Moby Shut-yo'-mouth

I've had one question on my mind for quite a while, that I can't seem to figure out. A good friend of mine has the last name of Melville. When most people hear the name Melville, they automatically think of the classic Moby Dick, written by Herman Melville. I first heard of the name Melville when learning about the book, and I would assume that is most people's experience.

So here's my question... What would my friend have to do to get out of the shadow of Moby Dick? Can he EVER do anything grandiose enough to be famous for his own efforts, so that when people hear the name Melville, they don't think Moby Dick instinctively?


As I have pondered this topic often over the years, I have wondered what it would be like to live in this shadow. Seems like everyone you meet, when they hear your last name, would ask "So... you related to Herman?" or, as I asked my friend when I first met him, "You related to Moby Dick?" His apt response was "The whale?"

What sort of thing would he have to do in his life to move out from Moby's shadow and start casting his own historic shadows that are at least as big as Moby's?

Senator? President? Serial Killer? Wheaties box? A character on Celebrity Jeopardy? The next Brandon on the next 90210? 756 home runs? Melville, by Calvin Klein...?

The LOL files

Is it just me, or has LOL usage come to the point of no return? It almost seems now that when someone responds to an email or text message with just "LOL" as the response, that they are mocking the sender.

Used to be that an LOL-only response made you feel good inside, like you had actually made the other person laugh out loud. But things have changed.

(One quick note on the history of LOL - apparently it was invented to ease the burden of typing a longer response over the internet. How painful is it really to type all 15 letters in "laughing out loud"?? I mean, I type around 4th grader speed, and it only takes me about 20 seconds to type the whole phrase out. You would have thought that in the days of the quill pen and ink-dipping that scribes would have invented LOL. Strange, I know.)

In fact, I know of two instances in the past month where I received a semi-unwanted text message that was meant to be funny. In both cases, I didn't find either of them funny or deserving of any mental effort on my part before sending a response to indicate that I didn't think it was as funny as the sender obviously did... my response in both cases was solely "LOL".

And what I meant by "LOL" was "Nice try. You may have thought that was funny, but my highly advanced sense of humor does not agree. Please don't waste my cyber-space with un-funny rubbish like that again. Make sure it's funny next time."

Is anyone out there still using LOL to say that they actually laughed out loud?