Day: January 17, 2009

Often, I surf to the google news site, but choose the “Mexico” view. Anyway, yesterday at work, I opened google Mexico and there, three or four lines down on the right hand side of the main portal page was the headline “Quiere Jared ser útil” (Jared wants to be useful). Obviously, I understood that it wasn’t, in fact, refering to me. But it was a weird moment when it was like one of those Gombrowiczean hyper-signifying events.
Jared has become an increasingly common first name in Anglo-America, but it remains extremely rare in Spanish-speaking America. What Jared were they referring to? Turns out there’s a champion soccer player of Mexican nationality, sufficiently famous to be referred to by only his first name, as often happens with celebrities. He recently signed with the Guadalajara Chivas pro team, and he “wants to be useful” to his new teammates.
Below is the googlepage – I snapshotted it since obviously those pages are constantly changing their contents.