Where IS George, anyway?

From time to time, I run into a dollar bill that has been marked for the www.wheresgeorge.com website. Whenever that happens, I of course do my part for a admirably gonzo and arbitrary project by logging in and noting when and where the bill came into my possession. On a recent weekend, though, I got a bee in my bonnet and decided to go a step further, mildly vandalizing a little legal tender myself and entering a few new bills into the wheresgeorge database.

And here’s the weird thing: when I added the new bills, I learned that these were the first new entries I had made since – brace yourself, here – the year 1999.

Now see, I’m of the age to be long familiar with the internet, very familiar and comfortable with pretty much all things online, yet to still think of it as something fairly ~new~. Fairly ~recent~. Hell, it seems like just month, in a way, that I returned to my office from a trip to the University of Kansas computer center to announce that I had spent a while trying out this internet thing that people were talking about, but it seemed pretty worthless. Just last week that television commercials all had those little tentative subtitles suggesting that their more technologically inclined viewers might check out the text and images available at “www.pepsi.com” or whatever.
So it feels pretty alarming to discover that with something kind of goofy, silly, and random, in the very best tradition of what the internet has to offer, that I could not only have signed on more than a decade ago, but that I could have signed on more than a decade ago and then let it lay more or less fallow for the next eleven years. I knew I had not been a regular wheresgeorge participant, but I figured that meant I hadn’t entered any new bills for a year or two. How could it be any longer than that? It’s an internet meme! And internet memes are NEW!

Or I’m old. Same diff.