Part One
Some time ago I renewed my subscription to Netflix in order to utilize their streaming video service which is offered “free” to all their subscribers. The service is nice but the selection of movies available to Watch Instantly (their term for internet streaming) is a very small subset of the movies that they have on DVD. Because I’m interested to know of any additions to this subset, I subscribe to their RSS feed for New choices to watch instantly. With that subscription I receive notification in my web browser whenever a movie is made available for Instant viewing. This morning there were approximately 20 new movies available which I quickly scrolled through, clicking open a new tab for each that interested me. One of these was Yojimbo by the legendary Japanese director, Akira Kurosawa, who also directed the seminal Seven Samarai. After reading the description, I clicked the “Add to Instant Queue” button to save it for later viewing. Whenever you add a movie to your queue on Netflix they suggest 10 more related movies that they think you might like. This time, they showed me these (click to enlarge the image):
My eyes were immediately drawn to one of the movies on the bottom and in the middle, The Beider Meinhof Complex. The name was somewhat familiar so I read the description but it didn’t interest me so I closed the window.
Part Two
Every day I review the main page of links at reddit.com, an link aggregator where I often find interesting articles, pictures and video. This morning was no exception as I opened a dozen tabs to peruse one by one. When I got near the bottom of the page, I was a little freaked to see this:
Sure enough, the article exactly described the reverse of what had just happened to me seconds before as I read the link description. Sometimes life is surreal.