The origin of my name is from a punchline to a very forgettable joke about the Amish (yeah, I’ve forgotten it myself). It’s a play on ‘wunderbar’, German for wonderful. My paternal lineage is Amish/Mennonite.
My on-screen persona/schtick is to be more egotistical than I am IRL, so it was a natural choice. It helps that Bob is my real name.
After lurking for a while I came up with a question I wanted answered, which required me to register. I figured that I’d be continuing to lurk and only posting occasionally, and I came up with LurkMeister. I didn’t really make any connection to the SNL character who annoyingly added suffixes to people’s names, as some have suggested.
It has been commented that a LurkMeister with over 1500 posts is a bit of an oxymoron. What makes the name even funnier is that on Fathom I have over 13,000 posts.
I actually lived in the lightkeepers house on Cape May Point. Not as romantic as it sounds though, it had been converted into an enlisted barracks to house men stationed at a small Navy base, which is long gone. This was 48 years ago.
Ok, I had thought it was just your name, then from your post, I thought it might some pop culture things I missed. I never noticed the ARCANE bit until today. :smack:
My original name was dahfisheroo, part of my name, part of what I do, part irreverence, made up hastily for another reason. Everyone here thought my name was Dan. I started a poll, and fisha seemed pretty ok, made it shorter and more feminine.
So if any of you guys still hate that asshole Dan from MN, it’s not me.
I was inspired by some mysterious words on my birth certificate, “Chaim Mattisyahu Keller.” The word “name” was near them, so I figured it would make a neat username.
Funny how the guys who wrote that thing anticipated the internet in 1971.
My username goes back 15 years to when I was a frequent contributer on several local WWIV BBSs. At the time I was considering majoring in music, and chose “Solfedge” as my alias. It’s not supposed to be spelled with a d. I can’t spell.
Fellow board users nicknamed me Solfy. (we also had a Dulcinea nicknamed Dulcy)
People tend to misread it as “softly,” which makes me laugh because it’s not even close to fitting.
I learned to ski at three MN/WI ski areas:
Afton Alps,
Wild Mountain,
Trollhaugen.
Trollhaugen is the best user name of the three, so there you have it.
My current favorite ski area is Winter Park/Mary Jane in Colorado. They have a great bump run called “Drunken Frenchman”. I was considering that as a user name, but realized it could be a bit offensive.
Mine is from the song “Wharf Rat” by the Grateful Dead.
It’s about a pitiful drunk that dreams that someday he’ll “get up and fly away.”
One particular stanza resonated deeply for me at a particular time in my life:
“But I’ll get back
on my feet someday
The good Lord willing
if He says I may
'cause I know the life I’m
livin’s no good
I’ll get a new start
live the life I should”
So I feel a little like the August West of that song that did manage to turn his life around, and the name helps me remember to stay on the right path.
Way back in '92 when I was first introduced to the world of socializing online, I chose the name Crispy for myself since it was something I had been called back in elementary school. However, as more and more people got online, I’d start to find more often that the name was taken by someone else who’d gotten there first.
Frustrated by the fact that my name was neither original nor often available, I decided to seek out a name that was unique but still representative of who I was. And since I was heavily into reading, I decided to honor my favorite author at the time.
Certainly not the most interesting name out there, but I’ve yet to run across another Asimovian online. So, you know, mission accomplished, and all that.
My current user name is named after the book Straight Man by Richard Russo. Its main character considers himself a funny man, as do his colleagues. Nonetheless, he ultimately finds that world (or more specifically, a chain of events) has made him its straight man – the joke’s on him. The climactic line, which itself made me laugh, comes as the protagonist is hiding in the ceiling above the room in which his university chairship is being decided, the odour of his piss-stained pants floating into the room below, IIRC: “It was then that I realized this really wasn’t funny.” Anyway, my irreverence in some ways makes me like the main character, and I thought it was a pretty good username.
My previous (guest) username, eustachian?fallopian, came from my inability to distinguish the two tubes during a Knowledge Bowl/Scholars’ Bowl/Whatever practice during high school. I had to have a mod change it when I wanted to re-up and the message board couldn’t get the “?” to work – hence, I couldn’t log in.
ETA: I am probably the only straight man on the internet whose username does not refer to the way he swings. I am heterosexual, but I’ve never seen any need to announce the fact quite so directly on the interwebs.