Spot the difference competition.

Here are two almost identical photographs.

One is of an American football player: the other shows a science fiction author.

Can you tell them apart?

I know it’s very difficult but have a go and see if you can identify me from the two pictures.

There is a reason that I’ve posted this exciting and brain-straining competition. Marcus Canon is a pen name that I picked to avoid confusion with an existing sci-fi writer who had the temerity to share my real name. I searched for anybody using my chosen name and noticed Marcus Cannon but rather foolishly, I thought it wouldn’t be a problem with the different spelling…

…I was wrong. I recently did a Google search on the name ‘Marcus Canon’, after someone pointed out to me that they could find nothing about me on the web. Sure enough, the same thing happened to me. Google puts up the usual (and very irritating) message box that implies I can’t spell and must be looking for something that Google thinks is better. This one asked ‘Did you mean Marcus Cannon?’.

Now that’s all well and good, but what I don’t like is the fact that the results are shown for the big lad above (oops…I’ve given you a clue there, if you’re still struggling with the competition), unless I force it to search for what I actually want. I’m worried that I’ll be losing book sales because of this. I may have to change my pseudonym, which will involve hours of work, changing book covers, website details and the like.

I think I’ll contact Google and ask them just why their search engines deliberately search for something that the user isn’t interested in. Is this just a glitch in the software, or is it something more sinister to do with revenue for the company?

Back to the competition, though. Did you spot the difference? Yes? Well, congratulations! There’s no prize, unfortunately, except for the pride that you quite rightly feel, having demonstrated such awesome powers of observation!