Death in threes

[harleysneak]

Sorry if this isn't the right place to post this, but I wasn't sure where else to do it. I just wondered if anyone else has heard the whole thing that celebrity deaths come in 3's. It seems very strange, but in most cases it seems to be true. In the last 2 days, there was James Brown and then Gerald Ford. If I was famous, I may just be a little worried at this time.

 

[dong]

Cue Framed looks around to see if any studies have been done on this topic

Methinks it's more a self-fulfilling prophecy though: celebrities, like other humans, die all the time and so long as we are willing to bend a few conditions here and then it will seem to hold.

 

[FourBear]

I thought it wasn't only celebrities that die in three's. I thought the saying was that bad things (death included) always seem to happen in three's. Maybe that's why the number 3 is considered to be a mystical number by some people!

 

[dong]

On that note I remember the same among Benedictine monks- particularly embodied by the origins of musical time signature notation: nowadays we call 4/4 (4 beats in a bar) "common time" and it is denoted by a c. But that isn't actually an acronym, it's a broken circle. Back in the old days, 3/4 was considered complete (perhaps related to the notion of the Holy Trinity) and was actually denoted by an o (a circle), representing a kind of completeness.

 

[mamab]

Dong, you sure are a wealth of information. Do you do nothing but read constantly? LOL Seems you often come up with an obscure take on things, things the "normal" person wouldn't know or even care to know.

I honestly think I had heard about the 3/4 time someplace, but I don't think it's something that everyone is aware of.

I had always heard it said that "bad things happen in threes," as well. I never thought about where the saying had it's origin.

 

[Furious George]

It's an interesting Philosophy, but I think it deals with chance and the media more than anything.

 

[tater03]

I would have to agree with the above poster. Please don't take this the wrong way Dong but yes sometimes when you post it is way above my head. But I will honestly say I learn a lot from your posts. As for the comes in three's yes I have heard this before. And to answer the orginal posters questions I would have to say maybe Fidel Castro. Now that is not to say that I am sitting here waiting for someone else to pass away.

 

[Plumley]

Yes, "bad things come in threes" is a pretty common old saying. It feels like it's true because we all seem to have that experience of three bad things happening. What we don't do is define a time frame. If you wait long enough, a third bad thing is bound to happen. When it does we nod knowingly because, of course, bad things come in threes.

 

[dong]

Heh, yeah, I thought I'd just throw in some random tidbit to show some historical example (that one came from a school textbook on the history of music). I think that a combination of what Plumley and Furious George say here essentially covers this phenomenon.

 

[mamab]

I think we'd all be surprised if we did a search or found a montage of all the "famous" people who've died in the last year, and recently. I can think of several, myself.