Cultural AD/HD

Last year, in the comics industry, there was a minor kerfuffle about a fraud-artist who was going to cons and selling prints of other artists’ work and claiming it was his. So, my husband (who recognised several of his drawings in amongst the hundreds) did a cartoon and a blog post about it and named this guy. In trying to defend himself against the online hordes, this fraud-artist pretended to be many different people including his own wife, sending nasty nasty and nastier letters to people. So, in a follow-up blog post Ty named the wife.

Not long after that, he got an email from a woman with the exact same name (which isn’t all that common) and from roughly the same area of the US, who was complaining that if anyone Googled her all of this horrid stuff would pop up with all sorts of venom and invective directed at her. Unlike the wife of the fraud-artist, this woman actually has a public ‘face’ of sorts—she runs an online charity and blogs and works as a journalist. She was quite concerned that anyone Googling her was going to be getting a very negative impression, thinking that this was her. After some consideration, Ty took the name off his site, stopped using it all together and posted on several sites/pages/forums to ask others to do the same to give this woman a break.

It was a bit of an eye-opener though…

(anyone Googling me is just gonna get piles of guys from England! I think ‘Keiren’ is a variant of ‘Ciaran’ there, whereas I pronounce the ‘eir’ as it is in ‘heiress’. It’s basically a way to fix up plain ol’ Karen Smith. When I was born, my mother had spent her life hating her old-fashioned name and intentionally picked a name that had been in the Top Ten for the entire ’60s. I’m always surprised when I run into a “young” Karen/Caren/Caryn/etc. because I always expect someone in their 40s. My kids laughed themselves silly when they were watching Mean Girls and one is named Karen Smith. )

mooglets:

My radio has been all about ‘internet safety’ and ‘what if your new boss google’s your name?!’ today, so I just googled my name and thankfully, only one photo of me showed up, which I just deleted. 

Amusingly, there is someone living only a few miles from me who has my name, and is a graphic designer. 

I find this serendipitously amusing. 

Might clean up my FB a bit as well, y’never know what I might think is fine but an employer would look at and judge me for.