Monday

 

I do believe in coincidences

In 1996 a man in Brooklyn named Russell Jones starts to get a couple of what he assumes are prank calls a night. It turns out that the rapper Ol' Dirty Bastard, who is also from Brooklyn, was, at birth, named Russell Tyrone Jones. So Russell Jones continued to get calls, on and off, from people trying to reach O.D.B. He even got calls talking about how great O.D.B. was when O.D.B. died this November. It's odd to consider who the people calling the number for Russell Jones thought they were going to reach in the days leading up to O.D.B.'s funeral. But the punch line in this (true) article is:

Jones really didn't mind the notoriety of being paired with the self-destructive rapper. After all, he was much better off than his brother Tom Jones. "His life in the seventies was a living hell."

Tom Jones and O.D.B... separated at birth?
Summarized or excerpted from Michael Agger's article in the 1/17/05 New Yorker.


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