Calendar

Google-Eyed

Dave Gorman searches for the perfect whack

A A A Comments By Jason Budjinski Thursday, Oct 20 2005

Admit it. You've Googled your name once or twice, curious to see how many other "yous" there are in cyberspace. It's nothing to be embarrassed about. Dave Gorman certainly wasn't embarrassed when he wrote Are You Dave Gorman?, a true tale about hunting down 24 other people who share his name. But if self-Googling is a quick curiosity quencher, Googlewhacking — searching the Internet for two unrelated words that yield a single result — is a full-time endeavor. Gorman should know. In his one-man performance, Googlewhack Adventure, the London-based comic talks about the series of events that took him on a transcontinental journey... all because he wanted to meet website owners who combined words like bamboozled panfishor unicyclist periscopes.

Gorman gets his whack on.

Details

Thursday, October 20, through Saturday, October 22. Tickets cost $29 and $32. Call 954-462-0222, or visit www.browardcenter.org.

Broward Center for the Performing Arts, 201 SW Fifth Ave., Fort Lauderdale

More About

Gorman became engrossed in the hobby after learning that his website, DaveGorman.com, contained a Googlewhack (Francophile namesakes). Because Are You Dave Gorman? was such a success, Random House commissioned him to write a novel — as in fiction. So Gorman accepted the money and got to work on, well, Googlewhacking.

"I thought it'd take only 20 minutes," Gorman says of his first attempt. "Four hours later, I found a Googlewhack, and I started corresponding with the guy whose site it was."

Things got heavy when a friend challenged Gorman to track down, in person, ten Googlewhack-owners. At first, Gorman declined. But that all changed one night after a bottle of tequila and more prodding from his friends. "I don't know what happened after that," Gorman recalls, sort of. "All I know is I woke up the next morning at Heathrow airport with a ticket to Washington."

Before he knew it, Gorman had been around the globe. He met his friends' challenge, but another remained unfulfilled — the novel he owed Random House. Gorman's only option was to pay back the money. And he did after some 150 performances of Googlewhack Adventure, which, ironically, is now available in book form. Go ahead, Google it.

Check out this week's featured ad for Arts