Barney Does Google

Like many artists, I have a day-job that is not in the arts. One Thursday, I find myself in front of a high school advanced placement economics class, filling in for an absent teacher, and attempting to fill in the missing historical context from the handout that the absent teacher had left behind.

One of the students asks, "Mister Thal, are you still a mime?"

"Yes, I am," I respond, "but I am also a playwright, in fact, I just had a reading of my play this past Sunday."

The following day, I notice on MyBlogLog that someone had found my blog by doing a Google Search for "Mr. Thal Playwright." (I should note that on my day job I never let my students think that my first name is anything but "Mister.") So that day I post to Facebook:

Ian Thal is amused to see that some student of his did a Google search for "Mr. Thal Playwright."

A number of friends thought that was amusing, but Barney, who wishes to be known as "my anonymous friend, Barney" despite the fact that defeats the whole purpose of anonymity, responded with:

Barney what's more amazing is that it works: http://www.google.com/search?q=mr.+thal+playwright&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

This followed with a conversation with Barney about the past reading. Where upon, Sunday morning I discover that as we were speaking, he was trying other Google searches:

mr. thal is a mime playwright who who has a wiget [sic] on his blog that lets him see this

Which indeed it did. He then followed with the somewhat less successful searches:

ian thal mostly though it is a matter of figuring out where the fat is in act iii and cutting it.

And:

ian thal the mime who wears silly hats

To which I respond with:

Barney is a friend who shares my quirky sense of humor

Which doesn't work at all.

Going Viral

Somehow, last week's post, Arlecchino at the Gulu-Gulu Cafe received a one-day spike in readership. Intially, I attributed this to this post by my friend, local playwright and actor, Art Hennessey (mentioned previously when I did a presentation for his students at Emerson), on his Mirror up to Nature blog, as I always find it interesting to read, and generally find it worthwhile to follow the links he provides to other sites, so understandably, I thought that this would be the source of traffic considering how well he praised it.

Instead, I found that the visitors were coming primarily from two sources.

The first was Wicked Local's Somerville Blog, in which Kathleen Powers referred to me as "well known Somerville mime" with some hint of surprise that mimes might also write blogs. I suppose I must be well-known now, if other people say I am!

The second was Universal Hub, where founder, Adam Gaffin referenced my blog not once, but twice (make that thrice and it would have qualified as a running gag for the day.) First, he expressed surprise that mimes might recite poetry and then suggested in a second post that actress Alecia Batson could use some pointers in mime technique before her next audition.

Digg Posts Deleted

Just a note:

I deleted several posts to this blog that were posted by accident. I use a number of social bookmarking sites, including Digg. Yesterday, while looking over past bookmarks I had, quite by accident, published some of my "diggs" to this blog. This isn't an act of self-censorship; I merely wanted my "diggs" to stay on Digg. I prefer to use this blog for a different type of writing.

Thal contra Schumann: The New England Journal of Aesthetic Research Interviews

As mentioned previously, I was interviewed by Boston Phoenix contributor, Greg Cook for his blog The New England Journal of Aesthetic Research regarding my criticism of Bread and Puppet Theater founder and artistic director, Peter Schumann which began last year after ending my relationship with the troupe.

Cook, though by no means endorsing either my position or Schumann's, did an admirable job of asking both of us difficult questions, many of which I am still pondering.

Cook's series begins with an overview entitled "Peter Schumann's Israeli-Palestinian problem?" and continues with a two part interview with Schumann beginning here and ending here. The series concludes with an interview Cook conducted with me via email.

As I digest the contents of Cook's interview with Schumann, I may decide to comment further. However, as of this writing, I wish to note that both Cook and I (largely at Cook's suggestion, though it seems to be keeping in tune with my general practice) have cross-linked and each other's blogs to such a degree. The result, is a potential in hypertext rarely seen exercised in the blogosphere.

Bizarre Protest Sign Awards

Adam Holland has nominated a photograph I took at the October 7th, Dream for Darfur rally fo his "Bizarre Protest Sign Awards".

Ian Thal and the Doppelgängers

I used to look myself up on Google until I learned how to have Google do the work for me. This past May, I was surprised to find that the website ex.plode.us had created a profile based on my profile at tribe.net along with links to some of my friends there, and URLs for other pages I operate. I decided that the best thing to do would be to claim my profile and establish myself before somebody else did and caused mischief. Interestingly enough, I found multiple profiles for some of my friends, especially ones I know from LambdaMOO, who tend to be early adopters of internet techologies.

One nice thing about ex.plode.us is that it serves as a means for linking one's various networking sites and blogs onto a single page and since it crosses networks, one can have a flickr persona listed as a friend of a tribe.net persona. However, I have to confess that ex.plode as of this writing does not have a lot of utility yet and the documentation is so slim compared to that on tribe, Blogger, MySpace, or technorati that I had to largely rely on trial-and-error (I even had to debug one of their widgets with my limited html skills.)

This led me to wonder: How many Ian Thals are there on the internet that I do not know about, or have simply forgotten about? I found a few abandoned webpages with which I had once tried to promote my art but I also discovered a previously unknown "Elven lord Ianthal Serevemon" who is apparently a character in somebody's fantasy role-playing game, and while I first went by the nick-name of "Ianderthal" at the age of thirteen, and and even used it as an online handle for several years (though it only remains as the name of my yahoogroup) and while most Ianderthals I found were in fact, my own past selves dating from 1999 to 2001, I was to find "a 19 year-old guy from West Bloomfield, Michigan, USA" using the same moniker , another studying in Middletown, Connecticut, another who is the guitar player for a band called Too Hectic and yet another (perhaps the same) Ianderthal, who is a contributor to Urban Dictionary. There were yet other Ianderthals whose identity I could not even begin to fathom, I suspect that at least one was an anime character.

As my last name is so uncommon that anyone who posesses it is quite likely a relative, I had never before had the experience of discovering a doppelgänger in the same manner that a "John Smith" might. Curioser and curioser.