born 23 January 1970

Alan Embree, The Dalles, Oregon, left handed relief pitcher

Daniel Tognetti, Buenos Aires, Argentina, reporter

John Stagnari, Englewood, New Jersey, extra

Juliano, Chicago, Illinois, raw food evangelist

Julie Blutstein, Miami, Florida, production assistant

Kym Shirkani, Los Angeles, California, actress

Mark Wohlers, Holyoke, Massachusetts, relief pitcher

Michelle Ihnot, state of New York, set dresser

Oleg Ovsiannikov, Moscow, Russia, ice dancer

Ray Felipe, Chicago, Illinois, script researcher

Rick Youck, Calgary, Alberta, best boy

Robb Badlam, Ogdensburg, New York, producer

Robyn Good, birthplace unspecified, Australian rigger

I yield to no one in my love and veneration of the Internet Movie Database. Still, there are some aspects of it that are just plain goofy.

Take the STARmeter, for instance. Just below the date and place of birth of every name you can access, there’s a strange hucksteresque ranking, an enticement to arcane and esoteric enlightenment.

“Up 678% in popularity this week. See why on IMDbPro.”

That’s the tag associated with Today’s Winner, Julie Blutstein. She was a PA on four productions in her early twenties, most famously the Brad Pitt beard-a-thon Kalifornia (1993). I’m reasonably sure that nothing anyone could have done in or upon the cyberspace, the twittsterverse, the information superhighway, or the virtual reality could realistically account for a 678% surge in anyone’s popularity, least of all poor idle turning-forty-today Julie Blutstein. And yet, there it is. The internet says so.

I don’t know. I love algorithms as much as the next guy. But only when they are applied for an actual purpose. This whole notion of “popularity” as “currency” is just galling and confusing to me whenever I encounter it. Why can’t Julie Blutstein enjoy this, the seventeenth year and counting of her quiet retirement from production assistantship, undisturbed, without some dumb robot STARmeter making spurious claims that anyone in the universe other than me is the least bit interested in her career at this point?

And no, I'm not going to sign up for IMDbPro to find out. I'm an amateur, and I intend to keep it that way.