July 24, 2005
Frequent conclusions drawn after using Google's "I'm feeling lucky" button to look up people whose names are generated at random from US census data
1) She's a real estate agent. [Lori Bishop]
2) He's a photographer. [Scott Evans]
3) He's a real estate agent. [Todd Brown]
4) She recently ran in a footrace. [Julie Gosnell]
5) He's dead. [Jason Conley]
6) He's a academic or a book author (and usually both), but not one you've heard of. [James Weinstein]
7) He's not a person at all, but instead the name of a business in the yellow pages. [Troy Stump]
8) He's participated in an obscure online forum related to computing technology or genealogy. [Joseph Bove]
London bombings, Iraq, and Charlie Starkweather
My kids (7 and 9) keep asking me questions about Iraq and (more recently) the London suicide bombings.
When I was their age, I asked my mother about Charlie Starkweather, whose name came up on Nebraska grade school playgrounds even into the late 1960s. I think I mainly wanted to know, "should I be scared about this?"
My mother's message—no, probably not.
That's just about the tone I'm looking for with my own kids. But I'm probably no more convincing than my mom was.
No. Maybe not.
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