Voices
PETER
MANDEL
HUFFINGTON
08.26.12
The Weird
World of
Google
Doubles
THE INTERNET IS, as far as I can
tell, a nearly infinite universe of
things I do not want to know. I
can usually ignore the boasts, the
shards of opinion, the superfluous stuff that swirls around on
my laptop. But there’s one online
fact that simply sticks in my craw:
There are people out there who
have been brazenly using my name.
I still recall the night when, shaking at my keyboard, I uncovered
search results for an international
army of so-called Peter Mandels.
Even Peter Mandelson, the British
politician, refused to stop popping
up when I typed in M-A-N-D-E-L.
ILLUSTRATION BY ANDY MARTIN
On a good day, I came up third
or fourth in the Google Order of
Mandels. But a naturopath based
in Germany was perpetually first,
taunting me from the very pinnacle of Peter Mandel-dom. I despised clicking on his website,
where he’s touted as “a genius
phenomenon who, someday, is
going to have a place in history”
and which went on about things I
didn’t understand, like a Mandelinvented therapy known as “Esogetic Colorpuncture.”
Was there a way, I wondered, for
Peter
Mandel is
the author of
Jackhammer
Sam and Zoo
Ah-Choooo.