Actually, the full name is Rufus Xavier Sarsaparilla.
I’m a guy who happens to be a fan of women’s basketball. One of my favorite players was Kate Starbird, who starred at Stanford before embarking on a less-than-stellar professional career. When I first went online in 1999, I joined a women’s hoops newsgroup and decided to create a username which honored Kate. I thus translated the component syllables of her surname into German – stern is “star”, vogel is “bird”. While I’m partly of German origin, my major ethnicity is Czech, but Hvezdaptak would be a lot harder to remember, spell, and pronounce.
Xanthous \Xan"thous, a. [Gr. xanqo`s yellow.]
Yellow; specifically (Ethnol.), of or pertaining to those races of man which have yellowish, red, auburn, or brown hair.
I like words that start with “x”. I have brown hair. There you have it.
I almost went with gloom merchant, but that would give you the wrong idea about me.
Sonia Montdore, a character in the novel Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford, is the mother of a single, beautiful offspring. She (Sonia, I mean, not the offspring) is dumpy and overweight until she undergoes a physical transformation and becomes chic and slender. She is a fag hag. She is bossy and monumentally tactless. She has good jewelry. She serves plain but delicious food at her dinner parties. All of the above are true of me, so I chose her name as my nom de forum.
‘queen’ because altho i’m distantly related to both the house of tudor AND the house of windsor, this board name is as close as this american is ever gonna get to royalty!
When I was a kid, I had a Caspar the Friendly Ghost talking doll, with a pull-string ala Chattie Cathy. From day one, Caspar had something wrong with him, and the phrase “I’M a FRIENDly ghost,” (said in a very sing-song tone) was garbled, and it sounded to me and my sister like he was saying, “I’M a FRECKa free.” I just like the word (which often is mistakenly written as FREAKafree) and use it for my hotmail account and a bunch of usernames.
A guy on my company softball team started calling me Shoeless, as in “Shoeless Joe”. This was around the time “Field of Dreams” originally came out. Somehow it stuck.
Back in the early days of usenet I used to sign my posts “Electrical engineer, computer geek (er, programmer), and no talent bum musician” which I think sums me up about as well as a single line sig can. When I made a yahoo account, I shortened it to engineer_comp_geek which was as close as I could get to my sig and make it fit. When I signed up here I used the same name.
I did something very similar in high school. I was doing a pretty simple card trick where you take whatever random card they select and shuffle it to the bottom of the deck, then flip the deck over as you are shuffling to see what the card is. Once you know what the card is, you can vigorously shuffle the deck and use some hokey choice things to find it. The problem was I screwed up the initial shuffle and lost the card in the deck. Now I had no idea what the card was. I went “oh crap I screwed up” and in a further demonstration of sheer clumsiness, I almost dropped the entire deck onto the floor and flipped over a bunch of cards in my hand as I tried to stop mid-shuffle. As I struggled to keep the cards in my hand, one of them slipped out and fell onto the floor. My friend looked at amazement and said “That’s my card! How did you do that?” I just shrugged and said “It’s magic” and refused to repeat the trick again to anyone else.
When I first started using SDMB, it was a discussion board on AOL. They eventually moved it to the Web, and I signed up (for free, then) using my first initial and last name, like many of my other userids. How dull. So I decided to switch to something a little more memorable. I have played the guitar since I was 7 and was very avid for many years, until getting married and having two kids slowed me down and I just gradually stopped playing. But I also love to cook, and since I still had to eat, I still had to cook. So I came up with the first phrase about cooking that came into my head. I also far prefer a gas cooktop, and found kitchen heaven in our house we bought in '95 with a gas range, downdraft grill, electric convection oven, and electric conventional oven.
I started playing in earnest again a few years back and played in a blues band for a couple of years. I dropped out to go back to grad school but I still play all the time. But I don’t really want to go to the trouble to solicit the mods to change my username, and I’ve got enough posts that at least a few other members recognize me now. So I’m still Cooking!!
I used to be referred to as Only Mostly Missus as I was engaged to Only Mostly Dead before I joined. (Now I have my own membership and OMD’s my husband.)
Anyhow, El Perro Fumando is the bar where you can get $2 off a Giant Blue Margarita if you wear something blue in the land that is Sports Night. If you haven’t already seen the entire series, go rent it now.
Thanks for asking! I didn’t even know until this thread prompted me to find out.
The Flaming Lips opened up for Beck at the Lied Center at Kansas University in 2002. In the background they had this video running with Dr. Cube and his gang of friends having some adventures. I just thought the name was cool and weird. I had it as the banner phrase on my cellphone for years. When I signed up here, DrCube was short, unique and memorable, so it seemed like a good candidate. But now I’ve found allthisstuff.
Apparently Dr. Cube is the evil scientist leader of “Dr. Cube’s Posse”. This is all part of some live-action wrestling show called “Kaiju Big Battel [sic.]” put on by some Americans to look half Mexican and half Japanese. It looks pretty interesting. I especially love this:
“Danger can happen! Dr. Cube’s Posse is the evilest evil within Kaiju Big Battel. Heading up this clearinghouse of wickedness is the misanthropic mad scientist, Dr. Cube. Cube’s three-step plan to self-actualization includes world domination by means of genetic modification, financial crime, and terrorizing mankind with his giant, city-crushing monsters.”
Way back when, I posted on here under the username ssskuggiii. After a few years, I had it changed to Mirrored Indigo Shadows, which wasn’t very fitting. I’m really not that goth. Of course, a year or so passed, I forgot the password to the previous username, and used the nickname I’d earned during that year. (I’m not that concerned with finding it out, and I could care less about post counts.) Nashiitashii is a diminutive form of my actual name, Natasha. My friends are really bizarre, and somehow started calling me this. It stuck, so I stuck with it. I rarely use any other usernames online these days.
Lol, I was JUST thinking of starting the same thread.
Well, long story short: Henry the third. Huge fan of Knuckles the Echidna from the Sonic the Hedgehog games.
Actual lengthy explanation: I really got into the StH comic-books Archie comics was putting out (really neat story-lines, and fantastic art whenever Patrick Spaziante and Harvey Mercadoocasio were drawing). I used to have a bunch of internet handles, but eventually I settled on Athair313; Athair was this old, wise mystic who was part of Knuckles’ backstory (and his great grandfather, IIRC). Knuckles inherited the position of Guardian of a magic floating island and Athair was the only member of his family line to ever refuse the position, which made him the black sheep of the family (despite rejecting it to work for the greater good of the world). 3 again, because I’m the third, and 13 because that’s how old I was. When my old AOL screen-name was compromised (about a year later, a year after that we switched to MSN), I had to come up with a new one, and eventually settled on H3Knuckles.
PS. Mangetout, that’s amusing. I was one of the people who thought it was supposed to be Man get out, but I always read it as mange tout (not knowing those were actual french words).
Cooking - there are a few of us hardcore guitar types on the SDMB (just ask Crotalus, lieu, small clanger, spectre of picanthropus, picker, Birdmonster (bassist) and sleestak, to name a few off the top of my head)
Since I was born on the 13th day of the month, I consider 13 my lucky number. Mr. Lucky was also born on the 13th, and we were married on a 13th (then again, that’s not turning out so well, so… :rolleyes: ) Seriously, I may be one of the few people who’s superstitious about Friday the 13th in a good way.
