Last night Nikki and I were talking after the kids were in bed, as grown ups do sometimes, I’m told.  Anyway we were talking about something or another and she mentioned that she didn’t like something, a lot.  Like a deep aversion to it, that went way back to childhood. I said: “Oh ya, you have baggage there.  You’re Bilbo Baggage.”

Now, at the time I laughed at my own joke much much harder than it deserved because, well it’s probably not nearly as funny as I think it is, and I have a tremendously inflated sense of my own wit.  Then I got thinking, hey that’s pretty darn funny, has anyone ever said that before?  Before the Internet I would have chuckled a self satisfied chuckle and went to bed, smugly sure of my own massive wit that could not be matched by anyone.  But instead we happen to be insanely well connected to a global ego check network, which quickly provided me with ample evidence that I am far from as smart as I like to think I am.

The point of this post isn’t to mention that I said something witty and wanted you to know about it, but rather to mention the sheer unlikelihood of two different people (actually many different people) coming up with the same phrase independently.  That phrase isn’t so out there that nobody could have thought of it, but it is relatively unique I think, and enough to prove that there must be at least a couple of people out there as weird as I am.

It has a whole “million monkeys on a million typewriters” feel to it, and now we can even find out if any other monkey has come up with something good with the power of the typewriter-web.  Pretty crazy stuff.

So, I salute you, guy with the first hit for my search for Bilbo Baggage, and your socio-economic discussion of the world of Middle-Earth that I clearly have been reading the wrong books to understand fully.  He published his piece yesterday morning, thereby beating me by several hours.   But even before then, there are a few other monkeys that predate both of us.

It’s a strange, weird, coincidental world folks.  Watch for this stuff, it happens all the time.