Glenn Greenwald in Salon: Major troop reductions imminent - again

Mark Mitchell in Embryoyo: Fool Me Forty-Nine Times, Shame on Me...

So who is this Mitchell guy?

The change in titles suggest it's handmade plagarism and not just datascraping.

Does it say something positive about my outlook on humanity that I'm actually surprised?

And I second Susan: Who is this guy?

> Any idea why the plagarism? Is he looking to sell ads? Is this a splog site?

No sign of ads - it looks for all the world like a normal blog full of decent quality articles about political and social issues.

I don't see an income stream here. Resume boosting? Or the worlds saddest form of ego boosting?

Susan, good catch. I was typing them into Movable Type as fast as Jim was finding them.

Greenwald in Salon: Wolfowitz agrees to quit

Mitchell in Embryoyo: Hungry Like The Wolf

Screens captured; where do you want the images?

I catch a person or two a month this way, mostly bloggers who are shocked! shocked, I tell you! to get an e-mail from me.

I am not at all surprised by Theresa's post ... this sort of thing is rampant.

Having a little too much fun here.

Not sure how to timestamp, but working on it.

The good news: professional dumb stuff-doer (AV Club)

Given the Salt Lake City connection, I'd bet on it.

He just does not LEARN, eh?

My mind is boggling. Loudly.

My mind is boggling. Loudly.

Mark Mitchell is clearly a pioneer mapping out new topologies in Malice-Incompetence space.

I've got the full screen captures with the time in the corner now.

At this point, I'm thinking the greater challenge would be in finding an article on the blog that isn't ripped from somewhere else.

James@23: I think that's actually this guy's MySpace blog. If so, he's a location match with the Mark Mitchell fired from the Daily Utah Chronicle.

Finding examples of plagiarism and stomping on them? I'm all for it, though not just at the moment (I have a Dutch class to go to). Piling on the guy who did it, past the point of memorable instruction? Not so much.

Not saying we're doing anything wrong. I'm just worried that we'll sour our discourse. And we don't really need that right now.

Ignore me if I'm being a worrywart.

The thing is....he may have posts of his own in there, but now every single one of 'em is suspect to me. Even if I enjoyed his very own writing style, I would never really take it for being all his own ever again. Kinda sad.

Which is to say that they don't care unless the copyright holder sends them a bunch of documentation in the mail, even if the plagiarism is blatantly obvious.

Yes, I'm a little angry about spam blogs stealing my posts so they can slap AdSense ads on top, and the amount of work that appears to be involved in getting Google to revoke their account.

That was first written by Cintra Wilson. It was published in her book "A Massive Swelling : Celebrity Re-Examined as a Grotesque Crippling Disease" in 2000.

Anyone found out if that promising young reporter found another journalism job somewhere and would like to do a reprise?

I think it's funny.

Awfully interesting thing: PZ Myers over at ScienceBlogs.com appears to have copied your article! Word for word! Punctuation by punctuation! Link by link!

How horrible... and PZ even appears to have done it *the day before* you posted yours. Why, the fiend must have broken into your computer and stolen your draft version! And your writing sounds so much like PZ's that nobody might ever have noticed PZ taking your article at all, if you hadn't bravely continued to post your original.

We're all fortunate that you possess the strength and character it takes to deal so effectively with other people posting your articles in the days before you yourself do, taking the high road and not even commenting at all on their crime, simply letting your words stand for themselves.

An yes, I did mean the plural "articles". After all, look at what Glenn Greenwald did with this other piece of yours! And there's more! In fact, trivially googling shows me that four of the last five of your posts have been stolen, word for word, by other bloggers who have then posted them hours or days before you posted them yourself! And the fifth? Well, all the others have been cruelly stolen from you, why not that one, too? You should check further!

And you should probably take your computer to the shop, install a firewall, get it scanned by a professional, etc. Everyone's posting all your work before you do, that MUST mean your computer is compromised!

At this point, I'm assuming that any item on that blog is most likely lifted from somewhere else.

I wonder what he was thinking to do this?

Salon's Carol Lloyd's Murderous Vegans

He's lucky he wasn't more widely read (most of his 'posts' have 0 comments) or people might take his little transgression more seriously. Like lawsuit seriously.

In comparison, ML on Technorati has an authority of 1400 (1) and a rank of 1200 (2).

Seems to me like he wanted to jump-start his blog. Too bad he connected the cable clamp to the gas tank.

----
(1) a function of the number of links (?).
(2) overall rank of all blogs. Here's their top 100 blogs

That was fun while it lasted.

He must be reading Making Light, right now, and deleting as fast as we post.

For the people who came in late, here are some screen shots:

Seriously, they're making a fucking Sims movie?

And the original.

Fool Me Forty-Nine Times....

And the original.

Creation Wins!!!

And the original.

Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!"

And the original.

...And After Everything We Did For Them!

And the original.

At Embryoyo and at MySpace.

But, assuming the project actually exists, it probably won't be. It's probably just someone going "Hey, this game sells outrageous quantities! Quick, sell the movie rights before the person who bought them figures out what the game actually is!"

As Kathryn said (2), this looks like handmade plagiarism, not datascraping. I think Mark Mitchell is the kind of human being who either doesn't understand that plagiarism is wrong, or doesn't understand that some people promiscuously remember text, or both.

I've known they exist since I was in high school, when I occasionally helped out with English Dept. round-robin readings of student poetry-writing journals. (I think I've written about this before on Making Light. If so, please forgive the duplication.) As soon as a teacher recognized one plagiarism in a poetry journal, the whole thing would get passed around the English office for further identification.

If I hadn't done that, I would have had trouble believing there were students who thought their English teachers wouldn't recognize standard chestnuts of English verse -- or, having recognized one, suspect that other poems in their journal might be lifted as well.

Is this guy the same Mark Mitchell who got fired from the Daily Utah Chronicle? We don't know for sure. If it is (or even if it isn't), this guy needs to learn that whether or not he agrees that plagiarism is wrong, other people think it is, and they will catch him at it. Better to learn that now, in an obscure blog, than in some later and more catastrophic circumstance.

Breathtaking.

Promise me you'll only use your powers for good, y'all?

...oh wait.

Seen this ritual before, have we? Heh.

Also, I have another pair of screen caps. Anyone want to give me an address to submit screencaps to for archiving? I feel left out.

Now we need a new game.

Subject: Son, the internet caught you with your pants down

You've taken down your typepad blog. Probably for the best.

If you want to be a writer, or even if you don't, stop stealing other people's work and trying to pass it off as your own.

The internet is watching.

It's always possible that he checked out this site generally, and then decided that sockpuppets would be a bad idea. Not likely*, but I'm just saying.

*In fact, it would probably be the first time for that, but stranger things have happened.

There's a more substantial game one post down, where Abi, Ajay, and the rest of the crew are writing LOLcat poetry and and other pastiches.

Honestly, how could anyone have thought he'd get away with that at all, let alone for any length of time? So much material, sooner or later, someone had to notice.

Seriously, it looks like he was only running for a few weeks, in fact, before someone actually did... And if the goal had been to get readers/citations, that would only have been self-defeating... soon as his profile rose, he'd get nailed for sure. He probably only made it as long as he did because no one was reading it.

Truly, truly strange.

Wild theory time: was he trying to impress someone in his personal life? Someone who might not read that much of the net? Someone who maybe hadn't heard about him getting fired from that paper?

Man, if you're reading this: just write your own stuff...

I mean, even if you've nothing to say, and have hardly a single original idea in your noggin, (a) that describes most of the bloggers in the world, anyway, and (b) in Hollywood, they call that marketability.

#55 may also be bogus.

Dude, what were you thinking?

How was Kansas City? Were you and Patrick able to absorb enough local cuisine to fend off barbecue deficit for a while?

Teresa: Groveling apologies for the sillinesss of duplicate posting.

The power of Making Light is truly awesome. Wonder if he's sitting in his room with the lights off, shivering.

The problem isn't so much the effect on the other person as the effect on us, if we let the glee of the experience carry us away. If we forget that there is another person at the other end of it*.

I just don't want what I'll call, for lack of a better term, karmic backlash. Not till you have your deflector shields properly angled again, at the very least.

Ignore me if I'm being a prig, or a bore, or something like that.

-----
* I still think this is a useful task to do, because there are also people at the other end of this plagiarism, and they're going to be hurt by what he's done†.
† I sound almost like Victorian sex education for woemn, don't I? You can do it, but for heaven's sake, don't enjoy it.

..

oh, sorry. It seems that train of thought was just too warped to stay on the rails. Ta ta!

You forgot to accuse everyone we've ever met of censorship, preferably citing the First Amendment. Shocked at the omission, I am, shocked. I'd almost think you were pretending to be a sockpuppet.

Naah. Too Byzantine.

a) Mark Mitchell is actually the most insightful writer on the interweb, with a reputation that will be recognized by posterity, and

b) If a list of all the people he "plagiarized" were compiled, we'd have a list of all the bloggers who now possess access to a time machine. Or will have had future access to a time machine.

Yeah, I now see that. I seem to be denser than usual today. The goatse thing threw me off...I see from Wikipedia that the site is no longer active (didn't click on it because 1. at work and 2. ew).

Now why on earth would anyone want to do that?

• Two students plagiarized *each other* in a class of mine this semester. Word-for-word paragraph, plus additional damning evidence. Claimed it was "unintentional." 0s for both. I gave each the opportunity to rewrite, averaged against a zero.
(On a side note, the paperwork I had to fill out to submit to the University after catching my students was massive, but I suppose it's for the teachers' own protection…)

• One student in a class last year plagiarized a paper on Mother Courage, and another one on Angels in America, extensively copying from (the first time) the textbook we use and (the second time) from sparknotes.com.

• While working at Barnes & Noble, I was clearing out back issues of literary journals. One quarterly named "Rattle," the Summer 2004 issue, had an interesting poem on Joe McCarthy. 20 of its 26 lines might strike one as similar to a Roy Cohn speech in Angels in America… a *lot*… Magazine did nothing. Poet claimed it was inadvertent.

IM IN UR HAUS,
IN UR BOX,
WIT UR MAUS,
WIT UR FOX,
ON UR TRAIN,
IN UR CAR,
IN UR RAIN,
IN UR DARK,
EATIN UR GREEN EGGZ AND HAMZ

20 of its 26 lines might strike one as similar to a Roy Cohn speech in Angels in America…

Was it meant to be "found poetry"?

(What's the difference between found poetry and plagiarism? Found poetry has linebreaks.)

I'm dead from ROTFL, Jim; take my wallet and tricorder.

(Unless I just had a bad URL, in which case I still have a chance to mock him myself).

Exhibit A, published March 22, 2007: http://www.sff.net/people/yog/mitchell1e.jpg

"Musician boys are invariably the first big crush of a preteen girl, her first big sloppy emotional response to the world. The creation of teen sensations is now a multi-national Moloch, and such phenomenon as Menudo, New Kids on the Block, 'N Sync, the Backstreet Boys, and Disney's High School Musical represent a vital stage in the sexual/emotional development of the preteen -- i.e., the kind of biological confusion and obsessive hysteria which causes little girls to wallpaper their rooms with gratuitous posters of dreamy, hard-nippled thugs and tarty kinderwhores and throw high-pitched grand mal tantrums until albums and T-shirts and concert tickets are bought.

Twenty thousand girls stood outside the MTV window at Times Square in New York City and screamed for teen-masturbation-focus the Backstreet Boys in the summer of 1999. A few days earlier, another twenty thousand girls stood outside the MTV window and wailed and wept and beat their breasts for multinational super-pasteurized Hispano-sensation Ricky Martin. American seemed slightly shocked, as if we expected all that weird screaming hysteria to have died along with the Beatles."

Exhibit B, published May 25, 1999:
http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/1999/05/25/ricky/index.html

"Musician boys are invariably the first big crush of a preteen girl, her first big sloppy emotional response to the world. The creation of puppy-lovable teen sensations is now a multinational Moloch, and such phenomena as N-Sync, The Spice Girls and Backstreet Boys represent a whole vital stage in the sexual/emotional development of the preteen, i.e. the kind of biological confusion and obsessive hysteria that causes little girls to wallpaper their rooms with gratuitous posters of dreamy, hard-nippled thugs and tarty kinder-whores and throw high-pitched grand-mal tantrums until albums and T-shirts and concert tickets are bought.

About 20,000 girls all stood outside the MTV window at Times Square in New York and screamed for teen masturbation-focus the Backstreet Boys last week, and a few days earlier, another 20,000 girls all stood outside the MTV window and wailed and wept and beat their breasts for multinational super-pasteurized Hispano-sensation Ricky Martin. America seemed slightly shocked, as if we expected all that weird screaming hysteria to die along with the Beatles."

(I write for a living, so I get a bit angrier than most over plagiarism.)

hmm, it would be great if someone made a really good plagiarism bot and set it loose just to make it seem like Mark Mitchell was the king of plagiarizers.

The change in titles suggest it's handmade plagarism and not just datascraping.

Right now it's a work in progress. I'm trying to look at how the reasoning faculities get switched off when people look at terror.

How, one wonders, can Dershowitz say torture is acceptable; why does someone who is skeptical of bad data in things like creationism, decide that a small sampling of people with motive to lie are more credible than all the other evidence.

Right now it's dreckish. The skeleton is there, but the flesh is flabby.

I can send you the draft for comment if you like.

I'd be glad to read it & give you any feedback that I can. I'm a lot less in touch with current politics than you, and a lot less refined a moral thinker, but I can give you the idiot's view.

Tell me if you don't know how to derive my email from this site.

Yes, I am, in fact I wrote this song to prove it:

"The Real Mark Mitchell"
by me-

May I have your attention please?
May I have your attention please?
Will the real Mark Mitchell please stand up?
I repeat, will the real Mark Mitchell please stand up?
We're gonna have a problem here..

You all act like you never seen a genius before
Jaws all on the floor like Pam, like Tommy just burst in the door
and started whoopin her ass worse than before
they first were divorce, throwin her over furniture (Ahh!)
It's the return of the... "Ah, wait, no way, you're kidding,
that's too obvious to be plagiarism?"
And Teresa Nielsen Hayden said... nothing you idiots!
If she'd said anything I'd be claiming credit for it here! (Ha-ha!)
Copy editor women love Mark Mitchell
cause Mark Mitchell copies everything they're editing anyway...

anyway it's a work in progress, it's pretty good if I say so myself, totally new, nothing like it has ever been heard in this world before. I'm the new Ruttles, me, the real Mark Mitchell.

I just hope you people are ashamed of yourselves for maligning this young man. Especially you who wrote the bad Eminem ripoff, you're no Mark Mitchell young man (or lady) and you never will be.

What's a splog?

It happens, sometimes, when an account goes dormant, and some one hacks it, filling it with links to boost page rank.

Or they just build it from scratch.

They often look like metastasized, spam, e-mails.

Crazy? Sure -- crazy like a fox.

I don't know... that article talks about a manuscript sent for comment in 1999 and (a revised and possibly with plagiarism aded) manuscript at a publisher in 2001. The MM fired from the U. of Utah paper was presumably a college student, and so would mostly likely have been 15 or younger in 1999... Also, the Florida MM received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006, which seems a bit unlikely for the Utah MM.

I think the Florida person is a completely separate case.

For added weirdness, the Florida Mark Mitchell is the longtime partner, co-author, and co-editor of writer David Leavitt, who was himself busted for plagiarism by Stephen Spender.

#128: *snork!* I wondered how long it would take for Lobachevsky to show up.

mark.mitchell@utah.edu

What is so hard about putting a notice at the top of a post, including the link and author's name (OR Blog), concerning the origins of it?

Answer: Admitting that you didn't write it.

Link factories that yank stories unedited with source links I can understand. Heck, at least they help your Blog a bit. But straight plagerism? Sad... Truly sad.

Ah, you missed his first appearance up @ 26...

And I was listening to "Lobachevsky" on my iPod only a couple of nights ago...

... which makes me think: does anyone know of a recording of Danny Kaye's "Stanislavsky", the inspiration for "Lobachevsky"?

Yes, a splog is a spam blog: scrapes or duplicates info from other sites for the purpose of generating Google hits, usually for the purpose of generating revenue via Google Ads, though sometimes for political purposes (see also TNH's writings on Astroturfing).

There are many more out there than you think. There are circulating lists of splogs used by those who manage search engines that are used for the purpose of keeping splogs from overwhelming legitimate content.

The splog technique is also sometimes used for stalking: one person or a small group of people create a dozen or two splogs (usually duplicating content to save on labor) targeting their victim in order to give the impression that there are many people out there who have bad things to say about the victim, not just a couple.

Isn't anyone else fantasted that there are two major-league serial plagiarists named Mark Mitchell?

I assumed it was something like the T-shirt I saw long ago: "Dread Pirate Roberts #143. Want a franchise? Ask me how!"

The census department has lists of the most common names in the US. By building a spreadsheet and then multiplying...

Oh, wait, this is the 21st century.

How Many Of Me suggests there are 2,273 Mark Mitchells in the US.

Or maybe he's just some guy with the same name who is more clueless than I can comprehend.

On a related note - here's a hypothetical question for you all. You are contacted by someone who is doing their thesis on plagiarism detection and wants to put up a small sample of your work (like a blog post) under a ficticious name somewhere to see how long it is before a reader catches on. The one request is that if you are contacted they would like you to act like you are unaware of the "plagiarist" and report it to them. Would you agree? Why or why not?

Now I'm having a bit of guilty fun putting in names like 'Siobhan Gonzalez' and seeing how many imaginary people pop up.

two major-league serial plagiarists named Mark Mitchell

Maybe it's a shared author-name, like Ellery Queen for plagiarists.

If you go to the census lists, you can check if your surname ranks in the top 1000. If not, no you.

I'm quite certain my surname wouldn't make the top 10k, 100k or even 1 million list*.

---------
* As a shy person, I've always been a bit annoyed that having a rare name removes the plausible deniability most other people have from shared names.

That's one reason I'm protective of pseudonymity: if shy people can't have pseudonyms then they'll either be silent or on medications** when online.

** not that I don't think modern stress reduction methods- including antianxiolytics- are quite useful. Cortisol floods are bad, unless one needs to fight or flee.

Oops: off by an order of magnitude, as the census' list goes to not quite 100k.

Looking at all those names reminded me of Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping point quiz:
Are You A Connector?

When I first took it I scored right at average- 19 or 20. But luckily for my social life my partner-in-time scores 4x that.

there are 32 of my partner.

It's even more dramatic if you live overseas. There is one Scottish "Mc" name on the list (McLean), and no other typically or identifiably Scottish names there. But even in a Scottish city (Edinburgh), well over a third of my colleagues and friends have such names.

He made that quiz from the New York phone directory, so it'd be most applicable to North America.

However, my take is that connectorship as an ability is orthogonal to extroversion.

A connector is the person you'd go to if you needed to meet up with a Kierkegaardian existentialist and a rocket scientist (1). Better, the connector lets you know you ought to meet up with said people, because "what you just said reminds me of people you should meet- the three of you should get together. Here, let me give you their numbers..."

And when you do meet, the connector was right.

My partner is a connector. When I throw parties- well, I don't throw parties. When we together throw parties, there'll be everyone from apple farmers to stage managers to zoologists (3). Diverse.

------
(1) me, I'm an idea connector. If you need to get Kierkegaardian existentialism and rocket science (2) together maybe I can help.

(2) Leaps into the void

(3) or, if the party is in Silicon Valley, everyone from Apple developers to Fab makers to robot designers, with both Linux and BSD programmers. Diverse.

There are 39 people in the U.S. named Kathryn Cramer.

When I was a kid there was an adult Kathryn Cramer who had lots and lots of books overdue from the Seattle Public Library system. Every once in a while, they would try to collect a couple hunddred bucks from me when I went to check out a stack of books.

I very occasionally get mail for Kathryn Cramer, the self-help writer. Any time a letter begins, Dear Kathryn Cramer: Your books have changed my life . . . I know it's the other one.

Then there was the teenager who kept insisting in IM that I was her aunt Pat from Vegas -- didn't I know my own sweet niece Leslie? Why wasn't I willing to talk to her? She was going to prove to me that I was her Aunt Pat... I finally had to ban her -- for a lack of critical thinking skills as much as anything else.

Years later, I've got a couple of Mel Odom's Gene dolls in my collection, and had no idea it was the same guy. Although now I totally see the resemblance between the dolls and the picture. And I had no idea there was a whole other Mel Odom out there, to boot! Thanks for the info.

*I mean the cover was sexy. I don't know if the book was or not, since I never read it, because of the sexy cover, which is what made me want to read it...hey, I'm nearly 40 now, maybe I'll go buy the darn thing.

Maia is also a lower-tech world than the kinda-medieval setting of most fantasy novels. Richard Adams' earlier book Shardik took place in the same setting, albeit earlier in the internal chronology; in its epilogue, there's a brief mention of the introduction of horses to their world.

Q: Why isn't my name on the list?

The list of names from the census bureau isn't complete. For privacy reasons, names with relatively few responses were not included in the list. We used this data to create this site. Our site can only be as good as the data we have to work with.

* Around 1 out of every 10 people will have a last name not on the list.
* Around 1 out of every 10 people will have a first name not on the list.

Using the same statistical fallacy this site is known for, that means about 81% of people will have both names on the list. In a mathematical coup our scientists have determined from this information that about 19% of people will have either one or both names missing from the list.

"I think it's important not to take it as a rejection of you personally."
Gabriel Caine -- Diggstown.

Also, they know that they aren't the most accurate program in the world. A full discussion of the accuracy of the program may be found here.

Teresa, #149: Only a little; "Mark Mitchell" isn't an uncommon name by any means. Now, if there were 2 different serial plagiarists named... oh, Adlai von Heigenbrugge... that would gobsmack me.

Bruce, #152: I think you mean this shirt, still available from Pegasus Publishing.

Kathryn, #161: That's one of the reasons I used to have a prepared fake name ready to give people on the rare occasions I went to social functions where there would be mostly people I didn't know. My birth name was unusual, memorable, and there were only 2 of it in the phone book, the other one male (my father). NO WAY was I going to give some random person that level of info! (And here we connect over to the "honor killing & women's issues" thread -- how many men would even think to worry about doing that?)

I looked at the connector quiz, and promptly ran up against the problem of, "They expect me to remember how many people I know named Johnson?!!" I probably am a connector by any reasonable standard; 30 years of being active in SCA & SF fandom, 20 years of contradancing, 15 years of activity in various online fora... I know a whole helluva lot of people, and I have that free-association brain function that lets me remember that oh yeah, So-and-so was talking about that too, maybe the two of you should meet.

Slightly off-topic... have you got your LJ set up yet?

Pat, #169: It says volumes for the difference in online environments then and now that, until I re-read it and realized that you were still talking about early-AOL, my first thought was "that was an attempted phish."

Ah, but Teresa in this modern age of Google you can't ever really take them down. "Mark Mitchell, in Embryoyo, After everything we’ve done for them" is cached here for people who want to see and compare:
http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:DU8_NaNFjLEJ:embryoyo.typepad.com/embryoyo/2007/05/and_after_every.html+Mark+Mitchell,+in+Embryoyo&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=3&gl=au&client=firefox-a

Yes- I zapped "Kathryn, Ironically" into life yesterday*. My username is kathryn_ironic.

--------
* Of course I'd thought starting it was work: I see that was the easy part- now I have to populate it. (And what's with LJ's terse "you have only 4 friends" reminders? Don't they think I can count them myself?** or Couldn't they wait a few days before judging my social life?)

** as a human, I am able to automatically know the counts of groups with seven members or less. I believe that puts humans right up with crows, but not quite with the other chimps.

It could have been worse. The nerds who cooked this up could have come up with message "You have only 4 friends. What's wrong with you loser?"

That being said, welcome to LJ, Kathryn.
Go forth and populate it now.
Prose need not be deathless.

I have the same issue with an unusual last name; I have already been phone-harassed once by someone who assaulted me and then asked for my number because he wanted to "have another date." He was offended when I refused, and he thought I would be flattered and admire his cleverness in tracking me down by the phone directory and calling me late at night. I've listed my number under a fake name ever since, and at cons I ask for my last name not to be on my badge. (Though that last is fairly useless since I started working and being on program, unfortunately.)

I don't generally give out my phone number nowadays anyway. I give out a disposable email address.

Prose need not be deathless.

It should not, however, be lifeless.

One further possibility. It is possible to get a JOB as a blogger for a company or campaign. Maybe the blog in question was intended as backup for a job application.

> One further possibility. It is possible to get a JOB as a blogger for a company or campaign. Maybe the blog in question was intended as backup for a job application.

That's my favourite theory at the moment. It's immoral and naive, but at least it's sane.

(A blog could also get you a print journalism job - and you might be lucky enough to get an employer who's not web savvy.)

Unfortunately I get far too little of his misdirected mail. :)

(my name is a Word Of Power: Kill for poorly written database software)

Also surprising is just how many DBs strip the hyphen from my Queens (NYC) address. Queens addresses have two numbers separated by a hyphen, the first being the number of a cross-street. Dropping that hyphen has at least some potential for collisions....

As far as duplicate names, I once got dunned for checks bounced by a namesake who was attending a different school at my university (I was undergrad, he was a grad student). Also, when I Googled myself, I found a namesake who'd written two books on science topics that I'm actually interested in.... ;-(

And I get to define what a Google for them looks like. I suspect there are going to be some baffled n00bz in a few years.

(Note that the recent ML thread will be part of that - it has moved from fifth place to third in my Google results in the last 24 hours, overtaking one of my three websites.)

My brother, by contrast, is effectively unGoogleable, because he shares a name with a pro wrestler.

The old guy was also the subject of a very silly poem.

Another not-me Christopher Hatton is a writer who worked on a couple of ST:TNG episodes.

It should not, however, be lifeless."

Zombie Prose need brains now!

That said, I made Google first page when I was coorganizing the European Congress of Mathematics in '04, and currently have my blog on third and my university webpage on number 9.

Yay me.

There is also folksinger with my name and I'm pretty certain one science fiction editor, although the SF editor uses a well-known variant of my first name, Elizabeth, so I am not certain about that one.

I'd really, *really* like to meet the other one.

It should not, however, be lifeless."

I'd buy that on a mug.

Mostly this is because my first name is an extremely common middle name in certain cultures wherein going by both first and middle names is a common thing. So there are several dozen "Firstname Lee Mylastname"s out there, most of whom are male.

One of the ones who actually shares my name without fitting that pattern, most annoyingly, seems to be a writer of Christian children's literature.

Which is why I have a few handles I use consistantly for various things; I like to keep various parts of my life separate. I don't need people giving my boss grief for my political opinions, or my knitting blog spammed by those who dislike my feminism.

This board is the only one on which I use my actual name, though.

It should not, however, be lifeless."

zombie prose eats your brain.