Where's Xmastime

I wonder how many people out there have a picture of me on a wall. Or on the fridge. Or tucked away in a scrapbook. Or in their "TO BURN" bile. 10? 5? 0? And who knows WHERE these people are, right? Maybe there's a photo of me in Idaho. Or Canada. Kinda creepy, right? And that's just people who actually KNOW me, much less random people like I mentioned HERE:

Capturing shit on film is kinda weird anyway, isn't it? I mean, who knows where you might be in a picture somewhere. Some family from North Dakota get their picture taken on the Boardwalk, you happen to be walking behind them and there you are, on some mantle in a room in a house in a town you'll never even know exists. Maybe in 1983 you took a picture, and beside a tree in the picture happened to be a girl you end up meeting and marrying 20 years later. Same with movies - e.g. the last scene of "Valley Girl," when the camera pulls away, showing the LA freeway packed with cars. What if you were in one of those cars? - XMASTIME

Turns out we're getting closer and closer to knowing:

Random strangers in our pictures are a prosaic fact of life on par with breathing and gravity. The question of how many tourist pictures we’re in is an exercise in stoner philosophy on par with whether we’re all really perceiving exactly the same color when we say “red”. Interesting enough, but fundamentally unknowable.

But those days are numbered. Face recognition software is getting better fast, and within a few years you should have an answer to the Where’s Waldo conundrum of where you appear in the background of the world’s tourist pictures. What kind of breadcrumb trail would those images reveal? If you could aggregate all the photos of you in the world, it might be possible to build up a surprisingly telling narrative of your life.