"You're from Japan? You must know Mr. Wu! He's from China!"

[mrissa]

(Entry title taken, very sadly, from my Japanese professor's experience trying to explain to clueless Americans that East Asia is a rather large place. No, seriously. Someone actually said this to him. My grandpa always says, "Rissy, there's stupid laying around we haven't even used up yet.")

Robin explained to me that Big Bird had moved to New York to be with the Ninja Turtles. And it is, to the best of my recollection, true that in the Muppet Movie, the very first one, Big Bird moves to New York instead of going to Hollywood with Kermit and Fozzie. And in Robin's mind, people in New York know each other. Because they live near each other, there in New York.

I really love the fact that, in his little brain, Big Bird and his beloved Turtles are having pizza together. And maybe in a few years Edna St. Vincent Millay will join them. This just makes me happy.

Comments

[redbird]

Well, Big Bird moved here to break into PBS, but he probably met the Turtles later on, after he'd gotten the gig on Sesame Street.

[von-krag.livejournal.com]

Heh, just wait till he sees Hellboy 1 & 2 (which is coming soon to a theater near you!) NYC do have interesting neighborhoods I do believe.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

He is 4. We'll be waiting awhile.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Hey, man. If I can run into my fiance's college roommate on a flight out of a city neither of us lives in to a city neither of us lives in, and an acquaintance I haven't seen in four years on my flight out of Tokyo, anything's possible.

[katfeete.livejournal.com]

I was laughing, reading that title. But partly because when I lived in New Zealand, I had a lot of well-meaning New Zealanders and the occasional Japanese exchange student come up to me and say: "You must know X! They're from New York City (San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle....)". At which point I also would have to explain that America is a very big place, so big, in fact, that I had never even been to the cities they were listing, much less met all the denizens thereof.

I put it down to living in very small countries, but perhaps there is stupid laying around in other countries too.

(At least it was better than being asked if I knew any axe murderers. One show we export to NZ, and it had to be "America's Most Wanted"? What are we, stu... oh, right.)

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I remember watching Henry V shortly after I'd returned from Wales and being the only person in the theatre who laughed at the point where the King is in disguise and claims to be a Welshman to one of the soldiers. The soldier says something to the effect of "From Wales? Do you know Llewellyn?"

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Friend of mine tried (as a deliberate joke, with somebody he'd just met on an airplane) "Oh, you're from India? Do you know X?" Both of them were rather startled that the person did know X, however.

And I met an old acquaintance in Phoenix, changing planes Sunday on the way out to Silicon Valley. Does happen now and then.

true story....

[intrepida.livejournal.com]

My grandfather once convinced a man that he knew everyone in North Dakota. Which is a remotely achievable feat, but not likely. A week later the man in question had to pick someone up at an airport. Lo and behold, his passenger was from ND. The guy asked "Do you know Manvil Anderson?" The passenger said "Of course, everybody knows him."

Re: true story....

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

That's wonderful.

[barondave.livejournal.com]

When I was a freshman in college at Albany, NY, groups of us would share our various High Schools and home town. During one such gathering, someone said they were from New York City. "Oh," said another, "you're from New York. Do you know ____?"

And he did.

Thinking upon this later, the coincidence is not so great. While NYC has millions of people, the number of college-bound HS seniors is a much smaller number. We self-select for language, economic strata, mutual interests, and so on. The mere fact that you've struck up a conversation on an airplane means you can both afford to take an airplane and that you have enough in common to sustain a conversation. The chance that you two have mutual acquaintance goes up the more you have in common, even if the commonality involves being a cartoon character.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I don't want to encourage interethnic strife, but Big Bird is actually a puppet.

Also, "enough in common to sustain a conversation" is not, in my opinion, necessarily, as I have been conversationally ambushed by people I had nothing like enough in common with to sustain a conversation. Many of the people who have enough in common with me to sustain a conversation on an airplane have enough cultural assumptions in common that they do not try when they notice I am engrossed in my book. It's the people who don't share those assumptions who assume that the book must be a stopgap measure to stave off death by boredom, and of course I must welcome the conversational attentions of some guy in seat 32F.

[timprov.livejournal.com]

Or 36C.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

You know, they don't permanently reserve seat 36C for Arlo. Sometimes they let other people sit there.

[redbird]

"Enough to sustain a conversation" is also different from that sort of "you're from X, do you know so-and-so?" (even if X is someplace a lot smaller than New York). The latter is an attempt to find basis for conversation.

If someone is reading, I'm unlikely to approach them with anything conversational, though I will say things like "excuse me, I need to get into that window seat" or "do you know which train I should take for $destination?"

[barondave.livejournal.com]

Depends on what they're reading and how engrossed they are in it. Though I do tend to wait until they put the book down...

[barondave.livejournal.com]

Big Bird is actually a puppet

I knew that, but sacrificed verisimilitude for punchline brevity. (And they have made a cartoon with the character.)

And "the conversational attentions of some guy" points to a degree of commonality, eg he's attracted to you (over certain values) with the possibility (from his pov) that you might share same. That you don't share his disposition doesn't change the possible cultural intersection. Indeed, perhaps its strengthened, as 32F might have been similarly attracted to someone else reading a book on an airplane. You're both on an airplane sharing at least one hop in common, speaking a similar language and with some cultural norms in common. By itself, this improves the odds that he has encountered (or interrupted the reading of) someone you know.

Of course, his boorishness sharply reduces the chance that you'll find out, but that's a different thread.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

I got recruited on an airplane once, to cox a crew rowing in the Head of the Charles. But as you said, it wasn't that unlikely because of all the preselecting; we were flying home from the Masters' national regatta on a small plane and this leg of the trip went from Oak Ridge, TN (where the race was held) to Houston, an airline hub. When we noticed the woman in the opposite seat looked like a rower (tall and strong) we figured it was pretty likely that she was one. And in fact, she was, and rowing in a club where we had a lot of acquaintances. She asked me to cox her crew for the Charles - maybe she was desperate for someone to steer the boat, even though at that point it was months away. As it happened, her crew ended up not racing but I wound up coxing another boat from her same club. It was a fun race, too. This is why I never take the advice about not speaking to strangers.

(My other record for most unlikely encounter was meeting someone I knew from college in Pennsylvania in a rock-climbing class in TX. I don't think there was any preselection at all going on there. Neither of us were climbers yet in college.)

[barondave.livejournal.com]

Wow, you coxed a rowing crew in the Head of the Charles? Do you know...

Once, the person next to me on a plane turned out to have gone to high school with my cousin, and sat next to him in a class. Again, unlikely but not improbable: The plane's final destination was Boston, where my uncle's family grew up. I mentioned visiting my uncle, and she recognized the name.

I strongly suspect that, were it possible to determine, many travelers no more than two degrees of separation from one another. Not counting airline personnel as the link...

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Wow, you coxed a rowing crew in the Head of the Charles? Do you know...

Given what the rowing community is like, quite likely!

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

I love your grandfather's saying. It reminds me of comedian Ron White's "You can't fix stupid."

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Grandpa also used to say, "Rissy, there are more horse's asses in the world than there are horses." Haven't heard that one out of him in awhile, though.

[writingortyping.livejournal.com]

I'm originally from a little town in NH. One of our friends from town had a tendency to wander up to Alaska periodically. He was sitting in a bar in The Back of Beyond, when someone else noted his New England accent.

"Where you from?" said the stranger.

"New England," said our friend.

"Yeah, but where?"

"New Hampshire."

"Where in New Hampshire?"

"You won't have heard of it."

"Try me."

"Hollis."

"Oh - how's Jeff Smith?"

"Not so good. He died."

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Fabulous.

I had nothing that good in response, but I was in grad school with an Icelandic girl, and when I asked her where she was from, she repeated, "Iceland," a bit impatiently. I said, "Yah, but where in Iceland? Reykjavik or Akureyri or where?" She was startled that I knew the names of at least two cities in Iceland, because that was more than she'd run into from Americans before.

[profrobert.livejournal.com]

As with many other posters here, my experience is that every once in a while you get these odd coincidences (particularly for me with other people who grew up in New York City -- frequently there's some kind of overlap in schools and people we know). Most recent: I'm at a dinner party of scuba divers (taken there by a friend -- I believe water is for mixing with bourbon). The host is telling a story about his friend Ricardo whose company got caught up in a financial scandal (not his fault). I ask him what Ricardo's last name is. Turns out it's the Ricardo from the company that I went to as General Counsel after the scandal erupted. Small world.

Hollis, N.H., you say? I lived in Brookline.

[jymdyer.livejournal.com]

=v= Once upon a time I was in NYC with a girlfriend, who was telling me a story about some guy she'd run into. Apparently I didn't react in an impressed enough way, because she started to explain, in detail, about how rarely such a thing occurs.

She was about 4 paragraphs into stressing that fact when my friend Hannah came by on her bike. I waved, she stopped, we all chatted for a while, then she took off. At which point my girlfriend continued explaining that people in New York never just run into each other at random.

After I moved there myself, I ran into people I knew just about every day. It's good to specialize, I suppose (muppetness, bicycles, whatever). Overall I have the same impression of the city as Crocodile Dundee: "Imagine seven million people all wanting to live together. Yeah, New York must be the friendliest place on earth."

Re: Hollis, N.H., you say? I lived in Brookline.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

The other thing is that I think some people accrete people more than others do. Like me. If I run into my Byerly's cashier at the Twins game tonight, I'll know it, because I know her by sight and by name. If you're better at remembering names and faces, odds that you'll know it when you run into your sister's first college roommate are much higher.