a rose by any other name.....

the first blog we ever read, in 2004, was pandagon. robin, in her guise of advisor to student media at ucsc, had some e-mail communication with ezra when he was a student there, though they never actually met. he sent an e-mail telling her about his blog with jesse, called pandagon (he has his own blog now). we were impressed with their informative, well-written posts on current politics. from there we found eschaton. reading the comments, we joined the discussion. many, if not most, of the commenters used aliases. it was the style. atrios, cervantes, konapelli (changed to woody guthrie's guitar, last i saw), watertiger, thersites! we chose goofy names. following blogrolls and homepage links in comments, we found blogs more about nature and science. blogs about gardening and birds and photography. by then we had "met" other people in comments and kinda "knew" each other, so when we began our own blog we kept our noms-de-blog.

so i mixed cimematic and literary themes, posting as dread pirate roberts on a blog called dharma bums. the pirate is from a movie, "the princess bride." the dharma bums from a novel by jack kerouac. my partner in life and this scheme, the blogger formerly known as rexroth's daughter, from a song by greg brown, has dropped her nom de blog and come out, as it were, and retaken her given names of robin andrea. if you go to the top of our blog and click on "dread pirate roberts" under contributors, and then click on "my birthday" you can learn more about me than you may want to know.

you will not find my given name there, but in some commenting systems i have an e-mail address of dread_pirate_roger@yahoo.com. aha! a clue. as dread_pirate_roberts was already taken as a yahoo mail name when i tried, i went for the closest thing, using my actual given name. no, not dread_pirate! roger! you may also have noticed my gravatar, which shows up in comments. who is that? i was part of a blog called plato's dialogue, intended to be a dialogue between, roughly speaking, believers and atheists. cervantes, of a very informative blog about public health called stayin' alive, and i were, are, the godless. it didn't work out. i found a picture of a bust of plato to use as my gravatar for that blog. i kept it as it reminded me of a dear friend.

now i'm roger at dharma bums. maybe a new gravatar later. oh. links to referenced blogs, songs, books, etc.? maybe later. this post is about me.