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Welcome to this week's Picks. In our experience there are two things newcomers to the web do, when confronted with a search engine for the first time. The first is to type in as many rude words as they can think of "just to see what happens, not because I wanted to find a load of mucky sites". The second is to type in their own name, which can be more or less rewarding depending on that name. Our friend Bill Javascript, for example, is inundated with URLs every time he does it, but for his great mate John Dullnutter, the web is a lonely place indeed.
Until now. Spurred by his handicap, Mr Dullnutter, working in secret over many years, has come up with a method of revealing the secret websites hidden in all our names. And, like most great ideas it is based on a simple premise. All you do is feed your chosen name into an anagram generator -- we use Andy's anagram Solver, but there are many others -- select some apposite phrase from the resulting combinations of words, whack it into the search field and Bob suddenly (and probably much to his surprise, because he was just sitting down to tea) becomes your uncle.
By way of illustration, we at Picks selected (more or less at random) the names of six well known people and put them through the wringer. Here are the results:
1) The Spice Girls: not technically an individual, but since an anagram of Spice Girls is Pig Slicers we found it hard to resist. And whaddya know -- we find mention of something called The National Pig Carvers Association. This site -- which has its tongue firmly in its cheek -- is dedicated to the preservation and advancement of pig decoy carving -- a noble art that, apparently, stretches back to the 17th century. For more information, the curious should check out A Brief but Factual Account of the Development of Pig Decoy Carving.
2) Gianni Versace: who would have thought that the murdered fashion designer's name held within it the gnomic statement that acne is vinegar. Sufferers from this form of adolescent biological torture will certainly know what it means, however. The Acne Support Group is a UK-based charity providing information about the condition -- in particular look at the facts and fiction pages -- and a variety of treatments that may help.
3) Ian Wright: for those of a non-footballing disposition, Ian Wright is the Arsenal striker best known for putting the mental in temperamental. He often leaves opponents a-writhing in his wake. Sadly we had to admit defeat with a-writhing, though dropping the hyphen led us down several interesting avenues until, eventually, we came to Dracul: The Musical, which is described as "a passionate love story ... [which] portrays the supernatural Count Vlad de Dracul as tired and angry from the centuries of being cursed to exist like a blood-thirsty animal". The phrase "a writhing" recurs sporadically in the chorus of a song entitled Magic Wicked Night, in the music section of the site. Our favourite, however, was a delirious ditty called Phobia, sung by the inmates of a lunatic asylum. All day long we've been humming the chorus: "It's just a ... its just a ... it's just a PHO-BEEE-AAHH!!" Can't wait for it to open over here, and in the meantime we'll check out it the sites' list of vampire resources on the web.
4) Princess Di: originally we were going to use the UK's putative future Queen Camilla Parker Bowles. But, having banned any reference to bowels (just too easy), the best we could come up with was Camilla's Bloke Warper, which while apt, sounds a bit too gynaecological for a family column such as this. So we switched to our ex-putative future Queen and were delighted to find that Princess Di translates as Pain and Crises. This, in turn, led inescapably to the International Crisis Group, a private, multinational organisation which seeks to provide policy-makers with an objective and informed source of information, analysis and ideas geared to help head off impending crises in unstable parts of the world. It is currently focusing on five trouble-spots: Bosnia, Central Africa, Sierra Leone, Nigeria and Albania.
5) George Clooney: with a growing number of identikit Hollywood actors joining the celebrated A- list, it was somehow satisfying to discover that this recent arrival's name contains the instruction to Go, eery clone, go! For the pedants out there 'eery' is the archaic form of 'eerie', according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Anyway, armed with the keyword clone, it was only a matter of time before we came across the Church of Scotland's Cloning -- a step to0 far? part of the Church's Society, Religion and Technology Project. It has an in-depth discussion of the rights and wrongs of this rapidly emerging technology. What is nice about this site is that it seeks an open and fair debate, providing links to genetic engineering and cloning information resources, alongside its own report on cloning from a Christian perspective.
6) Gaby Roslin: the TV presenter who leapt to prominence on Channel 4's Big Breakfast, forgot which side her toast was buttered on, left the show and lapsed straight back into obscurity, bears a terrible burden: angry boils! She should go straight to the Medicinet Homepage, where, under the section entitled Diseases and Treatments she will read: "A boil generally starts as a reddened, tender area. Over time, the area becomes firm and hard. Eventually, the centre of the abscess softens and becomes filled with white cells that the body sends to fight the infection. This collection of white cells is known as pus. Finally, the pus 'forms a head' and drains out through the skin." Ugh! Medicinet is not for the faint-hearted, but does provide information about hundreds of conditions.
Well that's that. See you next week. Or to put it another way: Knee out, sexy ewe!
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