I have mentioned before the strange pleasures to be derived from the bizarre word pairings offered up by the spambot-catcher system ReCaptcha, used by my friend JES over on his Running After My Hat blog.
A few days ago it confronted me with the enigmatic combo kabod shinork.
Kabod surrendered its meaning relatively easily (if you have the German). But shinork?
Well, Shinork, I learned, is a personal name - but an astonishingly rare one; at least in the United States, where there is apparently only a single instance of it in the nationwide address directories. (Almost a Googlewhack kind of phenomenon. There really ought to be a word, didn't there, for names with a unique bearer?) He (she?) is ranked by that listings website as having the 1,857,883rd most popular name in America; although the also unique Condoleezza is ranked only 1,090,964th, which seems a tad unfair. Some kind of weighting going on for Web presence or celebrity?
Anyway, my search for Shinork led me to this - a rather wonderful little collection of reminiscences of an unusual childhood spent on an Indian ashram, which are outtakes from an autobiography called All The Fishes Have Come Home To Roost by Rachel Manija Brown. Now I want to read the whole book. It's not too early to set up a birthday wishlist, is it? No, it is not.
All too often these time-consuming meanderings around the byways of the Internet prove frustrating and fruitless, but we keep on doing it because every once in a while we happen upon a real gem.
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