Eric Grohe & Greece

Hi!

How y'all doing?

Two days ago I received an email from a friend that contained a PowerPoint presentation about an artist Eric Grohe Miller, who specializes in murals. I was fascinated by Mr. Grohe's artworks, so I googled him using (obviously) his name (Eric Grohe Miller) as the search keyword.

Interestingly, the majority of the results originated from Greek sites (or blog posts from Greeks or sites that are one way or another affiliated with Greece). I was really intrigued by this fact, so I clicked on this link, which, by the way, was the first result. In this page there is a presentation of the mural that has been designed by Eric Grohe for the Miller brewery in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Thus, the whole Greek cyberspace (sic) is literally filled with false information about Eric Grohe. Some exceptions exist, but they are just a handful.

So, reasonably, I started contemplating on various issues:

First of all, the reason why people tend to circulate unverified information. The effect of people acting merely as repeaters of information is tightly connected with rumours.I am using the more general term "people", instead of Greeks, as, I suspect, judging from the rumours concerning the recent H1N1 "outburst" (this is the first example that popped into my head), that this is a global attribute of humans and it is not an indigenous characteristic of Greeks.
The reasons for rumour spreading could be:

• Trust to the fellow human being (who is spreading the rumour)
• Gullibility (from the recipient of the rumour)
• Boredom to verify whether the rumours are just rumours or not
• The inherent need of people to impress others
  

Some solutions: Trust Nobody (cliche) and Verify Everything

Another thought had to do with the addition of the "Miller". Why do people from Greece think Miller is his last name? Some possible explanations:

1. The site is named "Eric Grohe Murals and Design". Someone with insufficient English knowledge and/or poor eyesight could have misinterpreted the Mural as Miller.
2. One of the Grohe's murals being displayed in the site has been designed for the Miller brewery, so a Google search after a conversation for a misheard "Eric Grohe Miller" would have produced acceptable results for a person that doesn't have the time and/or the curiosity to search more.

After this initial mistake, the fallacy propagated to all the other Greeks via chain mailing. So, I began to wonder how on earth didn't the same error appear on foreign articles.

• Did the foreign recipients detect the error and didn't pass the mail on?
• Shame on us (the Greeks)

• No foreigner ever received a mail about Eric Grohe Miller?
• The Greek cyber-ghetto :P

• Do we have to blame the Spanish about it? (I think the original presentation that contains the mistake is spanish and there is a significant number [not significant enough though] of spanish sites after the 4th page of the search)

Either way, the fact that Eric Grohe is known as Eric Grohe Miller in Greece is caused by the recession. :P

Ta ta,
elias a.k.a. diluted