Slow News Day: What's Your Name Mean?

I'm pretty sure, though, they didn't actually have a feature called "Eliminate Me" when I started using the name. I think Kruk is stealing ideas from me. That's why I wear the tinfoil hat these days...

John Tamargo was a Giants catcher from the late 70's, who is now managing the Durham Bulls.

Goofus, I must say your name is very appropriate.

In hindsight, though, I should've chosen something more imaginative and humorous, like "Grant".

It actually came up one year when my friends and I were gearing to do a fantasy football season and I needed a yahoo handle. I was reading the paper, looked down, and there it was. Liked it ever since.

Wikipedia knows all - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xanthan

"I woke up this morning, and I heard a distubrbing sound....
 It was the jingle-jangle of a thousand lost souls."

Several years later, it was in my head when I chose a chat name in Yahoo.  Most usernames aren't 55 characters long, however, so I shortened it.  I try to use it on any chat/board I'm on, since I don't like hiding my identity.

It's just funny because people just use 'Brute' and think either I'm a mean Neanderthal, or a gay guy with particular fragrance tastes.

First, when I was in high school at the good ol' Saint Ignatius, I decided, on a whim, to make a video showing people walking as if they were driving. So, for instance, I filmed a kid as he walked into the middle of a hallway, stopped, took a quick look around, and then spun in circles a few times before running away (See? Donuts! Clever! Clever!). Another scene involved kidnapping a stuffed bear from a student club's office, setting it up in the middle of a hallway, and then having a girl walk by and kick it over (See? Roadkill! Fun-ny! Fun-ny!). For the aftermath of the scene, we shot a closeup of the stuffed bear with black electrical-tape X-es over his eyes. My friend, Tony, took a liking to this bear, kept the X-es over his eyes, named him Toby, and eventually took him home. Toby still lives with him, and Toby is still dead.

ANYWAY, later that school year, Tony, my close friend Blake, and I started playing music together, just jamming. Tony would stick Toby in Blake's drum set before each jam session. So, of course, when it came time to figure out what our band name should be, we threw a few forgettable ideas on the table before someone realized that as long as we were on a Dead Kennedys kick, we could simultaneously pay them tribute and make Toby a part of our iconography by calling ourselves the Dead Teddys (Alternative Tentacles Records was also headquartered on Blake's block in SF, meaning we were jamming a stone's throw away from our name-inspirers' label, only we didn't know it at the time). The band didn't last long, as the other two guys decided they liked OK Computer-era Radiohead so much that my indifference to the prospect of playing ethereal avant garde neo prog rock meant I was out of the band. Classic creative differences. They later added a new guitarist, changed their name to Infinite Return, and discovered that the Infinite Return dot com url was owned by some bank-type entity.

ANYWAY, a few years later, when I was in college, Yahoo inexplicably decided to delete my account. While I eventually recovered it and all my emails, in the interim I had to set up a replacement email address. Blake was using DeadTeddy with his favorite number at the end of it for AIM purposes, so I realized that it would make perfect sense for me to use it with my number, and thus DeadTeddy8 was born.

this was about the same time the internet sprung up and all the green hornet names were taken, so i went with red since it was the color of the brick wall in front of the lobby computer when i had to come up with a screen name for this wacky new "aol" thing everyone was talking about.

Nattō is an acquired taste due to its powerful smell and sticky consistency.
Description of me or the food?  You decide.

But I'll put my two cents in. Really my name doesn't take a genius to figure it out.

pardon the awkward transitions b/w 1st and 3rd person.

In retrospect I should have chosen something longer.  Some sites don't allow short names, so I end up going by Snoffin or other variations of Snof when that happens.  This site seems to be pretty nice about name length (see "E" and "North Side Chicago Expatriate Giants Fan").

The word part is an oft-used synonym for home run, the 71 being the record breaking total of Barry Bonds in 2001.  My AIM screen name is bigfly73 cuz somehow bigfly71 was taken(probably by me and I just forgot.)

It is my username for various web sites and online poker rooms dating back to rec.sport.baseball and alt.sport.baseball.sf-giants back in the pre-interweb days (1991 or so).

That commercial was played all the time, and constantly hearing J.T. say "Furf Rocky" drove me nuts.   So, I irritated my friends, shouting "Furf Rocky!" without warning, or asking them in a deranged voice, "Are YOU Furf Rocky?"  No one was spared, not even my dog.

Then I happened to check this blog, and lo and behold, another poster had remarked his/her irritation with J.T.'s pronounciation of this "Furf Rocky" thing.   It was simply meant to be...and I created an account.

Add it all up, and you have a username you didn't ask the history for. I wanted to play too.

I went to school in the South and a classmate of mine had grown up playing baseball in some reeeeally small rural towns.  One time his high school team took a bus way out into the boonies and pulled up at the barren dirt field where they'd be playing that day.  When they were getting off the bus, the players on the other team were already there waiting to start the game... and my friend overheard one of their opponents say to the guy next to him "DANG, Jackson!  They got hats AND bats!  They gonna kick our ass!!!"

It quickly became the name of my football fantasy teams and my first fantasy baseball team, though I've since moved on from that to using  Metallica lyrics to name my fantasy teams. The name is Giants related so it was an easy call for use on this site.

Also, "Grant" was already taken.