Don't Google Yourself. You May Not Like What You Find.

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I did a bit of egosurfing (otherwise referred to as vanity searching, egosearching, egogoogling, autogoogling or self-googling). I looked up "Karp" and didn't find much that thrilled me.

I then Wikipedia'd myself and found a whole bunch of Karps listed - from punk rock bands to mathematicians. Not that I was expecting an article about me, but I thought that I might find someone with the same family name that did something interesting, something I could relate to.

And then I saw him.

Robert Karp. This was the type of guy I can identify with. Bob lived from 1911 to 1975, but from 1938 to 1974 he was employed by the Walt Disney Company to write the scripts for the Donald Duck newspaper comic strips. Now, there you have it, a man after my own heart - he writes, doodles and gets paid for it. What a perfect job.

So now that Donald Duck is my favorite cartoon character, I just had to find out some interesting facts about him. I discovered that not only is Donald Duck a household name, but he, too, has a household of his own. Take a look at this article, it describes the Donald Duck family tree. Here is an excerpt:
Donald's father is Quackmore Duck, his mother is Hortense McDuck and his twin sister is Della Thelma Duck.

Huey, Dewey and Louie are the children of Della.

Donald was supposedly born in 1920 in Duckburg.

Hortense McDuck is Scrooge McDuck's sister. Quackmore Duck is the son of Elivira "Grandma" Duck and her husband Humperdink Duck.

Donald Duck is a descendant from both the McDucks and the Coots. According to the cartoon, Back To Long Ago, Donald appears to be the rebirth of the 16th century sailor, Pintail Duck.

Scrooge McDuck is the richest duck in the world.
http://www.squidoo.com/donaldduck/ mentions that his full name is actually Donald Fauntleroy Duck. His parents must have been drunk at the time.

I never knew that people followed Donald Duck with such fanaticism. I mean, I know that Disney does all it can to market their products to kids (fan clubs and all that), but this sort of detail smacks of geeky Star Trek fans and their Trekkie clubs. I can think of almost nothing worse than attending a Donald Duck convention to be surrounded by a thousand ill-tempered, clumsy, speech-impaired Donald Duck look-alikes.

But Donald stood the test of time. If he were real, Donald would be 87 years old this year. I don't think I know of anyone else who could get away with not wearing pants for that long.

Comments

  1. GooGl(e)itchNovember 26, 2007 at 10:14 AM

    Y. Karp - from fish to fowl!

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousNovember 26, 2007 at 2:27 PM

    I heard that the Ugly Duckling is Donald's great grandfather's, second cousin, once removed. But Donald's immediate family doesn't keep in touch with that side of the duck clan because of their alliance with swans, who everybody knows are the sworn enemy of any duck trying to mark its territory in a park pond.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Yossi KarpNovember 26, 2007 at 2:47 PM

    r. n. karp:

    There was one member of the swan clan who did date a member of Donald's family for a while. But she was excommunicated by the swans because she, in effect, was out for a duck.

    ReplyDelete
  4. AnonymousNovember 26, 2007 at 3:03 PM

    Yes, I've heard that story before. In fact, I heard that Sir William Shakespeare awoke once late at night from a mysterious dream...a premonition, in fact. The dream was about a duck and a swan dating in secrecy, and how the families of fowl (The Swanagues and The Duckulettes) went to war against eachother until, in a tragedy unforseen, the duck and swan lovers were found drowned in a village lake. They had overdosed on noxious fish. Shakespeare jumped out of bed in excitement and plonked himself at his writing desk, and Romeo and Juliette was born. Indeed, it seems, Sir William's premonition came true...

    ReplyDelete

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