Paeans Uppercuts

Paeans	noun: plural of paean being:
	1. an ancient Greek hymn sung in praise of a deity.
	2. any song of praise.
	3. enthusiastic praise.
Uppercuts	1. noun: plural of uppercut; a short, swinging upward punch delivered to the chin.
	2. verb: to hit with an uppercut.

For the second time in my life I found myself looking at part of the Great Wall of China. The last time I’d looked at a part of the Great Wall of China it was attached to the rest of it. This time I was in Chicago where, oddly, a piece of the Great Wall was embedded into the side of the Chicago Tribune Building.

In 1922, the Chicago Tribune had held an architectural competition, the intention being to ‘build the most beautiful office building in the world’ and this was the result. And beautiful it was; a stunning gothic tower block that wouldn’t look out of place if Batman was seen swooping down from the roof. The publisher of the day must have been on something of a power trip because he’d asked his reporters to bring back chunks of world-famous landmarks and over 140 of these were now jutting out from the building’s walls. Presumably he hoped his building would benefit by having some of their greatness grafted on to its DNA.

So now a gargoyle that was supposed to be warding evil spirits away from the Houses of Parliament was instead cemented into the wall of this Chicago skyscraper alongside a chunk of rock from Stonehenge and a bit of a Pyramid and so on. I started to wonder about the veracity of some of the claims. Maybe a cub reporter, eager to impress the boss, had brought back some garden rubble and claimed it was part of the Parthenon. In a way, I hoped that was the case because otherwise the Chicago Tribune Building was responsible for some appalling cultural vandalism. I was pretty sure that the part of the Taj Mahal I was looking at had looked nicer when it was a part of the Taj Mahal rather than playing a bit part in this gauche mish mash. From across the road the Chicago Tribune Building was one of the most impressive skyscrapers I’ve seen, full of character and style, a symbol of the thrusting, ambitious decade in which it was conceived. Up close it appeared to be a freakish climbing wall, built on pillage and thievery.

The Chicago Tribune was part of the Tribune Group, which owned 24 different TV stations, making it America’s fourth largest media empire. Among its employees was a man called John F. Kuczaj (pronounced Koo-schy) who, outside of work, was responsible for a little media empire all of his own, having created two or three different websites. One of them, DaveKingman.com, a fansite dedicated to a former baseball star, was home to both paeans and uppercuts. John was going to be the twenty-first googlewhack I’d met so far but, crucially, he was the ninth in a chain. Hopefully he would serve up number ten and victory would be mine.

When John emerged from the Chicago Tribune Building lobby, he had a jolly round face, a crewcut and a very welcome willingness to ’whack.

‘Hiya, how’re you doing,’ he said, offering his hand.

‘I’m very well,’ I said, ‘very well indeed.’

‘Good,’ said John, ‘so why don’t we head back to mine and get some of these googlewhacks?’

The moment John said those words I knew that victory was almost assured. If he was ready and willing to ’whack, then I had no doubt that he would be able. And if he could find me two more, I was confident that I could meet one of them. After all, it seemed to me that the easiest googlewhack to meet must be number ten in the chain. For numbers one through nine I needed the approval of the ’whack. If they weren’t prepared to meet me then they clearly wouldn’t be prepared to googlewhack either and so the chain would end one way or another. But with number ten it was different. I didn’t need them to do anything other than meet me. Even if they expressly said that they didn’t want to meet me it would still be possible. If I knew where they lived or worked there would be nothing to stop me turning up on their doorstep unannounced, ringing the bell and shaking their hand. And that was all I needed. Had Dr Gish been tenth in a chain his failure to googlewhack wouldn’t have mattered a jot because I’d met him all the same.

We drove through the wide streets of Chicago. To an uneducated eye like mine it looked like New York only without the pressure cooker attitude, perhaps because, unlike the island of Manhattan, Chicago can expand; spreading out into the flat prairie land to the West. Out in the low-rise suburbs, we parked up outside a modern apartment block.

‘It’s a little untidy,’ said John apologetically, leading me in through a laundry room.

We emerged into a living room that was so full of stuff I’m not sure it could ever be tidy. It positively screamed bachelor pad. There were framed posters on the wall of various cartoon superheroes, there were toy cars and characters from The Simpsons dotted about the place and in the far corner, surrounding the TV, was a vast collection of neatly arranged and labelled videos, science fiction and comedy clearly defining John’s tastes. I was struck by how much of a British influence there was in the room, alongside the complete series of Babylon 5 were several British shows like The Prisoner and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. On top of the TV was a stuffed Monty Python exploding penguin and on the shelf to my right was a model of K9, Doctor Who’s robot dog. Most alarming of all, on a filing cabinet beneath that shelf there was a Sam Fox fridge magnet, though quite how a thirtysomething from Chicago comes to have a 1980s British Page Three girl fridge magnet was beyond me.

I would have asked, but before I could articulate anything, John spoke.

‘This is my computer game collection,’ he said, proudly.

I turned expecting to find a shelf of PlayStation games to rival the mammoth collection of videos but I found myself looking at something far more impressive than that. Against the wall, behind the door, were three, full-size, free-standing, coin-operated arcade games.

‘Oh my God!’ I said, struck with awe. ‘You have a Miss Pacman!’

‘Yeah, it’s kinda cool, isn’t it?’ said John, beaming with pride.

‘Can I have go?’ I asked, lighting up with childlike excitement.

‘Of course you can,’ said John, reaching on to the top and flicking some mysterious switch. ‘There you go,’ he said as the machine flickered into life, ‘it won’t need any coins now.’

‘Wow,’ I said, loosening my shoulders in preparation for the joystick action to come.

‘Now, while you do that, I’ll get to work on these googlewhacks.’

When I left John’s I had Doppelganger Hippopotami, Candyfloss Draughtsmen and the Miss Pacman high score. The high score gave me a taste for victory and I liked it that way; I didn’t want it to leave. All I needed to do now was to meet one of these two ’whacks and it would all be over. I would be the winner.

Doppelganger Hippopotami

This googlewhack led me to yet more fan-fiction. It was a short story written by someone called T. F. Revor (I suppose he has to use his middle initial to prevent being mistaken for a Trevor) and it was based on a TV series called Gargoyles. I’d never heard of the show before but I didn’t think it had aired in Britain. I assumed that Mr Revor (the T, I discovered, stood for Thomas) was based in the States.

Right at the top of the page there was an email address inviting comments on the story. But there was also the ominous phrase ‘completed September 25, 1996’.

The page was seven years old and I knew that an untended website could easily turn to seed. I knew there was every chance that the links would no longer work and that the email address was quite likely to be defunct. I wasn’t at all surprised when it bounced straight back to me but nor was I prepared to give in.

I’d met two fan-fiction writers in the shape of Bibliophilic Sandwiched and Verandahs Plectrums. Both were committed writers who’d maintained a longstanding web presence. I didn’t think that fan-fic was something T. F. Revor could easily have given up. If he was writing fan-fiction in 1996 I was convinced he’d still be doing it now. I went straight to Google and looked for information on T.F. Revor. Yes! You can use it as a search engine too! I searched for his name in every combination I could; T. F. Revor, tfrevor, Thomas F Revor, Thomas Revor, Tom Revor all cross-referenced with fan-fiction or Gargoyles and I found quite a few matches. I ended up with 25 different email addresses. Maybe they were all him, maybe they weren’t; there was only one way to find out and before long I’d sent 25 emails floating off into the ether.

Twenty-three of those emails bounced. Two received no reply. There were no clues as to where T. F. Revor could be found. It was a dead end.

How dare he be so elusive? Surely I had every right to find this stranger’s personal details! Didn’t he realise that he was number ten in my chain? Secretly I vowed that, if in a few years time I did encounter T. F. Revor, I would wreak my revenge for this frustration; I would call him Trevor.

Candyfloss Draughtsmen

I was looking at the home page for someone called Jason Tan (and his dog, Sleepy). He was a student at something called the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (Jason, not Sleepy) and the page seemed to contain his research on the representation of Asian cinema, particularly films from Hong Kong.

RMIT? Would I have to go to Australia to meet number ten? There was still time left for a trip like that if it had to be done. I was approaching the end of February and that meant that I was approaching the deadline; my 32nd birthday on 2 March.

I clicked my way around the site looking for contact details and it didn’t take me long to find them. But it didn’t inspire me with confidence. Just below his email address, it said the following:

It had been both created and abandoned on that fateful day back in 1998. Would his email address still work five years later? He was almost certainly no longer a student at RMIT; he could be living in Melbourne still but he could have moved on too.

I wrote him an email and hit the send button, all of which is quite difficult with your fingers crossed.

Having sent the email my next stop was Google once more and pretty soon I was looking at http://www.eta.immi.gov.au – the kind of address that scares technophobes away from the internet with its impenetrable system of meaningless letters and dots. It should really be called HowToGetAnAustralianVisa.com because that’s what it does. Australia, being the lovely, progressive country that it is, allows you to apply for something called an ETA, or Electronic Travel Authority, online. You visit the website, pay 20 Australian dollars (about £7.50) and give your passport details and, hey presto, the ETA is yours. You’re free to visit Oz for up to three months. No queueing at the Embassy, no officialdom to contend with, nothing stapled into your passport forbidding you from reporting on events in the country; in short, no worries. What could be simpler?

Or in my case, what could be more complicated? A message popped up on the screen in front of me saying:

There has been a problem with your application. You will need to visit your local embassy. Your credit card has been charged $20.

The cheeky bastards!

Not that it mattered, because moments later my plea to Jason Tan bounced back to me. Not wanting to admit defeat I Googled his name and discovered 2570 pages of information. I sifted through it and came away with a list of 300 potential email addresses for people with that name. It was hopeless. Some were obviously not him: elderly academics who couldn’t possibly be the fresh-faced youth in the photo; one wrote on his site that he’d ‘never had a pet’ and so on, but even so, there were hundreds of addresses that could have been my man. I emailed them all. It led nowhere. I’d reached another dead end.

I’d taken this chain to nine and there it had died. I was down but not out. On the subs bench was an eighth place googlewhack: the writer and producer of Bhutan: Land of the Thunderdragon, the unwitting creator of Langur Dandelions.