Sunday, February 24, 2008

The Origins of Schlange

(Post 16)





(Note: Somehow my post editor is having issues. Most of my whitespace (Blanklines between paragraphs, 5 spaces in front of a new paragraph, or anything else that I've tried to use to make my paragraphs look nice) is disapearing every time I save. Sorry, but you'll have to bear with me.)

As part of giving my blog a facelift I'm changing my profile. I'm putting the old contents of what was in my profile here and editing it:
Schlange A. Taube nearly sounds like a real name doesn't it? Why did I pick it to post under? I've got a buddy Schmetterling who got me interested in blogging (his blog is The Eccentric Sage). He's got a unique pen-name and I was jealous.

He told me that his came about because of an experiance with a fellow who was a great fan of Tolkien. Apparently, Tolkien has an insignia that places his initials (JRRT) over the top of one another in a cool way. This fellow wanted something cool like that for himself, so he worked one out with his initials. Schmetterling subsequently made one that looked like a butterfly and thus created an alias (Schemtterling is German for butterfly).

We explored using the same method for me. We started superimposing the letters in my name over the top of each other to see what we could get in the way of a picture. We came up with several possibilities, one of note being the dollar sign ($). The one we went with looked something like an "A" hooked into the back end of a snake. That made me "A snake." Because everything sounds cooler in German we looked up the German translation of snake: "Shlange." That has pizzazz so I kept it. However, I didn't want to feel like an evil villain all the time so we started looking for something to go with it. Somehow I remembered Matthew 10:16, and that gave us a dove to go with my serpent. It also gave me a good name for my blog. Dove in German is "Taube." Stick an "A" that looks like a snake into the center of a German SnakeDove and what do you get? Schlange A. Taube, at your service.

-Schlange

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