Sunshine Coast Carjacking Chaos Sunshine Coast Carjacking Chaos
April 22, 2025 11:54 AM Subscribe
The best comment I've seen for this video is "The sound guy's getting a really weird echo off that mirror the woman is holding."
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:04 PM on April 22 [7 favorites]
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:04 PM on April 22 [7 favorites]
"Gotta admit, their stories sound consistent"
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 12:06 PM on April 22 [23 favorites]
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 12:06 PM on April 22 [23 favorites]
It's rare to find someone you come to know well enough to finish their sentences. And begin them. And middle them.
posted by mittens at 12:08 PM on April 22 [4 favorites]
posted by mittens at 12:08 PM on April 22 [4 favorites]
That is honestly a cool phenomenon, the speaking as if with one voice.
The whole package of hair and outfits and everything are even more amazing. Like, these are like some movie ideal of identical twins.
posted by jacquilynne at 12:10 PM on April 22 [3 favorites]
The whole package of hair and outfits and everything are even more amazing. Like, these are like some movie ideal of identical twins.
posted by jacquilynne at 12:10 PM on April 22 [3 favorites]
You should really read this article about the twins. Especially if your first comment is that these women are weird or creepy.
When Steve Irwin came to the rescue, he was in a troop carrier with a camera crew and a flurry of people. He had been called from nearby Australia Zoo to help a sick green sea turtle that had been found floating in the Pumicestone Passage in south-east Queensland. He charged into the water boots and all.
There he would encounter another rare natural phenomenon. Two identical women, speaking in unison, comforting the turtle. "He couldn't take his eyes off them," says their sister, Liz Eather. "He was quite taken with them."
And it wasn't just because he was suddenly experiencing double vision as the twin sisters stood in the water in their matching clothes. It was because he recognised something in them, something he had in himself; a profound intuition and innate understanding of birds and wildlife.
posted by oneirodynia at 12:16 PM on April 22 [18 favorites]
When Steve Irwin came to the rescue, he was in a troop carrier with a camera crew and a flurry of people. He had been called from nearby Australia Zoo to help a sick green sea turtle that had been found floating in the Pumicestone Passage in south-east Queensland. He charged into the water boots and all.
There he would encounter another rare natural phenomenon. Two identical women, speaking in unison, comforting the turtle. "He couldn't take his eyes off them," says their sister, Liz Eather. "He was quite taken with them."
And it wasn't just because he was suddenly experiencing double vision as the twin sisters stood in the water in their matching clothes. It was because he recognised something in them, something he had in himself; a profound intuition and innate understanding of birds and wildlife.
posted by oneirodynia at 12:16 PM on April 22 [18 favorites]
Because the original post doesn't say, these ladies are Paula and Bridgette Powers and they are pretty awesome and they rescue seabirds (apologies for the video of Piers Morgan).
posted by fight or flight at 12:16 PM on April 22 [12 favorites]
posted by fight or flight at 12:16 PM on April 22 [12 favorites]
Ha, jinx neirodynia! I owe you a Coke.
posted by fight or flight at 12:16 PM on April 22 [2 favorites]
posted by fight or flight at 12:16 PM on April 22 [2 favorites]
Twin articles from the ABC, how apropospropos.
posted by chavenet at 12:22 PM on April 22 [1 favorite]
posted by chavenet at 12:22 PM on April 22 [1 favorite]
I saw Paula and Bridgette referred to as "Cliff's Angels" which lead me to look that up - and it turns out they were Cliff Young's road team for a period.
Who's Cliff Young you are asking? Well, he was an Australian folk hero. A potato farmer who took to distance running late and won the 875 kilometres ultra marathon between Sydney and Melbourne at 61 years old. The twins make their appearance late in the video.
posted by zenon at 12:28 PM on April 22 [5 favorites]
Who's Cliff Young you are asking? Well, he was an Australian folk hero. A potato farmer who took to distance running late and won the 875 kilometres ultra marathon between Sydney and Melbourne at 61 years old. The twins make their appearance late in the video.
posted by zenon at 12:28 PM on April 22 [5 favorites]
I had a friend who could do that with his husband, and to some extent with anyone he talked to. I think it’s just a flavor of neuro spicy, where you’ve got a really tight channel on your interlocutor, and from there it’s just like predictive typing — if you’re locked into the context, and you know somebody relatively well, like their vocabulary and typical phrasings, you could probably do that.
posted by toodleydoodley at 12:47 PM on April 22 [2 favorites]
posted by toodleydoodley at 12:47 PM on April 22 [2 favorites]
I think it's super great, but also, thank goodness I don't have to hear MY twins do that all day. They are super adorable how they always need to be touching or sitting on top of eachother for show watching for book reading.
posted by atomicstone at 12:57 PM on April 22 [1 favorite]
posted by atomicstone at 12:57 PM on April 22 [1 favorite]
I was in Gatlinburg Tennessee one time - always a naturally surreal environment, yee haw - and there was a twins convention. Almost all the sets of twins were wearing matching clothes; it must have been part of the festivities. I have never wanted to take photographs so badly and not done it, partly because it just felt wrong and partly because I was not good at asking people if I could photograph them yet. Still not great at that! But I strongly felt they should have the right to enjoy the glorious peculiarity that is Gatlinburg without people with cameras - this was before ubiquitous smartphones - hounding their every step. Still I will never forget it - it was peak weird.
posted by mygothlaundry at 1:00 PM on April 22 [4 favorites]
posted by mygothlaundry at 1:00 PM on April 22 [4 favorites]
Echoes of The Chaplin Twins (Charlie Chaplin's granddaughters).
posted by Lanark at 1:01 PM on April 22 [1 favorite]
posted by Lanark at 1:01 PM on April 22 [1 favorite]
The two of them sound amazing, based on what I have read about them, and I shall personally fight* anyone who is mean to them.
*glare at/think uncharitable thoughts about
posted by maryellenreads at 1:06 PM on April 22 [4 favorites]
*glare at/think uncharitable thoughts about
posted by maryellenreads at 1:06 PM on April 22 [4 favorites]
It also reminds me of an improv game I've seen done on Whose Line Is It Anyway? that also sometimes comes up as a recurring bit on Comedy Bang Bang, where two performers try to give an extemporaneous speech in unison while pretending to have it memorized, e.g. "sure I remember the club's loyalty oath, why don't we say it together to prove we both know it?" Except these ladies are really good at it!
posted by Strange Interlude at 1:10 PM on April 22 [3 favorites]
posted by Strange Interlude at 1:10 PM on April 22 [3 favorites]
Oh.
Oh. Wow.
Good thing I didn’t have that blotter.
posted by ashbury at 1:27 PM on April 22 [2 favorites]
Oh. Wow.
Good thing I didn’t have that blotter.
posted by ashbury at 1:27 PM on April 22 [2 favorites]
They are super adorable how they always need to be touching or sitting on top of eachother for show watching for book reading.
The most apropos typo in MeFi history!
posted by jamjam at 1:36 PM on April 22 [6 favorites]
The most apropos typo in MeFi history!
posted by jamjam at 1:36 PM on April 22 [6 favorites]
These women sound amazing and wonderful and I think I might go a little mad if I was in their company for any length of time. I mean it does sound exactly like when you are on that call and your own voice is being fed back to you a few milliseconds off.
And I knew a pair of identical twins who would probably talk like this if they hadn't tried very hard not to. Instead they'd just throw a little parenthetical in the middle of the other twin's sentence, and the first twin would pause just long enough for her sister to say her piece and then carry on so smoothly you weren't sure who had said what.
The other pair of twins I knew for a few months before I realized they were twins... and they were identical. But they really didn't even look like each other, there was a few inches height difference (entirely due to posture), one wore contacts, totally different hair styles, they spent hardly any time together, lived in different residentces, didn't even sound alike. We met in university and one was in Math/Computers and the other was taking Art.
posted by cirhosis at 1:41 PM on April 22 [1 favorite]
And I knew a pair of identical twins who would probably talk like this if they hadn't tried very hard not to. Instead they'd just throw a little parenthetical in the middle of the other twin's sentence, and the first twin would pause just long enough for her sister to say her piece and then carry on so smoothly you weren't sure who had said what.
The other pair of twins I knew for a few months before I realized they were twins... and they were identical. But they really didn't even look like each other, there was a few inches height difference (entirely due to posture), one wore contacts, totally different hair styles, they spent hardly any time together, lived in different residentces, didn't even sound alike. We met in university and one was in Math/Computers and the other was taking Art.
posted by cirhosis at 1:41 PM on April 22 [1 favorite]
Watched the video - after the initial confusion, I was mesmerized. Then following the links above - these two ladies are simply remarkable - in many ways!
posted by davidmsc at 1:51 PM on April 22 [3 favorites]
posted by davidmsc at 1:51 PM on April 22 [3 favorites]
I've always been a fan of the slightly wonky stereo double tracking David Bowie did with his vocals. So pretty much this is just like if the song Ziggy Stardust came to life.
Down to the blonde/blue blue dress.
posted by es_de_bah at 1:53 PM on April 22 [1 favorite]
Down to the blonde/blue blue dress.
posted by es_de_bah at 1:53 PM on April 22 [1 favorite]
I found the video disturbing.
But they seem like wonderful people.
posted by Windopaene at 1:53 PM on April 22 [1 favorite]
But they seem like wonderful people.
posted by Windopaene at 1:53 PM on April 22 [1 favorite]
Maybe, but easily my winner for most annoying sibling ever. But then, I'm not a twin.
posted by Rash at 1:55 PM on April 22 [1 favorite]
posted by Rash at 1:55 PM on April 22 [1 favorite]
ww hh aa tt tt hh ee ff uu cc kk, mm aa tt tt??
posted by lalochezia at 2:10 PM on April 22 [3 favorites]
posted by lalochezia at 2:10 PM on April 22 [3 favorites]
This is lovely. I hope they get lots of donations for their work.
I’m reminded of a Terry Pratchett character who had the opposite of multiple personality disorder—she was one person in two bodies. She passed for twins, but she was still uncanny to people.
posted by Countess Elena at 2:59 PM on April 22 [2 favorites]
I’m reminded of a Terry Pratchett character who had the opposite of multiple personality disorder—she was one person in two bodies. She passed for twins, but she was still uncanny to people.
posted by Countess Elena at 2:59 PM on April 22 [2 favorites]
At least they'll be able to find work in Embassytown.
posted by edselford at 3:24 PM on April 22 [4 favorites]
posted by edselford at 3:24 PM on April 22 [4 favorites]
That is honestly a cool phenomenon, the speaking as if with one voice.
I trained myself to do something superficially like this as a kid because I was the kind of kid who was into really annoying party tricks. On a good day, I can still do it. It does work a better on people I already know fairly well.
The technique involves looking at the other person's face while dropping into a mental state that feels very similar to the one I'd use to emit glossolalia or scat, where I'm doing my best not to pay any attention at all to any meaning that the syllables coming out of my mouth might have, instead just trying to "sing" as close as I can get to in unison with the syllables coming out of the victim's. The process feels much more like playing an instrument than speaking.
Basically what I think is happening is that I'm bypassing a heap of the usual speech processing, which is slow, and using a more direct, less abstracted and therefore much faster pathway between perception and motor control to copy face shapes and speech sounds. But although it's fast there is still a delay, maybe a tenth of a second, and that's enough to fuck really seriously with most speakers' ability to emit meaningful speech. It works like a completely non-stealth, punchably up-close and personal version of Benn Jordan's sound jammer.
I don't think this is quite what's going on with the Twinnies, though. Seems to me that they're probably operating as a distributed identity that they've been building for their whole lives, and that this identity's entire process of speech production is shared across both their brains. I don't think they're just saying the same things, I suspect that what you're hearing when you listen to them is a single mind that happens to have two complete sets of motor and sensory apparatus to work with. I don't think they're speaking as if with one voice, I think that the best way to think about what they're doing is that there really is just the one voice.
Even the occasional desyncs, where the two of them drop in two different words that mean the same thing without missing a beat, remind me of stuff that goes on all the time in my own head while I'm speaking; it's just that I don't have a spare set of vocal apparatus to sound out both of the generated words, so nobody else notices the spare ones but me.
I suspect that their unusually keen ability to figure out what's going on with other living creatures might well reflect their distributed consciousness's ability to integrate two physically distinct sensoria in something loosely akin to the way binocular vision generates a depth model. Which is deeply, deeply cool and amazing and exactly the kind of departure from the familiar that I would expect an up-himself asshat like Piers Morgan to treat with no attempt at empathy or respect and react to with ridicule.
posted by flabdablet at 4:25 PM on April 22 [2 favorites]
I trained myself to do something superficially like this as a kid because I was the kind of kid who was into really annoying party tricks. On a good day, I can still do it. It does work a better on people I already know fairly well.
The technique involves looking at the other person's face while dropping into a mental state that feels very similar to the one I'd use to emit glossolalia or scat, where I'm doing my best not to pay any attention at all to any meaning that the syllables coming out of my mouth might have, instead just trying to "sing" as close as I can get to in unison with the syllables coming out of the victim's. The process feels much more like playing an instrument than speaking.
Basically what I think is happening is that I'm bypassing a heap of the usual speech processing, which is slow, and using a more direct, less abstracted and therefore much faster pathway between perception and motor control to copy face shapes and speech sounds. But although it's fast there is still a delay, maybe a tenth of a second, and that's enough to fuck really seriously with most speakers' ability to emit meaningful speech. It works like a completely non-stealth, punchably up-close and personal version of Benn Jordan's sound jammer.
I don't think this is quite what's going on with the Twinnies, though. Seems to me that they're probably operating as a distributed identity that they've been building for their whole lives, and that this identity's entire process of speech production is shared across both their brains. I don't think they're just saying the same things, I suspect that what you're hearing when you listen to them is a single mind that happens to have two complete sets of motor and sensory apparatus to work with. I don't think they're speaking as if with one voice, I think that the best way to think about what they're doing is that there really is just the one voice.
Even the occasional desyncs, where the two of them drop in two different words that mean the same thing without missing a beat, remind me of stuff that goes on all the time in my own head while I'm speaking; it's just that I don't have a spare set of vocal apparatus to sound out both of the generated words, so nobody else notices the spare ones but me.
I suspect that their unusually keen ability to figure out what's going on with other living creatures might well reflect their distributed consciousness's ability to integrate two physically distinct sensoria in something loosely akin to the way binocular vision generates a depth model. Which is deeply, deeply cool and amazing and exactly the kind of departure from the familiar that I would expect an up-himself asshat like Piers Morgan to treat with no attempt at empathy or respect and react to with ridicule.
posted by flabdablet at 4:25 PM on April 22 [2 favorites]
It's a different kind of witness statement altogether!
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 4:38 PM on April 22 [3 favorites]
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 4:38 PM on April 22 [3 favorites]
While they did the absolutely correct thing by getting as far away from the guy with the gun as possible, I would like to think it at least crossed their minds to pretend that there was only one of them there and try to get the carjacker to believe he was suffering from concussion.
posted by dannyboybell at 4:45 PM on April 22 [1 favorite]
posted by dannyboybell at 4:45 PM on April 22 [1 favorite]
exactly the kind of departure from the familiar that I would expect an up-himself asshat like Piers Morgan to treat with no attempt at empathy or respect and react to with ridicule.
Whereas they have two bodies and share a mind, he has one body and half a brain.
posted by Greg_Ace at 5:20 PM on April 22 [1 favorite]
Whereas they have two bodies and share a mind, he has one body and half a brain.
posted by Greg_Ace at 5:20 PM on April 22 [1 favorite]
Have you read The Rook? If not, you should, it is great.
Gestalt, three bodies, one individual. Creepy as foretold.
posted by Windopaene at 5:26 PM on April 22
Gestalt, three bodies, one individual. Creepy as foretold.
posted by Windopaene at 5:26 PM on April 22
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posted by BCMagee at 12:01 PM on April 22 [5 favorites]