What's in a name?

There's another Nicholas Russon out there in the wide world, who was, last I checked, a student at UNB. I sometimes wonder if my online doings sometimes cause people to think that they're things that he's done. I hope that hasn't caused him problems. Still, having a namesake who is a libertarian moonbat isn't too bad, compared to what poor Lauren Bernat is experiencing:

The video, now a legitimate Internet phenomenon, features one Lauren Bernat, an advertising executive in Florida, exercising — or gyrating rather suggestively is more like it — while using Nintendo's Wii Fit.

Another Lauren Bernat, a master's degree candidate for library science at St. John's University, is not amused. Actually, "utterly freaked out" is probably the most accurate way to describe it.

Bernat, 22, works as a librarian at a library for teenagers in New York, and said she first became aware of the Wii Fit girl video on YouTube (real title: "Why every guy should buy his girlfriend a Wii Fit"), when several "random guys" began sending her Facebook friend requests Thursday. Bernat, who has the strictest privacy setting on her Facebook profile, says she responded to several and asked who they were and why they were adding her.

"One of them told me, 'Google yourself, you obviously haven't seen the video,'" Bernat said in an interview Thursday.

My name is rather unusual . . . so it was a surprise when I found there was another "me" out there. Some names are much more common . . . David D. Friedman, for example:

This is the home page of David Friedman. Not the Hawaiian artist David Friedman, or the composer David Friedman, or the fix-what's-wrong-with- government David Friedman (050) or the fifteen year old David Friedman or the eighteen year old David Friedman or even the economic journalist David Friedman but the anarchist-anachronist-economist David Friedman.

Now you know why I included my middle initial.