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.

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.