Pony's last blog.

Tim's recent brush with his doppelganger (and then again) has me wondering: Just who out there do I share a name with? So I turned to good ol' Google to track other versions of myself down. I've known about this guy for a while:

Scott E. Heisel is the technical director of the American Malting Barley Association, Inc. (AMBA). Milwaukee, WI. He received B.S. degrees in biochemistry and in agronomy from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1982. In 1986, he received his M.S. degree in agronomy. He worked for several years at the USDA/ARS Barley and Malt Laboratory and has published several papers on characterizing various enzymes of germinated barley and the use of biochemical techniques to identify barley varieties. Heisel joined AMBA in April of 1987. He is a member of the American Association of Cereal Chemists. As a member of ASBC, Heisel has served as the chairman of Local Section Four and has moderated technical sessions. He chaired the Subcommittee on Deoxynivalenol in Barley and Malt and currently serves as the liaison officer to the AACC.

Pretty fancy, dude. I didn't even know "agronomy" was a real word! When I first discovered that someone with my same exact name was living less than two hours from me when I was growing up, it kind of weirded me out. Then it made me laugh when I realized dude worked in the beer industry and I was straight edge. The ironing is delicious.

(Side note: I wish I was a cereal chemist. Then maybe I could make my Cinnamon Toast Crunch taste even more cinnamon-ish. Maybe the world's not ready for such a thing, though.)

Apparently, I also play Counterstrike and go by the nickname "DIRTYBIRDY." I can assure you this definitely is not me. Everyone knows my nickname is "The Hammer."

I'm not even the only Scott Heisel in Ohio; apparently, there's one in Cincinnati who workss at a science camp (or at least he did in 2004). This most assuredly is not me, as I am a total moron when it comes to science. There's a great comedy bit by Patton Oswalt called "Physics For Poets" that pretty much sums science up for me:



Apparently I'm not the only Scott Heisel to have played Magic: The Gathering before, but at least I was never nerdy enough to enter a tournament like this guy did. (It's not for lack of wanting; they just never had tournaments by my house growing up.)

And after a good 26 pages of search results, that's just about everything I came up with. It's kind of strange knowing there's someone out there with your exact name, although I imagine it's much, much weirder if you share a name with a celebrity. (I went to high school with a kid named Michael Jackson, and I went to college with a kid named Nick Nolte. Bummer for both of them.)

Do you share your name with anyone else?