nsfw http://tinyurl.com/5aqry nsfw

January 29, 2005 4:42 AM

NNDBis an intelligence aggregator that tracks the activities of people we have determined to be noteworthy, both living and dead.
posted by Dean Keaton (21 comments total)

I was going to post this, having stumbled across it a short while ago. It needs a lot of help, though, as many of the bios are sketchy at best. The idea of seeing seemingly unrelated people linked together in a sort of six degrees of separation way is great, though.
posted by fixedgear at 4:46 AM on January 29, 2005

Did they just list everyone as "sexual orientation: straight" by default? People with little information in their profiles still always seem to have that listed. Even people who are widely rumored to be bi are listed as straight; see, for example, Avril Lavigne.
posted by Asparagirl at 6:42 AM on January 29, 2005

It works every time!
posted by Hankins at 6:54 AM on January 29, 2005

FWIW it lists Anna Nicole Smith as bi and John DuPont as gay .
posted by fixedgear at 7:00 AM on January 29, 2005

There's not much information on each person, so it's a terrible lookup resource, but it's great for browsing. I found this great interview with Gallagher via a link there, which (Good God) makes me want to see a Gallagher show. I also learned that Donald Trump never shakes hands, calling handshakes "barbaric." It's mostly for pop culture fluff, though - look up Octavio Paz or Rabelais and you just get a list of books they wrote and universities they attended.
posted by painquale at 7:05 AM on January 29, 2005

The lists are the best feature. Here's a list of depression sufferers, and a list of schizophrenics. Famous Poles. Vegetarians. Diabetics. Fulbright scholars. New Yorker reporters. McGill University alumni. Etc. etc...
posted by painquale at 7:20 AM on January 29, 2005

And possibly the best list of all: Coolest headshots.
posted by painquale at 7:23 AM on January 29, 2005

Search for "crazy" and you get lots of results. Heh...Gary Busey.
posted by davidmsc at 7:23 AM on January 29, 2005

Hey, the Pogues are back together with MacGowan, and touring!
posted by shoepal at 8:19 AM on January 29, 2005

How is the url in the post title nsfw at all? It's just Billy Dee Williams in a Colt 45 liquor ad. Yes, the tinyurl is a bit of a surprise, but it's bad form.
posted by zsazsa at 8:22 AM on January 29, 2005

Frankly, this site seems like utter crap -- almost an anti-Snopes.

I had a look at the entries for two famous people who I know/knew quite well, Allen Ginsberg and David Crosby, and there were grossly misleading errors of facts or emphasis in both entries. And no, I don't have the time to send a stream of emails to these people to argue the points.

This is practically a classic example of how Web media is prone to repeating mistaken information, and suffers from lack of fact-checking.
posted by digaman at 8:38 AM on January 29, 2005

Shakespeare was "straight" and "an overrated hack," and the "executive summary" of Joni Mitchell is "Big Yellow Taxi"?

Please. Worst of the Web.
posted by digaman at 8:53 AM on January 29, 2005

This sites gets points for linking to the Rotten Library, an incredible collection of biased and interesting facts. Think of it as the anti-wikipedia. And, unlike its offensive parent site, is pretty much totally SFW.
posted by zsazsa at 8:55 AM on January 29, 2005

I've always thought a site like this one could be useful, a sort of "IMDB for people of note" (though I might add that IMDB has data on a lot of people who aren't entertainment industry types--politicians, etc.--from the latter half of the 20th century simply because they appeared on a TV program and thus got an entry) and I look at NNDB from time to time but I sometimes find the editorializing in the descriptions annoying, not to mention the factual inaccuracies mentioned above.

Oh, and I understand epilepsy, depression, schizophrenia, etc., but why is "vegetarian" a "risk factor"?

Second the Rotten Library. It's fun reading.
posted by Kosh at 9:10 AM on January 29, 2005

I am a bit scared because I am listed as a brother of someone minorly well-known. What freaks me out is that they list my full name, publicly unknown middle name included! (I am not exactly well-known and my middle name appears nowhere on the web.) I am wondering who these people are currently.
posted by neustile at 9:51 AM on January 29, 2005

Did they just list everyone as "sexual orientation: straight" by default?

Some are listed as "Matter of Dispute".
posted by gimonca at 10:32 AM on January 29, 2005

A suprisingly frequent occurance of eyepatches in the headshots list.
posted by firemouth at 3:05 PM on January 29, 2005

But Neustile, is the guy really your brother?

And Painquale, how is that list headshots cool? How is it even a list of headshots? Maybe in Firefox there's a different page show but all I see is a list of people and no headshots or links to images.
posted by billsaysthis at 3:59 PM on January 29, 2005

"She doesn't do skirts"

If we'd all like to turn to March in our offical Avril Lavigne 2005 calendars, we will notice Avril Lavigne, wearing a skirt.

Grrr.
posted by cillit bang at 7:29 PM on January 29, 2005

billsaysthis, click on some of the names. You'll be taken to the main page for that person, and each will have a weird picture.
posted by painquale at 8:48 PM on January 29, 2005

painquale, doesn't seem so special to me unless one has a fetish for eyepatches.
posted by billsaysthis at 2:18 PM on January 30, 2005