OK, so if you watch Battlestar Galactica, you know that the song All Along the Watchtower, by Dylan and covered by Hendrix (these people need no first names), played a very important role in last night’s episode.

So you wanna hear something weird?

I had my iPod on shuffle at work/school today, and that song came on (the Hendrix version). I had not watched the episode, nor heard anything about it, at this point, but I watched it as soon as I came home. Weird enough at this point, right? What a coincidence – the song that I’d be hearing in the episode just a few hours later happened to be picked randomly out of the 10000 songs on my iPod.

It didn’t stop there, though, because I attached special signficance to the song as soon as I heard it. “God damn!” I said to myself, “this is the perfect song for today!” I took it off shuffle and started listening to more Hendrix. I listened to him while I did some more work, then listened to him all the way home. I considered blogging about it – about how All Along the Watchtower is the perfect song for one of the first hot days of the year, for some reason (which would be a pretty stupid thing to blog about, but my brain was obviously muddled by strange psychic cylon confusion magic). Then, we put on the show, and there was the song that started this strange mini Hendrix obsession in the first place.

Isn’t that fucked? Of course it’s coincidence. But it’s not often that I, out of nowhere, get obsessed with a song. That’s totally out of character for me. It’s even less often that the song I get obsessed with for no reason ends up playing a role in my near future.

Say all you want about distorted memory, subconscious pattern recognition, the fact that coincidences are inevitable, etc etc, but some things are just so unlikely that it is more parsimonious to guess that something other than mere chance is operating.