The Name.

Yahmdallah Bjorknickerfod? What kind of a name is that?

I'll tell you.

Completely made up.

Here's the story. Back in college my roommates and I would often author limericks and other dirty poems to post at parties. We were pretty good at it, and most folks often looked forward to them as much as the kegger itself. Well, the bluer they were, the more reluctant we were to claim them. So we all invented pseudonyms for ourselves. I thought of mine out of the blue one day while traveling back to college after spring break. I wanted something so whacked and international that you would have a hard time guessing the nationality, and voila.

Back just as the internet became widely available, my real name proved to be so generic that I would always be firstlast12314212341234234squared when I tried to create an online account of any sort. So I dug into my beer-dimmed memory (a lot of my Sr. year in college is hazy), and remembered Yahmdallah.

Of course, no one else had thought of this name.

I've been told that it means "Thanking God" in Arabic, but I've never verified it. After 9-11, I wondered if I'd have to change to a new pseudonym, but it looks like no one so far has assumed I'm of Middle Eastern descent. I'm a middle-aged, married, American white guy, and a father, btw.

My wife inadvertently attracted a web stalker at one point, and I found that having a pseudonym in this huge international phenomenon of the web is a good safety precaution. After we got rid of the stalker, and his girlfriend (it was a really freaky episode - there are some seriously disturbed people in the world), she went incognito with a pseudonym, too. No problems since. [update: I was wrong - see above.]

On some blogs, the authors get all snotty about people using their real names. But more often than not these are older, single guys who don't have much danger of some parasite latching onto them, so I feel they are talking a bit out of turn. Safety is a hell of a lot more important than someone feeling I'm being somehow more honest because they know my real name.

And there you have it.