For this week’s edition of Blogging Insights, Dr. Tanya is interested in names. She writes, “The name that you blog under is the calling card which introduces you to bloggers and readers across the globe. Some bloggers use their first name and some use their full name. Others prefer to keep their identity unknown, blogging under a cool made up name.” And then she asks us these questions:
Do you use your own name for blogging?
Yes, my parents named me Fandango and as soon as I was old enough to understand what they had done to me, which was when I was about five, I killed them both. Can you blame me?
If you use a psuedonym, what are your reasons for this and what led you to choose that particular name?
This is my fifth blog and I’ve used pseudonyms for all of them, albeit not the same pseudonym for each of them. When I started my first blog in 2005, I worked for a very strait-laced, conservative company. I wanted to be able to freely express my liberal-leaning views, opinions, and perspectives on my personal blog without having to worry about someone at work stumbling upon my blog, reading my leftist, godless posts, and ratting me out to anyone at the company.
I had retired from that job when I started this blog in 2017, so I wasn’t worried about being “found out” by my uptight, conservative bosses. But I had been the victim of identity theft twice and thought that it would be prudent to not use my real name for my latest online endeavor. So, as I describe below in my answer to Dr. Tanya’s next question, I came up with “Fandango.”
(Okay, you caught me in a lie. My parents didn’t really name me Fandango and I didn’t actually kill them when I was five. That didn’t happen until I was a teenager.)
Is there an interesting story behind your User Name?
Here’s the story, but I don’t know how interesting it is. One of my favorite songs of all time is Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.” There’s a stanza in that song that goes:
“I see a little silhouetto of a man,
Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you do the Fandango?
Thunderbolt and lightning,
Very, very frightening me.
Galileo, Galileo, Galileo Figaro,
Magnifico-o-o-o-o.”
At first I though of using “Scaramouche” as my pseudonym, but every time I typed it, those squiggly red lines beneath the name showed up and autocorrect kept changing it to “scary mouse.” So I decided to go with “Fandango.”
I wanted to find an avatar to go with my chosen pseudonym, so I Googled “Fandango” and discovered that there was a computer adventure game from 1998 titled “Grim Fandango.”
I’d never heard of nor played the game, but as soon as I saw the image of Fandango, I decided that I had found the perfect avatar for my blog.
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