jello operator

I was talking to a certain former sociology graduate student who recently started working for a non-profit organization. She said she wished that some of the people she worked with would be able to apply sociological insights to the populations they worked with. And they she said, "They're also the kind of people who believe there are really twins out there named Orangejello and Lemonjello." To which I had to point out that the story of twins named Orangejello and Lemonjello is featured in Freakonomics, where it is attributed to a first-hand sighting by prominent sociologist Doug McAdam, who confirmed to me that he had met a woman in a California grocery store with children she introduced as Orangejello and Lemonjello. (You might wonder if he had been duped by the woman, but I'm not going to be the one to raise that possibility out loud.)

By the way, big news in sociology recently is that Fabio Rojas has been guest blogging over at orgtheory. I'm a Fabio Rojas fan, although the exact magnitude of this fanship--the posters, the bobbleheads--I keep secret. But Fabio's stint raises two important points. First, considering that Fabio is now blogging alongside Omar Lizardo, it's interesting that a blog co-inaugurated by an economist named "Teppo" has managed to score two of the more interestingly named younger sociologists.* Second, it's further evidence for my theory that if all the known and suspected blog authors and readers in sociology got together, they could basically take over the future of the discipline.

* Confession: I keep a list of interesting names I run across in academia so I have character names at hand should I ever drop all this to write a mystery novel--it started one afternoon when I was reading in the survey methodology literature and kept running across references to this guy who surname was "Oldendick"--and "Teppo," "Lizardo," and "Fabio Rojas" are all coincidentally on this list.

Update: I just looked at ancestry.com, and an "Orangejello Castleberry" is listed as having a Mississippi provenance, while a "Lemonjello Snarfblat" is listed as having an Arizona provenance. How common it is to have twins with different last names from different states, I have no idea, but perhaps the ancestry.com hits are not complete records but just the tip of the jelloburg as far as these names are concerned.