Why the InterWebs Are Dangerous. Or You Can Call Me Al.

 Of course the Internet can be a colossal time-waster. Just between Facebook, Twitter and Flickr, you can blow a good hour or two before you know they’re gone. But the real danger are all those weird and wonderful, fun and freaky sites out there that offer nothing more than weird stuff you can play with, link to and send to your friends. The danger of these sites is that time isn’t all you stand to lose.

I thought I’d rest my wrenched back for an hour and do a bit of work on my laptop while Andy transferred the Mourvedre and Grenache to oak barrels. (Don’t feel sorry for him. It takes about 5 minutes apiece and involves no labor harder than hooking up two ends of a hose.)

I was looking for gardening sites that would help me with winter plantings and somehow ended up on the My Heritage Site. Which has nothing to do with seeds and planting. Unless I googled heirloom seeds and somehow got dumped here. But isn’t that always the way on the long and winding road that is the Internet Superhighway.

Turns out My Heritage offers a feature that lets you find your Celebrity Look-a-Likes. And it just so happens, in last semester’s photography class, I produced a self-portrait project where I made myself up to look like dead movie stars. Hee-Hee. Wouldn’t be funny to take my Gloria Swanson, Alla Nazimova and Jean Seberg pictures and see if Heritage actually matched them up with those celebrities?

So I submitted my self-portrait as Jean Seberg shortly before the pills and suicide took her:

And here’s who they pegged as my celebrity look-alike:

AL PACINO! AL FRICKEN’ PACINO. And not just Al Pacino, but Al Pacino as Tony Montana in Scarface! Sorry, but worse than being told you look like a guy is being told you look like a guy that guys don’t even want to look like. At least match me with Brad Pitt. We’re both blond.

Sure they’d made a mistake, I hacked around the site until I found you could make a collage with all the celebrities you looked like. Here’s what I got:

Jeeez. If Al Pacino wasn’t bad enough FRANCOIS MITTERAND?!!!! ADAM SANDLER???

Then there are the guys with facial hair. And I don’t even want to know who Conor Oberst is.

Maybe, I rationalized, it’s because the photo is dark. So I quickly uploaded me as Alla Nazimova, Vamp of the Silent Screen:

So here’s what I got:

My top match is still a guy. In fact most of my matches are guys, but at least I got some female matches.

But Tupac Shakur? There isn’t enough space to print WTF as many times as this warrants. Don’t get me wrong, I was impressed with the guy’s talent. But in what universe is my lily-white face a twin for Tupac?

ROBERT DE NIRO???? I’m working my way through the cast of the Godfather movies? I decided it was too dangerous to my ego to upload any more pictures of myself, so I posted up this one:

Heritage told me to upload a picture of a “real face”. Apparently on some places on the Internet, they actually CAN tell if you are a dog.

So now I’m depressed and contemplating a drastic course of self-improvement. Like Botox or plastic surgery.

Or maybe the healthier plan would be to embrace my inner (and exterior) Al Pacino:

Think I look like a guy? Well say hello to my leetle friend!

Postscript.

Is this unfair or what? Andy’s celebrity look-alikes: