Friday, March 31, 2006

Random Name Generator 2

I have found somebody using my Random Name Generator: The people who send spam!
They have to make it look like the sender is a real person, so they just use a randome name generator and put the results in the "From" box. There are Confirmation of Free Gift messages from several people in a row with names like "Kelly Moss" "Laura Proud" "Paul Kent", etc. I wonder how I collect my royalty?

In another bend of the Lombard Street of my mind, I have thought about all the prequels to "Dune". Here is an excerpt from a pre-pre-pre-quel written by Homer Simpson:
" One day Mr Atreides sat down at a cafe and thought about the future.'I wonder what my descendants will be doing thousands of years from now? Maybe they'll turn into a giant worm!'"

Speaking of giant worms, I finished crocheting a baby blanket for my friend yesterday. I didn't really intend for it to turn into a giant worm, it's just that I kept making loops and pulling them through, and pretty soon my hands and crochet hook were out of control and it was a long thin curly fuzzy pink...Worm! I tried to fix it by steadfastly adding layers, but somehow each layer was a little longer than the last, so it started curving in a perfect arch. It was about 5 or 6 feet long and 8 inches wide and I had already used 3 skeins of yarn and my freind's baby was going to come in a week! My only hope was to connect the ends and make a giant circle. Then it looked like a big flared skirt. I resolutely filled in the middle, then joined it all together in a burst of wishful thinking. I shook it out, opened my eyes and... it looked like a nice, oval baby blanket, exactly the right size, and like I planned it to look like that from the start! Yeah!

Thursday, March 09, 2006

White People's Names

I've been looking at my family tree recently, a part of which is of the Cherokee line.
These ancestors of mine were obviously trying to fit in with the white people who were now everywhere, and you could tell they were trying to give their kids white people's names.
"What are white people called?"
"I don't know, they all have names like William or Willie or Jesse or something."
So my great great grandfather, whose name was Jesse, named his kids William(who died young), a girl named Jessie, then William, next was Willie, Edwin/Edward and Sally(my great grandmother).
A couple of generations before that they had an even harder time. It looks like they only found White names from books. These are the names of my great great great great grandfather and his brothers and sisters:
Henry, Mary, Rattlinggourd, Pink (Pinkney), Martin, Mark Anthony, Hardin, Washington,
Jefferson, Susan & Elizabeth.
A different part of my family tree was made up of pilgrims who came to America very early. Many of them married natives, one of whom was very religious-a "praying Indian", and they named their son Ami Ruhami. This is something from the Bible, which I guess is a different way of finding White People's names.
I think they would've been better off with my Random Name Generator, don't you?