EDITOR's NOTE. I suspect  T.AA. Colquhoun misses the point of the original Andersonnote and S. Aksenov's  comment--ir maybe I do.  I took both to be spoofs on some VN scholarship that relies (overly much) on numerology and such like. On the other hand, VN did engage in oneirological number mongering. 


-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [Fwd: Prophecy in Pale Fire?]
Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2001 13:21:11 -0500
From: TA Colquhoun <TAColquhoun@compuserve.com>
To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>


This  message was  originally  submitted by  TAColquhoun@COMPUSERVE.COM to  the
NABOKV-L list at LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU. 

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Message text written by Vladimir Nabokov Forum

>I just received a copy of Priscilla Meyer's "Find What the Sailor Has Hidden" and I noticed on p. 185 that she connects King Alfin crashing his plane (called a "bird of doom" in the notes to line 71) into a building (reminiscent of certain recent events) with the waxwing flying into the window. She mentions that the Swiss call the waxwing Sterbevogel ("death-bird") and consider it an omen of war, pestilence and famine, which reappears every 7 years (though it was actually 8 years since the last attack on the World Trade Center). She also mentions that Shade died 16 days after his 61st birthday. 16+61=77, the number of one of the plane s involved in the terrorist attack of September 11th. Don't read too much into this, it's just a wild coincidence that I thought you guys might find interesting. Sincerely, Steve Anderson<

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 What utter piffle. It's on a par with all those silly urban legends about 11 Sept - like the face of the devil in the flames of the WTC and all the Nostradamus rubbish. Pleeeease. Let's keep Nab's beautiful world out of the fray. The only 'birds of doom' are the cretins that give credence to this sort of thing. Alexandra Colquhoun