I had been lurking here for a while and needed to sign up quick to offer my two cents on a thread and selected this username because it just popped into my mind at that moment. I first heard it in an article about whitewater paddling (my main hobby) in which the sheriff of an Appalachian community was asked what he thought of all the kayakers that descended on his town for the spring high water. “Ohhh…they’s jus’ river hippies.”
That stuck in my mind for some reason.
I don’t look much like a hippie in real life.
Oddly enough, not the map company.
I was into flying radio controlled planes. My username is a basic maneuver.
I like rabbits. A lot.
So THAT’S where you’ve been!!! I missed you!! 
People at my work when I was an Admin Asst. would say to me “reallifename” would you do something for me and I’d say, “That’s Missy to you, bub.” Yeah. Spellbinding, I know.
I used to be **Pochacco **. That was the alias I used when I was playing a lot of online shooters in the 90’s. I thought it was funny to kill people named as a Hello Kitty character.
But a few years ago I decided I wanted a searchable alias. If you Google “Pochacco” all you get are Sanrio sites. I’ve always admired hamsters for their quiet dignity, and I was amused by the idea of being the absolute master of something small and trivial. So … .
Colibri is Spanish for hummingbird. My doctoral research was on hummingbirds in Panama.
It also refers to Huitzilopochtli, the Southern Hummingbird, Aztec god of war and human sacrifice.
Camping nickname from long ago.
Mine does not make sense anymore. My first job while I was on active duty in the army was as an Aeroscout Observer. I got to fly around in OH-58s and have fun. OH-58s have a perfectly good name(Kiowa) but we always just called them 58s. I decided to get out but stay in the National Guard. I was surprised to see that my Guard unit still used OH-6s. Something I didn’t expect to see outside of a museum. The OH-6 has a perfectly good name (Cayuse) but since Vietnam it has always been called Loach. Loach was derived from LOH, Light Observation Helicopter. When I was looking for a name I decided on Loach and have used variations ever since. A little while later my job and the helicopters went away and I went into tanks. Then the tanks went away and I am currently a Combat Engineer. I haven’t been in a Loach for at least 16 years but the name remains.
Some assumed it had to do with the fish or the director. Nope, the helicopter.
Thanks!
In reality, I’m too lazy to come up with anything new, anyway. Besides, if I changed to something else..well, let’s say (random username) I wanted to change to “Morning Addition.” Then I’d be “Morning Addition is the new Digital is the new analog.” So I guess I’m kinda stuck.
-M/A/D/a
I give up.
I used to have two cats, which were two cats too many.
Now I have just one cat, and he’s eighteen.
Soon, I may be Not Any Cats.
Nah, I’ll probably scrape up a couple of kittens from somewhere. And when those get old and die, I’ll be too old to get more.
That’s an upsetting thought.
Named myself after Janis Joplin & threw in a nod to Big Brother. Been using this nick & variations of it all my online life.
India. 1979. I was on the fourth night of a two-day opium and sex orgy with a high-ranking Madagascaran general and a half-dozen east-Asian college co-eds/call girls.
The general and a girl named Nomi went out for cigarettes. I was eating the last of a lemon cake, and trying to make conversation with one of the hookers, but her English was far from understandable in my opium-induced state.
I told her “That’s enough honey. No more talking.”
She said, “Lendon vake?”
I said, “Honey, let me eat my lemon cake cuz I want to go to bed.”
“Lendon ved?” she said.
But at that point, my last hit off the pipe did something to me, and her words began to echo off the walls.
"Lendonvedenlendonvederlendervedendervedderlendenvedderlenderveddenderlendervedder…
“Len…der…ved…der.”
I was lost in the sound of her voice bouncing around my eardrums, and I hadn’t noticed the general had come back, and was standing over me. He was repeatedly asking me if I was okay. I finally realized he was talking to me, and I said “Yeah…yeah.”
Then he asked, “But are you happy?”
I looked at him, nodded my head slowly, and said, “No.”
I’m a Marx Brothers fan. Rufus T. Firefly was the name of Groucho’s character in Duck Soup, the greatest film comedy of the pre-Monty Python era.
I’ve loved your username for years, on account of that image.
There was close to an hour between changing my name and posting. I expect thousands were on the edges of their seats, wondering what had become of me.
Think Professor Fate from The Great Race.
my real name is oliveoyl~
Back in the early days of [del]wasting time at work[/del] the Internet, I was a member of a dial up user net thingy, and being very much into the Roppongi nightlife at the time, it was sort of a self-mocking name. It’s followed me for a couple of boards.
Settling down as a middle age, non-partying old fart, I’ve thought of changing my user name, but as I go in waves of posting and then getting too busy, I’m not sure if people would still know who I am (not that many do anyway. . .) so I’ve kept it.