> Gee - I always thought 'doofus' was spelled 'dufus'
Only in europa, it's "doofus" here. But for me, the most important
spelling was "D0FS". I was the D0FS Manager -- see the "Overall data
flow" section of the document at [1]. That job, crossed with the highly
influential contribution of 1960's TV Ad writers to the memepool [2],
spawned my previous tagline "I'm not a real doofus, but I play one at a
national laboratory." [3]
> Did you also register realdoofussucks.com?
Nope. I can't see that being much of a threat. ;-) Nor .net or .org,
or even .sex. Not MyRealDoofus or BarelyDoofusing or KnowRealDoofus or
RealDoofusNow. Thanks for asking, though. Maybe I'll invest a second
penny, just in case.
Cheers,
Wayne
[1] http://www.computer.org/conferences/mss95/lueking/lueking.htm
[2] For those of you who had the [mis]fortune of missing 1960's US TV,
there were some very memorable moments. "Mothers are like that. Yeah,
they are.", "Aren't you going to drive me?", "I feel good all under.",
just to quote a few. I believe the "doctor" ad was for aspirin. (Most
likely for Bayer, but could have been St. Joseph's.) It was during the
first heyday of Doctor shows (Kildare, Ben Casey), back when they could
solve any emergency in 30 minutes, and never lost a patient. So it was
assumed that having an actor say, "I'm not a real doctor, but I play one
on television," would actually persuade some percentage of viewers to
buy a product, and it probably did. The warm, reassuring monologue
continued something like, "And when I have aches and pains, I reach for
"Muipo", which is "Nature's" spelled backwards." My imprecision here is
not so much due to my memory's failing as it is the fault of a great
many popular and "successful" commercials. We remember the ad's hook,
but not the actual products.
[3} Shapiro, M. A., & McDonald, D. G. (1992). I'm not a real doctor, but
I play one in virtual reality: Implications of virtual reality for
judgments about reality. Journal of Communication, Vol. 42 No. 4, Fall
1992, 94-114.
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