Meeting my pseudonym

I have been reading about Lewis Carroll recently. In particular, I have been reading about the fact that his real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and that he first adopted his nom de plume when he was 21.

Reading about this reminded me of my own pseudonym, and the time that I met him.

When I was about 17, I chose the name "Robert Kane" to be my pseudonym, if ever I needed to give a false name, either when publishing classic children's literature or when apprehended by the police. I chose this name because I reckoned it would be easy to remember. The reason for this is that my parents initially planned on calling me Robert (my uncle Robert apparently talked them out of it, so that my name is now Dónall Eoin Roibeard McCann). As for the name "Kane", it is close enough to McCann to be easily remembered (and, in fact, I have read in more than one place that it is an anglicised derivation of McCann, although I can't attest to the veracity of this claim).

So, for a few years, I used this name when I needed a convenient pseudonym. I never used it as a fake name for the police, but I did write a few things here and there that were attributed to Robert Kane.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I was studying for a year in Valencia, Spain, and Robert Kane began posting to the forum used by my university ultimate frisbee team in Dublin! As it turned out, one of the new players that year was actually called Robert Kane (also known as Blonde Rob) and was just as surprised as I was that somebody else was using his name.

Since then, I haven't used it as a pseudonym, but I have failed to come up with an alternative that I find suitably fitting and similarly easy to remember.

I'm sure C.L. Dodgson never had the problem of accidentally bumping into Lewis Carroll...

Fun with Hairdressers

Here is something you can try at home (assuming you live in a hairdresser's) . One prerequisite is that you will need about a week's growth of facial hair.

Go home (or to the hairdresser's if you're not trying this at home) and find a hairdresser with a pretty poor grasp of English. Get in the chair and tell her what you want done to your hair (this is, of course, merely a formality, due to her aforementioned loose grip on the local tongue). Sit back and relax while she performs her dark arts, but remember to pay attention towards the end, when it comes to the part when she gets the razor and trims the edges at the back and sides.

Assuming you aren't some freakish testosterone fiend, a week's worth of facial hair should be relatively sparse - enough to be noticed and make you look badly groomed, but not quite enough to be considered a beard. The hairdresser will not know whether or not to trim the sides, in case you are, in fact, growing a beard and wouldn't appreciate a negative side-burn look.

To complicate matters, your carefully selected hairdresser will not have the ability to ask you to disambiguate your fuzz by the standard method of asking you a straight question. Instead, she will look puzzled at it for a minute, then decide to go for it, and apply the razor to the edge of the hairline. She will then, naturally, turn to the other side of the face, look puzzled again, decide the original decision was a mistake, and turn the razor off and put it away wordlessly, leaving you with a fashionably lop-sided look and a date with the razor when you get home.

Or maybe that just happens to me.

Vocabulary - Pie/Foot

These are the latest additions to the vocabulary saga. All rely on the fact that the Spanish word for foot is "pie" (pronounced pee-'eh)

"Easy as foot"
"I have a sore pie"

I will recognise that this is probably in no way funny to read. I'm just documenting...