alt Hacker NewsYou’re for sure right about the name thing. It’s so hard to resist commenting on names for a lot of people, I think, due to the extreme asymmetry of novelty. When you meet someone named Michael Jackson, that’s such novel information to you: “there’s a guy right here in front of me who is named the same thing as a famous musician!” Meanwhile, from Michael’s perspective, they’ve been named Michael Jackson and getting comments and jokes about it near-daily for 35 years - and it’s really a boring non-story - they’re named after their grandfather, their parents didn’t care about the other Michael Jackson one way or the other, and they themselves also neither like or hate MJ.
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I had a friend named Michael Jackson who went by a different first name. I didn't even know until several years later when he showed a group of us his drivers license and accidentally outed himself.
They might like to hear "Michael Jackson? Like the guy who wrote the book about scotch??" once in a while
This is like when you're working retail and the scanner glitches or the barcode isn't registered and the customer says "I guess that one's free then!" and you have to say "ha ha, very droll sir" as if you didn't hear that same joke yesterday.