In Search of Nate

Blame “Ed”:http://www.puddingbowl.org/ed/. I got the idea from him. Here’s the deal: do a search for your first name on a “Google image search”:http://images.google.com, and pick one of the photos you see there to, y’know, blog about.

I honestly wasn’t planning on joining this particular bandwagon, but I naturally had to peek at what was there for my name. And I noticed that ‘nate’ turned up this picture in the number five slot:

!http://www.calvin.edu/news/events/debate/images/1800/big/nate.jpg 320×228!

See, the thing is, I know that guy. No, not the one on the right — the other one. The Nate. I forget his last name, but I see him every year or so at “Rick Treur’s”:http://www.rivercityimprov.com/ annual Christmas party in Grand Rapids. The picture is from 2000, when one of the GOP primary debates took place at Calvin College, my (and the other Nate’s) alma mater.

The first thing I thought was: why the heck is he being so friendly with George Bush? Then I remembered that West Michigan is pretty conservative, all things considered. No reason Nate wouldn’t be. (And heck, it was 2000 — even conservatives didn’t know better yet.)

I’m going to take this stupid little Google game a step further, and do my small part to hinder Bush’s reelection chances to boot. I’m going to try to get another Nate picture — yes, a picture of me — up _above_ the Bush one in the Google rankings. Given my “surprising luck”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/000266.html with Google image rankings thus far, this shouldn’t be too hard. So, here’s the pic:

!http://www.polytropos.org/mt-static/misc/nate.jpg 240×320!

I figure the cute baby factor will pick up a few extra clickthroughs.