Most of you probably know the origins of Donald Glover’s rap name, Childish Gambino. As he told Jimmy Fallon back in 2011, he got it from the Wu Tang name generator during his sophomore year of college.
We were all hanging out, chilling and drinking and then we were like, “oh, Wu-Tang name generator, let’s put our name in.” And we’re putting them all in, and they’re all funny and stuff, and then mine came up and I was like, ‘you guys, it’s not funny anymore. This is something big.’ I just really liked it.”
But here’s the odd wrinkle, and thus, the mystery behind the name Childish Gambino: There are TWO Wu-Tang name generators. One is located at mess.be and the other at recordstore.com, and guess what? If you type in Donald Glover into either Wu Tang name generator, you get back the same result: Childish Gambino.
This is odd because you can type in literally any other name in the world and the two Wu Tang name generators will give you two different Wu Tang names. This is true of EVERYONE except Donald Glover. This is even true of the Wu Tang Clan members themselves (the mess.be generator will return the actual names of the Wu Tang if you put in their real names, but the recordstore.com name generator will give them different Wu names).
What are the odds that two name generators that spit out two different names for every other person on the planet spit out the same name for Donald Glover: Childish Gambino?
It’s a helluva mystery, and it means that this is either the biggest cosmic coincidence ever, or someone is cheating by hard coding Donald Glover’s Wu mame into their generator in an effort to prove that they were the name generator responsible for Donald Glover’s rap name.
But which one is the fraud, and which was is legit? That’s the mystery.
That was actually the subject of the podcast [TLDR] a few months ago. They tracked down the programmers behind the two generators. Peter Dom (the programmer for the more popular generator, mess.be) was unequivocal in his answer: No way did he hardcode Childish Gambino into his generator. In fact, he said, if he were to hard code anyone’s name into his generator, it would’ve been his own. However, he did say that he made one exception: For the actual Wu Tang members. Still, Dom admitted — with God as his witness — that his name generator was the one that generated Donald Glover’s rap name.
However, Nick Demick, who owns the less popular but older Wu Tang name generator (by three years) at recordstore.com, insists that his was the original Childish Gambino generator. “I would never hard code. I would never do that. That’s despicable,” he said.
Who was lying? Who was not? Based on the fact that the [TLDR] podcast attempted to follow up with Peter Dom of the mess.be name generator after speaking with Nick Demick, and Dom didn’t answer phone calls or emails, it’s probably the mess.be Wu Tang name generator that is hard coded. But why would Peter Dom lie? There’s nothing at stake here. His Wu-Tang name generator is ten years old. It’s not a particularly popular site. It makes no sense.
But what if, as the [TLDR] podcast suggested, there is yet another possibility. What if both were telling the truth. What if Childish Gambino is just a “necessary fact of the universe” like the atomic number of gold? What if the laws of the randomness break down in one place? Around Childish Gambino?
What if Donald Glover is actually at the center of the universe, and we are all revolving around him? What if this man is our one true God?
