I’m on vacation, sunning on a patio in Palm Springs while my unfortunate colleagues shiver back home in Saskatoon.

But I’m still keeping up with my email. StepRep brought me an interesting result this morning. A while back my band Sea Water Bliss put out a low-budget music video that became moderately popular, especially in Europe. The video has appeared in a bunch of blogs written in a bunch of languages that I can’t read.

Thanks to StepRep’s Reputation Monitor, I receive regular updates on my band’s virtual tour of the Old World. Today I was alerted to the fact that our video had appeared on the French blog Fumez La Moquette (“Steam The Carpet”).

“Un travail de titan pour un résultat bluffant,” reads the caption – “A titanic labour for an awesome result.” Nice.

Having by now seen my video praised as well as belittled in numerous online forums, I hardly needed to strain my tenth-grade French skills to interpret what the commenters were saying about it. Most of them liked it, some snarked about it, and a few wondered how many trees were chopped down to make it. (The answer is “many”.) But this comment piqued my curiosity:

sinon le bassiste dans la vidéo me fait pensée à l’acteur dans Very bad trip le beau frère louche

(“By the way, the bassist in this video makes me think of the actor in Very Bad Trip, the dissipated brother-in-law.”)

It took some Googling to figure out that Very Bad Trip is the title under which the film The Hangover was released in France and Belgium. Isn’t that weird? Instead of translating the word “hangover” into French, the distributors released the film under an English-language title that was different from the original title! Why would they do that?

Anyway, this commenter is saying that Sea Water Bliss bassist Andrew Hall looks like the co-star of The Hangover, Zach Galifianakis. See the resemblance?

Zach Galifianakis and Andrew Hall

Mmm…maybe a little in the beard area?

This is just one more example of the fun that can come from using StepRep to monitor your online reputation. And that’s my contribution to StepRep’s marketing efforts for today. Now where’d I put that crossword puzzle…?

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 11th, 2010 at 12:19 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.