Weekend assignment

   This week's weekend assignment from our most emminent and respected blog-father, John Scalzi, is actually not from John Scalzi at all. This week, John enlisted the help of his lovely wife, Kristine, who said, "John, dahlink, stop playing with your little electronic toys, and come and play with me for a little while."
   "Can't do it, dear," replied John. "I have a commitment to my faithful readers. If I don't publish a weekend assignment every Thursday afternoon, I let them down."
   Kristine applied to her face the most alluring pout she knew how, and purred, "but John, what's one little Thursday out of a whole year?" She replaced the pout with a mischievous grin. "If you blow off your readers, I'll...well, you know."
   But John would not be swayed. His dedication to his duty to be a stalwart blogging example to all of us kept him at his keyboard in the face of temptation that might have weakened the knees of Christ himself. Try as he might, though, no matter how hard he wracked his brain, he could not come up with one single idea.
   Kristine's stilettos click, clicked across the floor, and she leaned down over his shoulder, and softly murmured in his ear, "just tell them to Google a pet name and report on the results, or something like that, and then come to bed, my little light sabre wielder."
   He closed his eyes and pressed his fingers to his forehead as the stilettos click, clicked back across the floor of his office and disappeared into the muting of the hallway carpet. Could he really get away with such a lame assignment? Was it fair to his readers? Would AOL pull his paycheck? He drew a ragged breath. If he didn't write something, and fast, he would likely spend the rest of the night in some discomfort.
   His fingers flew across the keyboard.

Weekend Assignment #120: Do a Web search on a pet's name and let us know some of the interesting things that pop up. It doesn't necessarily have to be a current pet -- if you've got a previous pet whose name will elicit more interesting Web results, by all means use that one instead.

Extra credit: Tell us an interesting name of a pet that wasn't your own.

   "OK, now, save." Click. "Come on, come on, save, damn it!" Finally the blue edit entry screen was replaced by the front page of John's journal, and he virtually exploded out of his chair, took the stairs three at a time, and burst through the door of the bedroom to find his lovely wife, in lovely lingerie, in bed, sound asleep. Have a good night, John.


   Now, Shadow - you remember Shadow, don't you?

Shadow doesn't have an odd name, by any stretch of the imagination, but I did find some rather interesting things on the first page of Google results. Here, for example, is the web site of the US Naval Surface Warfare Center page about S.H.A.D.O.W., a software security intrusion detection tool. Apparently, S.H.A.D.O.W. stands for Secondary Heuristic Analysis for Defensive Online Warfare. I wonder how much the guy whose job it is to come up with these acronyms makes.

   I came across several pictures of shadow puppets. Shadow puppetry is an ancient form of entertainment that has traditional roots in many different regions of the world.

   This is what I thought the first search result for Shadow would be.

   It's funny how coincidences happen. After doing the searching that resulted in this entry, I went and read this week's commentary by James Randi, where he mentions the fact that Walter B.Gibson, the creator of The Shadow, was an acquaintance of his. In fact, he refers to Gibson as a friend. Not that great a friend, apparently, as Randi seems to have got the man's middle name wrong. According to all the information I can find, the 'B' stood for Brown, not Bains.
   I said that I expected a web site about The Shadow to be the first result on Google. It was not. Upon reflection, it makes a lot of sense that the very first result, on a web search or an image search, was this.

   Shadow The Hedgehog is the dark doppelgänger of Sonic The Hedgehog. No one was really sure where he came from, or which side he was on until recently, when it was revealed that he was created in a lab by Doctor Robotnik but had lost his memory. Is it wrong for a video game to have that detailed a back story? Is it wrong that I know it?

   So, there it is John, my Google results for my pet, Shadow.

Aren't you glad I didn't pick Lady?

Extra Credit: One of my parents (I don't remember which one now. Dad?), when they were much younger and still lived at home with their parents, had a dog named Bud. One day someone pointed outthat Bud was actually not a boy dog, but was a girl dog. From that point on, the dog's name became Mrs. Bud. Yeah, it's not much, but it's all I got.

tags:Memes, Weekend Assignment