Yeah, yeah, I know: I’m way behind on writing over here. I’m not proud. I’ll be back to it as soon as I can.
In the meantime, courtesy of my friend Susan, an amusing not-quite-typo:
To accompany an article about recent statements made by U2 manager Paul McGuinness, a photo of McGuinness with singer Bono was posted. It was a small photo, fairly innocuous. Only the person in the photo wasn’t Bono: it was Tony Russo from Unforgettable Fire, a U2 tribute band based in New York.
A funny error and probably a nice boost to Russo’s ego in itself. But wait, there’s more.
A few commenters to the story note that the man in the photo is not, in fact, Bono. In his defense the author links to another article on the same topic that uses the same photo, only this time the image of McGuinness and Not Bono is much larger and located below a photo of the actual Bono. This second article is a real convenience for comparison, but it also highlights how the man next to McGuinness more closely resembles Bono’s younger brother in borrowed shades than the Irish Vox himself. (Bono wishes he had cheeks that pinchable.)
Susan did some sleuthing and found that the Not Bono photo is the first result to pop up when one google-images (that’s a verb now) “Paul McGuinness.” The Russo-McGuinness image has been mislabeled as “bono paul mcguinness.jpg.”
As you can see, the photo in the first-cited article has since been changed to the second result that appears on Google Images. That man with McGuinness, luckily, is indeed the real Bono Vox standing up.
Moral of the story: the internet is a resource, not a source. Google doesn’t vet information; it indexes it: put bad information in, bad information comes right back out again. Primary and secondary sources can be found online, but so can tertiary, quaternary, and whatever-the-word-is-for-twentieth-ary; the key is to make the effort to determine which is which. Copying answers off someone else’s homework will only get you an A if the copyee’s answers are correct.
ETA: Another article with a photo of Not Bono to add to the collection.
ETA: And another, this article focusing more on Bono himself.
*****
Many thanks to Susan, the typographical Nancy Drew.
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The Wall Street Journal had a story about the French not passing this legislation. If only they had used that photo, too. That would have been so perfect.