I find it amusing to have a Google Alert set up for my last name. For those of you not in the know, what that means is that every time Google’s spiders (is that even what they call them these days?) run across a new occurrence of my name on the Web, I get an e-mailed notification of the location. Because I have a unusual name — nearly unique — it is almost always a direct reference to myself, with one or another of my sisters popping up from time to time, too.

The two most surprising notifications in recent months have led me to the New York Times website. The first is this reference to my Filmography. Exciting, no? No, not really — it seems that they’ve only gotten around to putting names up there, and haven’t added my actual film credit. Yes, singular. My internship with a small production company one summer while I was in college was pretty short, and I only worked on the one film. If you’re interested, you can read more about it on Yahoo! TV, but I promise you it’s nothing you’ve ever heard of before.

The second link — and I hesitate to show this to you because it’s a little bit embarrassing, but it’s also sort of cool — also dates back to my college years. I barely remember getting interviewed for this, and I don’t think I ever saw the article in print. I wonder if I would have agreed to be interviewed if I knew it would be so publicly accessible nearly 20 years later. Hooray for the Internet? So anyway, I give you … The Lunar Howling Society. Oh, just to clarify, the reporter got my major confused with that of the also-quoted Susan (who was my roommate, and who will get a kick out of this when she reads this) — I was the Medieval Studies major, while she was in American Studies. My faith in the reliability of the American Press is shattered! (/sarcasm).

So, there you go. Have you ever found yourself popping up in unexpected places online? Share!

ETA: PS: My sister has started a blog. Go give her some love!