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Saturday, June 01, 2013

Return Domenic Johansson

Please sign the petition currently on Change.org, to return Domenic Johansson to his parents. He was snatched from them while on a plane hoping to leave the country.

I have followed the case for years and cannot understand why a government has the right to remove a child from a loving family where he was not in danger of anything other than growing an open mind. You can find more details about the case here, and there is a mailing list and opportunity to donate to the family there too. Please reblog, repost, FB and twitter. We can get Domenic back to his parents!

Disambiguating George Barnett

I've been watching George Barnett (born 1993) as he progresses from favourite of the home education community to public property through the medium of the internet.  It was obvious to me that he has amazing talent from the moment I first saw the video for Silent Sound.

He released Sierra Planes in 2010 and then 17 Days in 2012 and I thought they were both amazing, but what was even more amazing was that he was producing these records on his own, playing nearly all the instruments, providing vocals and backing vocals and doing the production and often video recording, himself.

Of course, a few weeks ago, his cover of Daft Punk's "Get Lucky" has brought him a lot of attention.  Once it reached a million views on YouTube it was obvious that the world had woken up a bit to his work - although the best of his own work is several times better than the covers, and the covers are amazing.  The total number of views this morning is 3,391,431.  I realize I have used AMAZING four times already in this post.  Watch the videos and then try to avoid calling them amazing many times over.  They are stunning, incredible, fantastic, wonderful...amazing.

I feared that there might well be some confusion, once people started to try to find information for him, because there is another George Barnett, also a drummer and musician, also English, also tall and also handsome, who is a model.  So I set up a wikipedia entry for George here.  It's been vandalized a few times already, which is really annoying.

Nevertheless, blogs and papers online continue to mix up George Barnett born 1993, singer, songwriter and producer and George Barnett born 1988, model and musician.  The Wall Street Journal mixed them up in their round up of Daft Punk covers, and has so far refused to unscramble them, referring to George's cover of "Get Lucky" in an article which references the other George Barnett's modelling career.  People (including me) have mentioned in the comments that they have made a mistake, but that hasn't changed the article, which is propagating around the web.

It's often said that you only realise how inaccurate papers are when you come across a story you know something about.  The mistaken mixing of George Barnetts has spread to Google, which is displaying one of George Barnett born 1993's photographs with the personal details of the other George Barnett.  I've reported it, but as the information seems to be collected by some sort of automated robot, I'm not sure how easy it will be to disambiguate the two George Barnetts for that.


The BBC website seemed to refer to George Barnett born 1993's appearances on the local radio showcase and other appearances, but then linked to the other George Barnett's details.  They've fixed that though!  I'm proud that the BBC at least does respond to information when they mix up their George Barnett's.

I'm not sure how to help disambiguate the two George Barnetts any more than I already have, and I'm surprised by how irritating I find it when a website gets it wrong... goodness knows how the man destined to be the "other" George Barnett feels about it.

I'm going to finish by embedding "Where the Devil Sleeps"...just because I can.