Alex Beam on the three Dan Kennedys

Dan_Kennedy_Chivas_USA_2011
Dan Kennedy

Alex Beam has an amusing column in The Boston Globe today on people who have the same name or close to it — like Isiah Thomas and Isiaih Isaiah Thomas, or Alex Beam and, yes, Alex Beam.

This is not the first time Beam has gone there. Here’s a column he wrote in 2003 on three Dan Kennedys. And he didn’t even mention the soccer player. Then again, that Dan Kennedy was only 11 years old at the time.

Photo (cc) by Ryan Byrne and published under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

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5 thoughts on “Alex Beam on the three Dan Kennedys”

  1. Two things to keep in mind when meeting someone with a famous name:
    1. Avoid bringing it up unless you have something funny to say that the person hasn’t heard before.
    2. There’s nothing you can say that they haven’t heard before.

  2. “Isaiah” Thomas.
    On a drive home recently I was awaiting an episode of The Moth, hosted by Dan Kennedy. Disappointed to discover it wasn’t you. 🙂

  3. I’d like to make one thing perfectly clear.. Rutgers University didn’t fire me.

  4. I was introduced to the strange and not so wonderful world of the MA RMV because of my apparently-quite-common name.Last few times I renewed my driver’s license, it happened that another Richard Peterson in another state had default warrants out for no shows at court appearances on moving violations. Like dozens in about a dozen states.When MA would check a national database, my name would bounce back and I was suddenly guilty until proven innocent due to this jerk’s activities in states from FL to CA and all over New England.Each case would require me to contact some Sheriff’s Dept.and to prove that I was not the guy who blew off a court date. In the original episode, despite copies of credit card receipts showing that I was spending money in Dedham (while MA claimed I was in FL) and a letter from the relevant Sheriff attesting that I wasn’t the miscreant, I STILL had to have a politician make a call. (I was a federal regulator with high level security clearance at the time).A lady in the Registrar’s Office gave me the “driving is a privilege, not a right” speech. Getting a court date to compel the RMV to do their job was not an option.This is not the way things are supposed to work. It should not take 30+ hours on the phone or online to renew the license of someone demonstrably in good standing. For the record, I went back five generations and found no familial connection to the notorious Scott Peterson. I thought the Internet was going to solve all this?

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