Dave Gorman

I sat down the other night to watch 'Dave Gorman's Googlewhack Adventure'. A googlewhack is two words that when put into Google produce just one result. 'Atherall ignoramus' is a googlewhack because it produces just one result: a website giving the Victorian history of Bedford. Under Gorman's rules this would in fact not count because Atherall is not in the Google dictionary, but you get the idea. Gorman's task, administered to him by another man called Dave Gorman who he met when he was trying to find lots of people with the same name as him, is to find two googlewhack websites and contact the creators of these website who he then visits. The visitee then has to find two googlewhacks of their own and Dave contacts the the new googlewhacks and they are set the same task. Completion of the task comes when he has met and visited ten consecutive googlewhacks in the same chain before he turns 32.

The show tells the story of whether he was successful in his strange quest. I enjoyed the show, not because it was funny although it sometimes was, but because the odd quest captured my imagination. My quest to find a live badger and my following of the letter D through the World Cup were similarly obsessive oddities. Tim De Marco, reader of this blog, commented that yesterday's decision analysis was a Gormanesque thing to do, little-knowing that the night before I had been watched the bearded fellow perform his show, and even though the idea had formed pre-watching I guess the watching propelled me more energetically towards my task.

I had a look at his blog before penning my own and found that Gorman is currently presenting darts for Bravo. He has also been attempting to hone his own darting ability and has earned himself the darts name: Dave "The Badger" Gorman. He has his own shirt (pictured) which I am very jealous of. Apparently the badger nickname comes not from an affection for badgers, but for a similarity in darting ability between Gorman and the striped mammals. Surely very few animals, other than perhaps the orangutan, are any good at darts. I may locate my own set of darts, throw them until my skill levels match the days when I was jobless and able to spend hours lobbing the tiny spears and then purchase for myself a furry orange shirt with Dave "The Orangutan" Atherall emblazoned across the back. The word "may" is perhaps slightly misleading in the previous sentence.

I've just noticed that my quoting of the googlewhack 'Atherall ignoramus' has made it no longer a googlewhack. If you type 'Atherall ignoramus' into Google, you also get this website and that makes me look like a bit of an ignoramus.