Yesterday, I noted that Luis Suarez had recommended a wonderful video, entitled “Wear Sunscreen” on his blog; in case you missed it, here it is again:

In my naivete, I thought the video was new and original, and I sent it on to various family members so they could enjoy it too. This morning, my son Jamie emailed me to say that a radio-broadcast version of the same material had been quite popular back in 1999, when he was a graduate student in Arizona. He said there was a rumor that it was a graduation speech given by Kurt Vonnegut at MIT in 1999, but that he couldn’t remember who the real author was. Maybe, he suggested, it was enjoying a revival because of Kurt Vonnegut’s recent death.

So back I went to YouTube, where I found that the video had been uploaded on November 29, 2006 and that there was no indication of its source or author. So, on a whim, I typed “sunscreen” into the Google search box in my Firefox browser … and before I could even finish, Google gave me a more complete list of phrases that I might want to enquire about: “sunscreen song,” “sunscreen lyrics,” “sunscreen brands,” “sunscreen products,” “sunscreen speech,” “sunscreen clothing,” “sunscreen lotion,” and “sunscreen ingredients.” Good grief: people had apparently already conducted searches for “sunscreen speech,” so I did too…

… whereupon I found that the text of the “Wear Sunscreen” video had nothing to do with Kurt Vonnegut, MIT, or any “real” graduation speech — and that it has been written up as an “urban legend” on snopes.com. “Wear Sunscreen” turns out to have been written by a Chicago Tribune columnist named Mary Schmich, whom I had never heard of before. And since I had never heard of her before, I wondered whether more information might be found about her in … well, why not try Wikipedia, which typically provides a more cogent and readable description of such things than might easily found by wading through a list of Google search-results? Sure enough, Wikipedia has a nice article about her, which says (among other things):

“Schmich’s June 1, 1997 column began with the injunction to wear sunscreen, and continued with discursive advice for living without regret. In her introduction to the column, she described it as the commencement address she would give if she were asked to give one. The column was circulated around the internet, with an erroneous claim that it was a commencement address by Kurt Vonnegut, usually at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the misattribution became a news item when Vonnegut was contacted by reporters to comment. He told the New York Times, “What she wrote was funny and wise and charming, so I would have been proud had the words been mine.”

“In 1998, Schmich published the column as a book, Wear Sunscreen. In 1999, Baz Luhrmann released a song called “Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)” in which this column is read word for word as written by Schmich, who gave permission and receives royalties. This song was a number one hit in several countries.”

So there you have it. The take-home lesson, at least for me, is this: if something seems too good, too original, too innovative, and way too cool to be true, there’s at least a chance that it isn’t true, and that lots of other people have already figured that out. It takes only a few seconds to check it out with with the assistance of Google, Wikipedia, snopes.com, and other Internet tools — and it could prevent some embarrassment.

I also have to wonder what on earth I was doing in June, 1997 and why I didn’t hear about “Sunscreen” when it first came out. But all that aside, I’m glad that it’s enjoying a bit of a renaissance; the message is still very relevant ten years later, in today’s world of 2007.