What's in a name?

I should be better at naming things than I am because I gets lots of practice thinking up names for my many fantasy sports teams.  If I ever come up with a good name, I will reuse it year after year.  My  three baseball teams keep the same names every year.  Tinker2Evers2Chance, my favorite team, is named after the Franklin Pierce Adams poem about my beloved Cubs.  Suicide Squeeze is an exciting baseball play plus has nice alliteration.  The Jane‘s Addiction song Been Caught Stealing is not about baseball but has a funny video. 

On the other hand my football team names change almost every year.  They are usually based on whatever books I am reading or tv shows that I am watching when I create the teams.  I once had a team whose name I changed every week of the season.  I have twice named football teams Defending Champs., though neither team was able to defend their title.  My favorite football team name was FireMikeSherman.com that I used during Mike Sherman’s final year as coach of the Packers.  I am a bit superstitious and think that a team with a bad names will lose.  So it is always difficult coming up with an appropriate name.  But I am comforted by the knowledge that after that season is over I am no longer tied to that name.

There was even more pressure to come up with a great name for this blog because of its permanence.  Since I have been trying to talk myself out of starting this blog for several of months, I have had plenty of time to choose the right name.  My first idea was to name it This is Not a Blog or The Blog I’m Not Writing or something similar.  That way when asked about it, I could reply that I was not writing a blog.  However I decided that I might get tired of that joke, and it was not that funny to begin with.  So while testing out names, I was also trying to come up with recurring bits that my blog could be known for like Ellen’s Open Letters or Allie’s drawings.  The idea crossed my mind of making diary entries.  And that thought led to the perfect name for my blog.

Today I Was POMPOUS is part of this line delivered brilliantly by Adam Baldwin from the tv show Firefly, “Dear diary, today I was pompous and my sister was crazy.  Today we were kidnapped by hill folk, never to be seen again.  It was the best day ever.”  I should apologize now to any Firefly fans who stumbled on to this site expecting to find a page devoted to Jayne Cobb.  If you have read this far, come back any time.  There will be future posts about my love of all things Whedon.

And I would have to be at least a little bit pompous to write a blog.  Why else would I even bother to record my thoughts and tales of my life here on the internet?  Unless I believe that you are longing for every detail of my life and will be changed for good by the wit and wisdom of my words.  Which of course I do.