Off the Mark

by Mark Wilmes

A man and his mouse

The Internet is really a remarkable tool in our everyday lives here in the 21st century. The young folks can play games online against someone on the other side of the globe; Internet users can find some pretty good information about illnesses or diseases with which they are dealing; you can find someone who owns a 1964 Barbie who might just want to sell it; you can watch videos and read news and listen to music, all with the click of a mouse.

Granted, when you are researching, you have to watch out for misinformation, but for the most part, the info is fairly legitimate. (This is not to be confused with those forwarded emails that are probably about 95% all or part erroneous.)

The sheer volume of information is staggering. Computer users are all too familiar with the mega-website Google. If you go to www.google.com, you can type in just about any word, or combination of words, and instantly find information.

As an example, while typing this column, I went to Google and typed in the words egg salad. In 0.9 seconds, I had 784,000 references to egg salad at my fingertips, sorted from most to least relevant. This, of course, also includes references to both the word “egg” and the word “salad” separately, in addition to the combo of “egg salad.” To find exclusively references to both words in combination, you can put quotations marks around “egg salad.” It will find only references to the words in tandem. In 0.3 seconds (Google is kind enough to tell you how fast they are) 603,000 references to egg salad were found, most of them recipes. Who would have thought that egg salad was anything more than eggs, mayo, mustard, and onions? Although in some areas they add celery, pickles, relish, cucumbers and even lentils. There are those who can’t resist “googling” themselves, which, incidentally, sounds like an insult of some kind. “You know you are doing that all wrong. I can’t believe you could screw that up!” “Oh yeah, well why don’t you go google yourself, buddy.”

For the sake of this column only…I googled myself on Monday (making sure I did this privately) and found a total of 303 references (using quotations) to Mark Wilmes. Working for a newspaper and my involvement with the Lake Benton Opera House, give me an unfair advantage in having my name come up, and four of the top ten references to Mark Wilmes on the Internet were referring to me. Numbers two and three referred to a singer/songwriter listed on “goobs.com,” which should delight my wife, Kathy. One was a reference to a Mark Wilmes who was the captain of the “Glengarry”; a reference to an expert gardener named Mark Wilmes; a reference to a Mark Wilmes in Iowa; and Mark Wilmes, a Windows XP network wizard.

What got me interested in googling myself was an email I got a couple of weeks ago from a guy named Mark Wilmes who lives in Indiana. It read as follows: Looking to contact Mark Wilmes, we are not alone on the planet. How are you? I am in Indiana. Used to be in Chicago. Tow-head, tall, and used to do photography. After emailing back and forth, I learned that he will be fifty next February, he has a wife named Carla, he loves horticulture, and he is blind in one eye. Oh yeah, and I look like his brother Arthur, except I have a full head of hair. So, I’ve even been “googled” by a Mark Wilmes in Indiana. Yikes!

I don’t get a lot of free time to surf the Internet, but I do have a few non-work related websites other than Google that are my favorites. My newest favorite is hulu.com. With a reasonably fast Internet connection, you can watch old episodes of many TV shows in their entirety or just the best clips if you chose. With the click of a mouse you can watch past episodes of recent shows like Battlestar Galactica, The Tonight Show, My Name is Earl, 30 Rock, or The Simpsons, or older shows like The Bob Newhart Show, I Spy, Lost in Space, Doogie Howser, M.D., or Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. Even one of my all-time favorites, “Rod Serling’s Night Gallery.” You can also view entire movies for free. Titles like The Jerk, Ice Age, Fever Pitch, and, well…Dude, Where’s My Car? It’s kind of like You Tube, only with quality video. They don’t have a huge catalog yet, but it grows bigger each week. It is a great site, although you do have to sit through an occasional 15-to- 30-second commercial.

In order to play board games, or even watch a movie in the Wilmes house, you have to have a computer nearby, because in a split second, a disagreement will break out over whom a certain actor or actress is, or what he or she appeared in previously. That is when you head to Internet Movie Data Base, or www.imdb.com. The website is THE source for TV and movie actors. You can search by movie or TV show or actor or even character. It is all cross-referenced and makes it easy, if you so desire, to find out how many degrees of separation there are between you and Kevin Bacon.

I’m also a regular visitor to twinsbaseball.com, wcco.com, startribune. com and nytimes.com. As a matter of fact the New York Times emails me every morning with what they think are the 20 or so most important stories in the paper each day…for free.

If I ever have that accidental cash windfall…or even that incidental nervous breakdown…just lock me away in a cabin deep in the woods with a DSL connection and a computer, and I’ll entertain myself into and through my golden years. And as a bonus, nobody will be around when I occasionally feel the need to google myself…