I was an avid snowboarder before I got broken a few too many times.
At one point in my life I flew too close to the sun with wings made of wax (metaphorically, so to speak). No, my dad didn’t make me do it, which is one difference from the original tale.
Coincidentally, eventually I took a job that involved a lot of business travel, so there is that connection too.
I was an accountant for over 30 years, own close to 4,000 books, and like what I believe is the only English word with three consecutive double letters.
Sorry for he hijack, but does it bother you when they don’t translate this to English in some translations? It does me. In English the word has come to mean flamboyant confidence of style or manner (possibly due to this play). In the play in French it (his white plume) is his symbol for his integrity of character, It makes such a difference.
Now back to your regularly scheduled thread. My user name is a character in a movie I like quite a lot. It’s a male character played by a woman who was listed in the cast with a man’s name at the time. So the gender bending was a little piquant for me.
“Homie” is slang for “friend,” and also a diminutive of my last name, and people have been calling me “Homie” for decades.
Back in the mid 1990s, I bought a tam-o-shantern at a New Orleans market, which bore the colors typically associated with reggae and the Rastafari movement. (I bought the hat for the lulz – I was not then, nor have I ever been, a member of the Rastafari movement, though I do dig reggae.) My floor-mates in my college dorm took to calling me “Rastahomie.” A few years later, Al Gore invented the internet, I needed a “handle” as it was called then, and I just began using “Rastahomie” since it was an existing nickname for me. I used it for this new thing called e-mail, on these new things called message boards (including this one), etc.
A few years later, I had a reckoning. Maybe I was afraid of cultural appropriation. Maybe I was afraid it gave the wrong idea. Whatever – I just decided that “Rastahomie” no longer made sense for me.
Enter my brother. He would oft greet me by saying “Hey, Homie,” in the voice of Homer’s friend Barney from The Simpsons. “HeyHomie” just kind of stuck, and I changed my name here.
Back in the days when everyone was using Unix machines to get onto the internet, my .sig (for whose of you who are both old enough and geeky enough to know what a Unix .sig file is) was “Electrical Engineer, Computer Geek (er, programmer) and no talent bum musician.” When I signed up for an e-mail account way back when, I tried to shorten that to engineer_computer_geek but that was too long, so I shortened it even further to engineer_comp_geek. I used the same name when I registered here.
Old college nickname.
This is brilliant. You were once a magnificent Roman temple, but the temple is now lopsided and the pillars are crumbling.
I’m from Syracuse. Pretty simple.
Prof. Pepperwinkle was a lovable, eccentric (but capable) crotchety old inventor on the early 1960’s TV series The Adventures of Superman. He was welcomed heartily every time he showed up.
Back in the 90s at my work we had a chat room that enabled folks from various places to interact both professionally and socially. I don’t recall the exact event, but somehow I was dubbed FairyChatMother (I’d been using my own name up to that point) but usernames couldn’t exceed 12 characters, so FairyChatMom it was and has been ever since.
Obi-Wan Kenobi is one of my favorite Star Wars characters, and I was born in 1965. I think I’d used some variation on it when I was on the Straight Dope forums on AOL in the '90s, and when the SDMB became its own thing, I used something similar.
I coach high school cross-country/track.
Any Sci-Fi fan will recognize my name as the name of the mathematical psycho-historian in Asimov’s Foundation trilogy. I guess I would aspire to that.
Sam Stone is the title character of a John Prine song about a combat veteran who gets hooked on heroin after taking opiods for the pain of a combat injury, and winds up a strung out junkie who ultimately dies of a drug overdose.
Sam Stone came home to his wife and family,
After serving in the conflict overseas.
And the time that he served,
Had shattered all his nerve,
And left a little shrapnel in his knee.
…
There’s a hole in daddy 's arm, where all the money goes,
And Jesus Christ died for nothjng, I suppose.
Little pitchers have big ears,
Don’t stop to count the years,
Sweet songs never last too long on broken radios.
Named after the greatest dog ever: The Right Honorable Tits McGee!
Read The Lord of the Rings at an impressionable age, tried to register to a BBS in the late 90’s as “Gandalf”, “Aragorn” and “Frodo”, the first 2 were already used.
The avatar is Frodo’s character avatar from the (IMHO criminally underrated) Interplay’s LOTR computer game.
I’d been washing windows that day
Dr. Winston O’Boogie was a pseudonym sometimes used by John Lennon.
Long ago, I read a quote attributed to the good doctor - “A conspiracy of silence speaks louder than words.”
Plus it helps that I’ve never run into a board where someone else has already grabbed that name.
I am thankful you weren’t repairing a septic tank that day.