100% Pure Petroleum Jelliffe

goo gle (goo gl ) tr.v. 1. Query the Google search engine to find occurrences of someone’s or your own name.

Everyone does it. If you’re not famous, odds are someone with the same name as you is, and you can live somewhat vicariously through them. Before I had a site, my name returned an eerie result that I had died of a brain hemorrhage while on vacation in New Zealand. I guess there are worse ways, and places, to die but I ain’t goin’ out like dat. Alas, I never met my Australian Doppelganger, nor will I be able to sleep on his couch.

But Google has just taken things one step further. With their controversial new Google Print initiative, scanning in long out-of-print books, Google is creating digital records of things no one would ever have access to on a global scale otherwise. What does that mean? Well for starters, you can google your name for matches in “many a quaint and
curious volume of forgotten lore.”

Smith Ely Jelliffe was a colleague (a friggin’ contemporary!) of Sigmund Freud, and Carl Jung!! I bet they did lines together. There’s even a Jelliffe Quiz that I haven’t quite figured out yet. But there aren’t any results for it on regular ol’ Google, so I would never have come across it without Google Print. I will see that it’s brought back to prominence, though. The Jelliffe Quotient will once again be a topic of dinner table conversation. Mark my words.

So which venerable namesake are you disgracing with your minimum wage job at Dairy Queen?