawing through the book. I glanced through a passage in which the characters were talking about how Diogenes would have been better off looking for a competent man than an honest man. Ross walked past me and smirked when he saw how obsessed I was over this, and he SAID (yes, you can guess what's coming), "You're still looking for that? You're like Diogenes." WTF?? How often do people talk about Diogenes?

So please, someone, of my many overly-intellectual and trivia repository friends, you must know the word for this.