Not To Be Trusted With Knives

After much yammering about it, I think it’s high time I changed my blog title to something non-thesis related. But I’m still not 100% sure what to change it to. So I’m trying one on for size – and I may try other ones in the coming days, sort of a multiple blog-ality disorder. Or I may get distracted* (ooh… that dog has a puffy tail!) and leaving up whatever title happens to be there. We’ll just have to wait and see how it pans out. For the moment, I’m not going to change my URL, as I don’t want to lose any of my readers.

OK, so first up we have the new title: Total Perspective Vortex. Astute readers will know this is reference to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. For those of you who already know all about it, feel free to let your attention wander freely for the rest of this paragraph.** The Total Perspective Vortex is summarized by Wikipedia thusly:

the most horrible torture device to which a sentient being can be subjected […] it shows its victim the entire unimaginable infinity of the universe with a very tiny marker that says “You Are Here” which points to a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot.

Most people go mad from being shown how utterly insignificant they are. Only Zaphod Beeblebrox has survived it unscathed, as the TPV was “simply telling him that he was the most important being in the universe.”***

Anyhoo, I thought that Total Perspective Vortex would be a good (if nerdy) name for my blog because all indications given on this blog are that *I* am the most important being in the blogosphere. The drawback to this blog name is that some other guy already took the URL totalperspectivevortex.blogspot.com… he wrote a grand total of 3 postings back in June of 2004 and then abandoned the venture. Clearly, he was not the most important being in the blogosphere.

The only other name I have thought of comes from this photo, taken at Capliano Canyon last April:

One of my pet peeves about Capliano, aside from the fact that they charge you nearly $30 to cross a friggin’ bridge, is that they have all these signs that tell you what to do. Like the “Kodak Photos Spots,” where they tell you “oooh, this is a good spot to take a photo! then you can have a photo that looks like the photos taken by every other tourist that’s ever been here!” And like this sign that actually tells you that it is a good place to do some thinking. And so I couldn’t resist doing this pose for a photo. And it wasn’t even a “Kodak Photos Spot”! So I was thinking that “The Thinking Spot” could be a good blog name, because I could use this photo. Except that anyone who has ever read this blog knows that very little thinking is going on here****.

*I’m very easily distracted.

**And that was a reference to Dumbledore in one of the Harry Potter books.. I’m pretty sure it was the Goblet of Fire, but don’t have the books handy to double check it.

***Of course, he was in an artificial universe that was created specifically for him so he actually WAS the most important thing in that universe, but that’s beside the point.

****Also, thinkingspot.blogspot.com has already been taken too. Sigh