Anyone seen that old black and white movie Witness for the Prosecution? I was watching it at a friends one night and the trailer that was shown at the beginning of the movie said the leading actress (Marlene Dietrich?) portrayed an intriguing question mark and we all thought it was hilarious. Somehow when we all chose nicknames I got that one and we all just shortened it to I.Q. but I decided to put down the long version 
Asmodeus was the Babylonian god of lust…amoung many other personifications.
Nuff said.
Huge fan of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musicals since the 1970’s. In 1997 he did “Whistle Down the Wind,” with a song for the character Annie Christmas in it. My last name is Anne, and my B-day is December 25th. Good thing I’m not an ALW stalker.
DZ42 - letters and numbers - not real original or clever, but slightly more so than what I usually use (DZieger).
And 42 needs no explanation, I’m sure.
Today’s Quiz:
My name is Rick Jones. My screen name is RickJay. For 100 points, guess where my screen name came from.
Actually, as simple as RickJay sounds, I actually have had some actual nicknames I could have used, the best of which was “Yonez.”
On my first day in the Army, maybe 30-40 recruits and I are standing there in three ranks, looking ridiculous in our pooorly assembled uniforms with oru families watching as we’re about to be bussed away to basic training. We’re waiting for the course officer and his master corporal to hand us our paperwork.
The master corporal, a guy named Lenny Bessette, was not the sharpest knife in the drawer; he was kicked out of the Army a few years later because he was basically just an idiot. How he had gotten promoted that far remains a mystery. Anyway, he announced that he’s going to start calling out our names and we are to come up and get our paperwork. He then warns us he might mispronounce some of them because some look weird. Wait for it.
So he gets down to Hutton, and then calls out “Yonez.”
Nobody answers. “Yonez? Private Yonez?”
The guy next to me, Bill Fletcher, leans over and says, “Hey, isn’t your name Jones?”
I say, yeah.
With a horrified look, Bill says, “I think he means you!”
Sure enough, he did.
I march up, take my paperwork, squeak “It’s Jones, master corporal,” and turn to take my place. As I’m walking by the families watching us, EVERY ONE of them has slapped their hand to their forehead.
For years, everyone called me Yonez. Even my CO and sergeant-major liked to call me that.
Sorry for the highjack but I figured a funny story’s always welcome, and I always wished I’d picked “yonez” instead of “RickJay.”
I earned mine.
It’s short for Purina Orca Chow.
It’s a private scuba joke. On the bottom of my left fin I’ve got ORCA painted on, and on the right fin is written CHOW. When my buddies trail me in the water, they see ORCA… CHOW… ORCA… CHOW…
It’s a bit of whimsy, and it reminds the group that when we’re down there we’re in someone else’s house. [Never mind that Orcas don’t attack humans.]
I’ve answered it before as well but what they hey…
It’s a nickname given to me by friends who claim I’m similiar to a character from the Princess Bride.
IRL, I’m a journalist.
Gonna try to reply to everyone. If I missed you, just whack my head soundly 3 times with a vacuum cleaner handle.
cheezit:…so, did you name your cat after the incident?
tracer: oh, oops. whelp…can’t think of anything witty to say, so…yeah.
shimmery: what kind of animal was it?
Jabe: Us Americans also like to start sentences w/ Us instead of We :). (Actually, is Us correct? I could never remember. Scribe should be able to tell us…)
**Spoofe:**rotflmao!
**AudreyK:**So, how’d you get your name? Oh, never mind.
slaps head like a fellow soldier of RickJay
Snooooopy: There’s someone on my personal message board you should meet. She goes by Spooky, and loves using extra o’s.
elvis: seriously?
dragonlady:…of Pern?
Malarky: I personally like the boy band one.
bdgr: why not D&DBadger?
**racinchikki:**As QOTU, have you met SPOOFE? Maybe you could rule together.
Sea Sloth: I think there is such a creature as a Sea Sloth. But, then again, you’re studying MBiology, so you would know, and I’m on crack.
Giraffe:…oh! great danes, dane=danish! smacks head again
ladybug: Naw, I got mine from a cartoon too.
saam: was going to say something witty about hanging around sea sloth too long, but realized how dumb a joke that would be.
Crunchy Frog: I like it better too.
IQM: I was wondering how long it would take you to reply.
Asmodeus: me too!
Annie-Xmas: I didn’t know ALW was still alive. The things you learn on the way to learning other things.
DZ42: Actually, I know 42 has something to do w/ sex, but not sure what exactly.
RickJay: I’m going off to bootcamp soon, actually, so I hope that my drill sergeant isn’t as dumb (though “master corporal”? I’ve heard of master sergeant, but not corporal. Guess I gotta review my enlistee ranks. But, how does a corporal get to be a drill leader?) CPL Bessett would have fun w/ my name; it’s a polish one with a nice little silent ‘L’ stuck in for fun.
shhh zzzz: How so? Could be interpreted in many ways…
OrcaChow: As good a story as that was, you need to end it w/ “and also because I feed my cat mashed Orca.” But then again, Sea Sloth might get mad.
dpr: …Dread Pirate Roberts? Oh, ok. Took me a second to figure it out.
Scribe: I did want to be a journalist, but changed my mind. Do you like it?
Hope I got in under the wire here…
I’ve always used unusual screen names, and my current one is no exception.
It’s the name of a small town in Algeria (that’s about as quaint as it gets).
Stella Fantasia is a classmate of Dolores “Lolita” Haze in the novel by Nabokov. “Adorable Stella, who has let strangers touch her”…just seemed appropriate somehow. Plus I’m into David Bowie, who has that whole spaceman/interstellar traveler vibe, & I thought it went with that. “Stella Fantasia” sounds like she could be Ziggy Stardust’s girlfriend.
This is my first post, and no one asked, but here goes the explaination for my screen name. My dad was a mailman, and when i was a snot nosed kid I thought he was a loser. As I got older and began to psychoanalyze a bit, I changed my mind. Dad was a bombardier in WWII, and never has talked about it much. His one major quote that sticks out in my mind is, “I never had a quarrel with those people, but I had to get in that plane every day, and drop bombs on them.” So after the war, he got back to his hometown and took the civil service exam. To this day, he hates to fly. Every day of his working life he got to walk on the ground, with the sky above him where it belonged, and he never lifted his hand in violence again. Not bad eh?
Purina Orca Chow is made for Orcas, not made of them. Are you saying that Purina Cat Chow is made of cats? And Soylent Green is made of… soy?
miliana: did you choose the town for any particular reason other than the sound of it? it does sound cool, regardless.
Stella*Fantasia: like the asterisk. I’ve always liked the David Bowie song w/ the lyrics ‘ground control to Major Tom’. Don’t know the name.
mailman: damn, that’s deep. Let me be the first to welcome you to the SDMB (am I allowed to do that?), even though I’m relatively new myself.
OrcaChow: ponders well, I guess that makes sense, but then I couldn’t tie your post to Sea Sloth’s, cutting down on the wackiness.
I was petting my cat, Tabithina, when I signed up. I wonder how many of us use our pet’s names.
We Americans… Take the word “Americans” out of the sentence. You would not say “Us even have to have shortened forms of initials”, you would say, “We even have to have shortened forms of initials”. Glad to help.
I was trying to come up with a name to use when I started looking through my Winamp. The first two songs that jumped out at me were “21st century digital boy” by bad religion and “scars flown proud” by faith and the muse. Digital and muse just melded together well, and hence “DigitalMuse”
Not to mention it just sounds really cool.
My undergraduate majors were physics, math, and computer engineering – no further explanation is necessary.
Mine’s one of those taken from a pet’s name, in this case, one reaaally rowdy cat.