Who knows best..

So here’s a weird one..

Last night, I settled down in front of the tv with my girlfriend and decided to watch a recent Derren Brown “Trick or Treat” (Season 2, episode 3 for those who want to watch it..) Tonight’s guest was David Tennant, the current Dr. Who, and after randomly choosing to get a treat, Derren decided to let him see both the past and the future. Stick with me if you have no idea where this is going..

For his journey into the future, Tennant was placed into a hypnotic state and was made to experiment with “automatic writing”, a technique where supposedly the brain can be thinking of other things and holding a conversation while the hand writes words onto a piece of paper.

After scribbling for a while, Tennant was told to take the paper home with him in a sealed envelope and return four days later with the latest copy of the Guardian newspaper. When they met and before opening the paper, they opened the letter and started to look through the scribbled writing for any words that they could recognise.

By now a story had started to appear with words like “will sue”, “online”, “scrabble” and “tile” and my mind started to get a little twitch as I remembered that I’d covered this story around the time that the programme was filmed in January. When the word “wife” came up, I started to feel rather concerned..

When Tennant was then asked to open the paper, there on page 3, was my photograph of one of my facebook scrabulous games.

Not only that, but the “wife” in question was from the actual game itself and had been one of the moves (in a particularly low-scoring game) that I had made.

I’ve had a few moments in my life that have made my jaw drop but the fact that the only reason that I’d shot the picture was that I was on the picture desk at AFP for the day and was feeling a little restless so had browsed the internet for anything odd. On some technology page, I’d seen the first reports of the fact that Mattel were taking legal action against the guys that had created the online version of the game so had taken a picture of one of my current games on my laptop. The text desk decided it was quite a quirky story so wrote the words to go with the photo and put it out on the wire.

For the picture to then end up being used in a psychic experiment on tv with my random choice of word being one of the keywords has just made my brain collapse..

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 at 11:08 am. It is filed under Random oddity and tagged with david tennant, derren brown, Dr. Who, facebook, future, guardian, journalism, leon neal, news, newspaper, photo, prediction, press photography, psychic, scrabulous, supernatural. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.