March 26, 1999

Figuring out when a brand-name human's 15 minutes of fame began and ended can be tricky. You can try plugging the name into a search engine in the hopes of discovering some obsessed fan's online homage, or you could try Biography.com, one of the A&E cable channel's online outposts. There you can search a database of brief info-sketches of 20,000 individuals – handy for fact checking a paper or enhancing your office-reception banter. The only glitch I could find was two listings for country singer Hank Williams, Sr.; otherwise, everything looks accurate. But there's no hyperlinking between entries, and using the "lastname, firstname" format for searches can be a little clunky.
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Rob Pegoraro rob@twp.com