Forgetfulness...

Here I sit at the computer to blog. There's only one problem: I have forgotten what I was going to blog about! Yes, indeed, ladies and gentleman, yet again every blog topic has been whisked out of my head.

Oh...I take it back. I remember one thing I was going to blog about. A very ticklish thing it is, too. (Ticklish is one of my code words for funny). So here goes.

On the first Thirty Odd Foot of Grunts CD I bought, Gaslight, Russell Crowe wrote a song called David. It's all about how there are other Russell Crowes in the world and people kept asking him if he was any of them.

For instance, one was a 41-year-old snake trainer from Florida who was sent to prison for abusing his snake. There was also a 13-year-old ballroom dancer from Oz who was named Russell Crowe; someone came up to RC once on a plane, showed him a picture of the kid in the magazine, and asked if it was him. He said no.

(Author's note: Honestly, who could mistake RC for a 13-year-old? Sheesh!)

ANYWAY! This is all very funny on its own, but the thing that really made me laugh was that I picked up an old National Geographic from 1988 -- it was a bicentennial celebration of Australia -- and guess who was featured on one of the pages? An 11-year-old ballroom dancer named Russell Crowe! It must have been the same one; it had to be. Only that picture was taken two years before the other one.

Freaky, ay?

Speaking of names, I remember now one of the other subjects I was going to talk about. The other day I started thinking about some of the names I tried to make up when I was interested in writing Andromeda fanfiction. I'm still interested in writing it -- it's just that I don't know enough about the sci-fi genre to write intelligently about it.

(A/N: Andromeda is the only sci-fi show I've ever watched, other than when I was forced to sit through incomprehensibly boring episodes of Star Trek when on vacation with my parents. My father loved Star Trek for some reason, so at night when we'd all head back to the motel, he'd ferret out which cable channel was broadcasting it. Since we didn't and don't have cable, he was thrilled with the novelty of it all. "Oh, yeah," he'd say, "here we go. This is gonna be cool." My mother and I would exchange exasperated and bemused looks, then flop back on the bed and try to sleep or read while blocking out "They are heading straight for us, Captain! Shall I employ our automatic weapons tracker?")

Anyway. I digress. Andromeda was a pretty cool show, except I didn't have the faintest idea what was going on half the time. My father would sometimes watch it with me, and ask me things like, "What are they doing that for? What's the thing he's carrying? Who's she? Why does she have purple fur?"

I would always shrug. "Don't know."

"Why are you watching it if you don't know what's going on?"

"Ummm...because of all the pretty people!"

I'm digressing again. My point here, if I can ever get to it, is that I started making up what I considered to be sci-fi names. I made up a character called India Mackenzie and determined that she would marry Telemachus Rhade, an established Andromeda character.

I now see that that was a ridiculous idea and that it would never have gone anywhere, but bear with me. I was young and stupid. Come to think of it...I'm still young and most would say still stupid. No comments from the peanut gallery please.

Some of the names I made up were pretty cool-sounding, I thought. I made a list of the children India and Rhade would have...

First was Xalar Southerland Rhade.
Then twin girls, Kyrie Ellemerie and Kaeori Secessia.
Then they'd adopt a girl named Mackenzie Skersan.
Then another boy, Corelion Vademas.
Then...hmm, let's see. I think the next one was Carami Vanora.
Then Taemiron Davvid...
Then Gawain Telemachus...
Then Tarlii Maliryn...

Was that all of them? I think I'm missing someone. Oh well, maybe not. In any case, the other day I had the bright idea to search for the names on the Internet, just to see if anybody else had come up with them.

What I found was interesting. Apparently the only really original names I made up were Taemiron and Ellemerie. The rest...

Of course, Gawain, Telemachus, Davvid, Mackenzie, Vanora, Kyrie, Secessia, and Southerland already existed as names or words. I merely borrowed them.

Maliryn was entered on a number of websites as a misspelling of Marilyn.

Corelion and Vademas were Spanish words meaning...well, I don't know what they meant.

Skersan was a word used in some language similar to Italian.

Carami was Sanskrit. It means something close to "I will wander" or "I may wander."

Tarlii was another foreign-language word...I have no idea what language though. If anybody wants to look it up and help me out with an idea, please feel free.

And here's the real humdinger, folks: Xalar, by inventing which I thought I was being terribly, terribly original, turns out to be the registered and copyrighted name of a FISH PRODUCER! Yes, indeed. I guess I am not so original after all. I swear I made up the name in class after listening to my astronomy professor lecture about parallax. I had never heard of Xalar, the producer of Fine Marine Products, until I, on a whim, looked the name up on the mighty Internet.

*sigh*

I am destined to reinvent the wheel.