I am looking for info about a singer that used to appear on Portland Public Access a decade or so ago. Strange goggle eyewear and he wore a head covering that was shaped like a lobster. No matter how I phrase the question I first get responses about Portland in general, then restaurants that serve lobster, then places that have boat access etc. etc. etc. How do I phrase the question to get what I want?
Was it Pontifex vonHummer?
YES!!
Thank you!!
17 minutes flat! All Hail @The_Other_Waldo_Pepper !!
In the era of Wiki, FQ doesn’t have quite the mission it used to, but it’s truly magic for queries like this.
Pontifex vonHummer is Portland’s answer to the question, “Gee I wonder what would happen if Cat Stevens dropped acid?”
(1) Killer Caribbean Queen - YouTube
I’ve had luck (sometimes) using the “-” option.
For example, if you do your first request and find it has a lot of cites about restaurants and boats, the repeat the same request but add -restaurant and -boat. That should exclude any hits that include those keywords.
Repeat, adding additional undesired keywords with - and sometimes this can help narrow down the results and be more helpful.
Sometimes.
Just for curiosity’s sake, I did find it by Google. I searched:
portland public access singer goggle “lobster” -restaurant
and the first result for me was a thread from Reddit/Portland. I did Ctrl+F to find the word “lobster” in the thread. It appeared twice, and the second time it appeared in the thread, the poster mentioned “von Hummer.”
OK, that was more success than I had, trying “KOPB” as one of my search terms (having already determined that those were the call letters for Portland’s public access television).
At least, I assume that it was Portland, Oregon you wanted, not Portland, Maine.
It is Portland, Oregon, but Portland public access television is not the same thing as KOPB(Oregon Public Broadcasting). Here is the difference: Public-access television - Wikipedia
FWIW, I found it by adding instead of subtracting: the singer’s public-access work “a decade or so ago” apparently made an impression on Czarcasm; and, well, Czarcasm has been posting here for decades. The guy was bringing stuff to the Dope’s attention so long ago that a Tom Cruise sequel was the highest-grossing movie of the year, if you will.
So if you plug “public access” and @Czarcasm into the SDMB’s search — well, you promptly get one of the half-dozen or so times that he’s posted about Pontifex vonHummer, is all.
The conclusion is inescapable.
@Czarcasm is Pontifex vonHummer. This thread and his earlier posts are just him trolling (in the fishing sense, not the jerkwad sense) for online attention, clicks, and revenue. Have you ever seen them both in the same place at the same time? Neither have I. Hmmm.
Not fishing-For some reason I just keep forgetting his name…though I have to admit to never seeing myself and him in the same room at the same time.
I’ll have to look into that.
Why do you have the quote marks round the single word (“lobster”) ?
I thought that was only used for phrases.
It stops Google from saying “Including search results without lobster”.
So it appears the quoted single word is now the replacement for what used to be the leading + symbol. It means this word is required. Is that accurate?
Exactly. It forces the quoted word to be required in the search. If it’s a phrase, it requires the phrase verbatim in the search. (Well, verbatim except for punctuation and whitespace. I’ve seen phrase search returns that had the phrase as words in consecutive sentences, or even consecutive paragraphs.)
If I recall correctly, Google deprecated the + meaning when they were pushing their Google+ social network.
Any progress on that ?