Lorenzo Von Matterhorn is a classical example of how the division between fiction and reality can be
Lorenzo Von Matterhorn is a nice little example of how the division between fiction and reality can become distorted online. A playbook by Barney entitled 'How I Met Your mother'. We find that Barney in another dating drama. In his own peculiar way he adopts the name Lorenzo Von Matterhorn. Rather than try and date using the conventional, newly single, persona. He introduces himself as such to a pretty girl who has a web enabled phone. She then Googles "Lorenzo Von Matterhorn" and finds a series of fake sites which describe him as Swiss, a billionaire, an explorer, animal lover and someone advised not to have penis reduction surgery.
So when Barney, still posing as Lorenzo Von Matterhorn, asks her out she of course says yes. So far, simply a cute little joke on how far men will go to get laid plus a commentary upon the modern and online worlds.
What slightly lifts is and blurs the line from that fictional world is that as part of the show's set up the writers created a Wikipedia page: not just in the show, but out here in the real world. Or the online world, however real you might think that is. Lorenzo von Matterhorn's page contained such as this:
Lorenzo Von Matterhorn was born somewhere in Switzerland in the spring of 1974. The exact date and circumstances of his birth are unknown since he was immediately placed in a basket and tossed in a river. Young Lorenzo rode the pristine Alpine glacial melt waters for hundreds of miles until a young Milanese woman discovered the basket along the banks of the river Po. Some say it was this first early journey to Milan that fueled both his love of exploration and fashion. The woman would raise Lorenzo as her own, naming him Lorenzo after her father and giving him the surname Von Matterhorn to reflect his Swiss heritage as well as his uncommonly large penis.
Shortly after his family moved to New York City in the late 70’s, Lorenzo began rescuing stray puppies and other cute animals. As someone who had been abandoned himself, Lorenzo recognized both the pain of loneliness as well as the power of hope. One evening, while nursing a particularly cute Cocker Spaniel back to health, Lorenzo noticed the rest of his brood howling in unison. Curious as to their abilities, he spent the next several months developing their voices and then entered them as a musical act in a local festival under the name DOG STEVENS. They took first place, and went on to become one of the most successful animal musical acts since The Beatles.
This isn't quite a Laurel and Hardy script nor does it reach the peaks of a really good The Onion headline but there's some good jokes in there. But, of course, Wikipedia is about facts, not fiction of fantasy, so once the editors realized what was going on they took down the Lorenzo Von Matterhorn page. What is there now is simply a pale copy of the original.
However, here we come to a problem of recursion: how many loops should we go back in determining what is fact and what is fiction? Lorenzo Von Matterhorn is of course fiction: even within the TV show Lorenzo Von Matterhorn is fiction. So perhaps there should not be a Wikipedia page, or perhaps only a trivially short one.
But despite it all being fiction, Lorenzo Von Matterhorn was (as far as anyone knows at least) the first fictional character to have a Wikipedia page created as part of the cover for that character: that is fact, not fiction. So perhaps the full page should be available for that fact, even if Lorenzo Von Matterhorn is fiction?
And if that isn't enough, then perhaps we should go around one more loop? That many are writing about Lorenzo, that many are searching for Von Matterhorn: is this not sufficient fact to make the fictional page worthy of inclusion?
