I’ve lost track of the number of times in the last 24 hours I’ve heard or seen some variation of the phrase “these things always happen in threes” in relation to the recent spate of celebrity deaths, usually referring to Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, and Michael Jackson.
NO, people, these things do not happen in threes. They only seem to happen in threes because you keep resetting the counter when it reaches three! If the saying was “these things always happen in sevens”, everyone would be counting a few deaths further back and wondering who number 7 would be, and then when someone famous passes away, you’d shout, “Aha! Seven again!” and reset the counter.
Now there is, perhaps, something interesting in the common choice of three as the number in which groups of related “things” happen. Two is just coincidence, but three makes a pattern, which might just fire off a few extra neurons in the pattern-matching hardware we call our minds…