Google Yourself

I read a good article in the new “Writer’s Digest” the other day. It is the July 2005 issue with the girl on the cover who is holding her laptop as though she just won the $3000 prize in their contest. Anyway, on page 50 there is an article by a person named Cassandra Hemenway Brush, called “Stolen Goods”. This is a good article. I subscribe to two writing magazines for different reasons, but one of the things I enjoy about the articles here are that they are concise without being abrupt.

This article is about how to prevent your stuff from being plagiarized. She gives you six lessons on things you can do to protect yourself from places that use content that they don’t have any rights to. Lesson one, the author gives us the most likely sounding advice of all, she says, Go Google yourself.

She did! She told me to Google myself…oh…er…this just in… www.Google.com is a search engine. Okay I knew that, but it still sounds funny. So. What is it like to Google yourself?

I Googled my name and came up with well over 14 pages of results! Wow! I am one popular guy, right. Well, I found this blog on page 4 of the results. I didn’t even find my poetry that’s on www.poetry.com at all. I have some opinions about those people too. E-mail me before you give away your work to them.

Anyway, I was really disappointed. I thought I would have more fun googling myself. *sighs heavily*

********

After I finished lazing about the ARC store Saturday I went to another of my favorite kinds of spots, a used book store. This one was the “Book Rack” on South Academy, which is in the same center (what is the difference between a plaza and a mall and a shopping center, etc?) as the ARC and the lady and her cat are very pleasant. I think cats belong in bookstores and libraries. Anyway, I love these places, and never do the exchange thing. I almost never get rid of a book. If it is so bad that I don’t want my children or friends and neighbors to see what sort of trash I have been reading I will usually donate them…

Back to the bookstore. If you come to Colorado Springs, there are a plethora of new and used bookstores to choose from. I guess I should say, “From which to choose” so I don’t use a preposition to end the sentence with. This one is pleasant, but not the biggest. I discovered a little gem that you have heard of. It’s called, “Everything I Really Need to Know I Learned In Kindergarten” by Robert Fulghum. Now I have seen this done as a poster with multitudinous rip-offs and satires including all I need to know I learned from my…Dog, Cat, Pig, Cow, Cheese, Bratwurst, 00 Dodge Intrepid which goes too fast, ummm, okay, so maybe I haven’t seen ALL of those. But this is a wonderful little book. Much better (in my opinion) than the Chicken Soup books, but maybe written for a different purpose, too.

If you see it, pick it up and give it a read. It’s one of those things that you can just open up to a page and start reading and get a little something. It is sometimes a little syrupy and not good (or possible?) to read all the way through in one sitting, but a definite must-read. The stories are short and read like a blog (There’s a silly idea some joker will come up with. A blog that you can carry with you everywhere you go, like, take some sheets of paper, bind them up somehow, maybe you could twist a wire through the sheets to hold them together and put cardboard or plastic covers on the ends to protect them. Then you could make a stylus like the one you use with your Palm, only fill it with ink. You could then, here’s the silly part, write directly on the paper and not even use a computer at all. Just print directly to the paper! Am I a genius or what?) And are (That was kind of a long parenthetical break, wasn’t it? I wonder what the longest in literature has ever been. Soliloquies should count, but if not, I wonder if there is a World’s Record for it. It would have to take less time to break than crawling 33 miles and be easier on the knees. My English teacher abhorred the use of parentheses and said that if it wasn’t important enough to the piece to make its own paragraph or sentence, it probably should not be included.) Quick and sometimes humorous, sometimes (She said your readers will forget what you were saying and have to go back and sort through all that junk) poignant.

I opened it up just now and read a story about an idea for a crayon bomb to bring world peace. I like this little book.

Remember, the Good Book says, “Flush.” Well, okay, it says to go outside the camp to a designated spot with your shovel and do your business and bury it, but I say you can shrink it down to one word of advice, “Flush.”