The Yale Daily News Contact Form

Friends,

Since its inception last semester, the Yale Daily News contact form has been a source of near-constant amusement to me. I had expected that the activity on this front would taper off as summer drew on, but so far, it's shown no signs of doing so. Consider the curious e-mail that I found in my inbox upon returning from Longwood Gardens, where I had been celebrating my three year anniversary with Dianne de la Veaux:

"This email has been sent from the Yale Daily News contact form:

Sent To: Michael Zink

Sent From: Frank Henrich (redacted)

Message: I have written a devotional book using 10 of the images in your book Le Moyan Age. I intend to print 250 copies of the book that contains 40 medieval images and give it away free to those in need. All my efforst to obtain a response from Tallandier Editons have been fruitless. Can you assitme on obtaining permissions, if so I will identify the pages. The collection of images in your book are outstanding. Thank you for writing the book. Frank Henrich, author and poet, Modesto, Californis USA. I am sending this email from a friends email so pleass respond to the emial listed above. "

An online search confirmed my suspicions: Le Moyen Age had been written by a Zink...Michel Zink, pictured at left: a rather well-known French scholar of medieval history. As it turns out, he also guest lectured at Yale at least twice during the 80s and 90s. In the past, some of you expressed surprise when I claimed to have a fairly common name; I can now definitively say that it is common enough. My reply to Mr. Henrich:

"Dear Frank,

I believe you have me confused with Michel Zink, a scholar of medieval history and actual author of Le Moyen Age (he's a professor at College de France, and his personal web page URL is http://www.college-de-france.fr%2Fdefault%2FEN%2Fall%2Flit_fra%2Fbiographie.htm if you haven't already found it). By contrast, I'm a student staff columnist with the Yale Daily News whose name contains the letter "a".

Aside from the fact that Michel Zink has been a guest lecturer at Yale from time to time, I'm perplexed as to the reason for this mistaken identity-nevertheless, thank you for your interesting e-mail. If you can't find a way to contact M. Zink directly, perhaps you can try to reach him by way of College de France. Good luck with your search.

Best,
Mike"

I have also made $500 this summer from the YDN contact form, which is a far more interesting story, albeit one for another time. If you would like to contact me via the Yale Daily News contact form, go here. Or you can log onto mail.yale.edu and send me an e-mail. Seriously, I've heard more this summer from some guy who thinks I'm an eminent French scholar of medieval history than I have from some of you. This is not acceptable.

Moreover, if the rest of you do not post here more often, then I will have no choice but to turn this into my personal blog. First, I will replace Martha's quirky, upbeat blog design with red text on a plain black background. I then intend to fill this space with minutae about my personal life, minutae which will be so unfathomably tedious, and which I will catalogue in such painstaking detail that you will begin to wonder how (and why!) I even find the time to blog between all of the trifling events happening in my life. If all goes well, I hope to progress to writing long free verse poems about how the rain outside my window makes me think about the currents of despair that have filled my heart to overflowing. I will spell "despair" d-e-s-p-a-r-e. Consider yourselves warned.

Mike