For those who have forgotten (or never read) the story behind my screen name, I’ll tell it again. I’m a guy who happens to be a fan of women’s basketball. One of my favorite players (and names) was Kate Starbird, who starred for Stanford University. She’s a self-described nerd, and was doing commercials for the Women’s National Basketball Association web site when I joined the ranks of Internet users in 1999.
One of the first sites I posted to was a women’s basketball newsgroup. Rather than simply sign up as “Starbird Fan” or something of that sort, I decided to translate the component syllables of Kate’s surname into another language. My three prinicipal ethnic backgrounds are Czech (which gave me the rather unwieldy Hvezdaptak), French (which yielded Etoileoiseau), and German (in which Sternvogel is an actual, but uncommon, last name).
I went with the last of these, and have adopted it as my identity pretty much everywhere I’ve ventured in cyberspace. One notable exception was during my days as an AOL subscriber (2001-06), when I created my account and learned Sternvogel was already taken. I’ve always suspected that a certain person in that women’s basketball newsgroup, who posted from an AOL account, poached the handle as one of his “alternate” usernames after he and I had a “difference of opinion”.
You know, it’s funny. Many of you say that your handle is what you use everywhere. I play WoW a lot, and sometimes I’ll come across a name on Anvilmar that will be just like a name here. I feel like a goofball asking someone if they’re a, “Doper” but I do it anyway. Both times I’ve asked, I’ve been made to feel like a weirdo, because not only have they not been one of us, but they don’t know what it means. Even with explanation after the fact, I always get the impression that there’s someone on the other end of my terminal looking sideways at the monitor and going, “Suuuure that’s what it means.”
Anyway, I’ve taken my name from the actress of the same name. While I’m not a fanatic of hers, I like her enough, but her name is BADASS, so I have adopted it. She can have it back when I die.
I love to make kites (mainly single-line), and I love to fly kites, (again mainly single-line), though I do have some really neat rotor-kites (which are of necessity, two-line.)
Made a sarcastic and pessimistic comment to Madpansy one time, which in and of itself is hardly noteworthy, but I casually signed it with “That’s me, Bobo the Optimist”, and it stuck. Compared to some people around here I’m a happy-go-lucky ray of freakin’ sunshine, but rarely has anyone called me an optimist without laughing.
“Bobo” came from a garage at which I worked many a year ago. An old guy there named Jim we called “Jimbo”, started spreading until Dan was Dano, I was Bobo (pronounced bō-bō not bäb-ō ) but “Kurto” just sounded stupid.
Not much to it really, mine would be from a romantic little book I recommend to nearly everyone within my contact because it demands to be read. The Violet Creep is sort of the monkey wrench in the plans of the main characters, and that, is how I feel I come into play where most things are concerned, cause trouble, leave no trace.
Radegast is either a West Slavic god of fertility and hospitality, or might just be a probably mythic town refered to by some German scholars. Either way, I always liked the statue of him at the Prague zoo, plus it was, in my opinion, the absolute best Czech beer during the time I lived in Prague.
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.
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 one of the leaders of the Illuminati who secretly rule the world from behind the scenes, carefully and insidiously pulling strings and slowly but surely bringing forth the New World Order.
I used to be heavily into graphic design and print at the time I joined. But now I’ve shifted the focus of my career into 3D modeling, animation and visual effects, so cmyk isn’t as telling a moniker anymore. But it does have 2 of my initials in it (K. C.). And I like the way it looks.
Another thing it’s good for, is try googling “cmyk”… it won’t lead you to the Dope. It helps with the whole anonymity thing.
Mine is a pun. In my formative years someone played me a King Crimson song called, “Elephant Talk” – it involves the multiplicity of words we have for talking.
Here is the “letter B” verse:
“Talk, its only talk
Babble, burble, banter, bicker bicker bicker
Brouhaha, boulderdash, ballyhoo
Its only talk
Back talk”
They only get up to E and then there’s a trumpet/elephant sound and then they just go apeshit. I’m actually not into jazz or fusion much at all, but I love that song.
Meanwhile, “bruja” is Spanish for “witch”. I always sort of envision it as the kind of word the townspeople hurl while they’re brandishing torches & pitchforks.
I’ve explained this once I believe but I’ll go again. There was this strange punk group called Atom and his Package from Philadelphia that had very brief and very minor success with the song “Punk Rock Academy”. I used to go see them whenever they came to Nashville which was strangely fairly often.
Eventually they gained such a cult following that if they wanted to play smaller shows they would play under the band name Lobster Mobster so only those in the know would show up and it wouldn’t be overly crowded.
It was never really that crowded in the first place but that’s what they did. I saw Atom once in New Orleans before the band disbanded. Wonder what they are all doing now?
