I am David Hasselhoff

I’d been thinking about splitting this weblog into two. The Adventures of AccordionGuy in the 21st Century would have all my stories and observations about life in general while another blog would be more technically oriented.

One of the names I was considering for the tech blog was “Happiest Geek on Earth”. This turn of phrase is actually Cory Doctorow’s; he came up with it by altering the Disneyland slogan “The Happiest Place on Earth”. He’s used it to describe both himself (in many places, most notably this Industry Standard article from October 2000) and me (in a recent bOINGbOING entry about my becoming a go-go dancer). I decided to run a Google search for the phrase to see if someone was already using it as a title for a web page.

The result was a single page of entries, and they were stories about either Cory or me. Of the two about me, one was the bOINGbOING entry. The other was from a German blog called Der Schockwellenreiter (in English, that’s “The Shockwave Rider”). He’d seen the story in bOINGbOING and decided to link to The accidental go-go dancer. Here’s the entry in the original German:

[Der glücklichste Geek der Welt]. So könnte ich mir mein Leben auch vorstellen. Tagsüber ein wenig hacken und bloggen und abends durch die Musikkneipen tingeln, schräge Songs auf dem Akkordeon spielen und dabei immer von hübschen Frauen begleitet werden. Joey ist jedenfalls the happiest geek on earth.

Google’s translation feature offered this interpretation:

[the luckiest Geek of the world]. So I could also imagine my life. During the day a little chop and bloggen and by the music taverns tingeln, diagonal Songs on the accordion in the evening play and by pretty women to be always accompanied. Joey is anyhow the happiest geek on earth .

“Diagonal songs”? As you can see, machine-based translation has a long way to go.

Between this entry and Der Spiegel’s coverage of Peekabooty, I’d have to say the time may be ripe for me to get out of this dead-end software business and launch a David Hasselhoff-like career in Germany.