A “Once in a Blue Moon” Superbowl Coincidence

I had bought the book, Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales by Marie-Louise von Franz, at least six months before I opened it on Sunday, January 31,1999 and found a section on the Chinese tendency to consider events which coincided in time to be meaningfully related. A footnote is appended to the section that mentions that people in the West also engage in this type of associative thinking: “The stock market usually goes up in years when a particular football league wins the Superbowl or in months with a blue moon.” I wouldn’t have considered this mention of coincidence especially noteworthy — except that I happened to be reading it on Super Bowl Sunday when a blue moon was also occurring.