A Day Late and a Dollar Short.

Back on May 22 of last year, I wrote a post about a new invention that had popped into my head. Typically it was one those things that's really stupid, but incredibly useful. It was a "hum search engine" where you could hum a tune and the search engine would find what tune it was. It'd be great for those times where you have a song stuck in your head, but don't know the name of it. Anyway, yesterday over at Metafilter I saw a post about a whistle search engine called Melodyhound. I was flabbergasted. Really. At first I thought maybe I'd been ripped off, but then I found out that this had been previously posted at Metafilter--on September 3, 2002, two and half months before I even started my blog. This is the story of my life. (When I originally posted this one of my commenters suggested I call Shazam, a cell phone service in the UK which does something similar. But it's not quite the same thing. Another commenter claimed the inventors of the .mp3 were coming up with something like what I described.)

This reminds me of something I read about in a biography of James M. Cain years ago. In the 20's when Cain was working as a reporter, he was covering some story in an isolated West Virginia town. The local eccentric announced he was going to unveil the invention he had spent the last few years laboring over. The invention turned out to be the bicycle. The man had never seen one before and wasted several years of his life reinventing something that already exists. This is my future.