The Scotto Grotto (org)

weird recent set of keywords to connect to my homepage blog- “feet and blisters, web” brings my page up first on av.com… I wish I could slap java on my lj page, so I could track keywords here, too.

Alton Brown has a fresh rant.

How mortifying! I know a lot of absent-minded folks…I’d hate to see that sort of thing happen to them. I wonder how my boss or my sweetie would deal with that sort of situation. Both straight-arrows but have little tolerance for rude or stupid people. The way they treated him probably cost the company a small mint in plugs and store usage fees.

Not cool that he had a dog in the car on an extended shopping trip, though. (I don’t know the whole story there…maybe it was a safe environment).

Thinking back on the Newton name post last week, and ‘s “With a C, not With a K” post and it’s got me thinking…

I’ve had people confuse the name “Scott” with Todd, Scout, Bob, and of all things, Gus. When I was a kid, I had a phase when I wanted to spell it Skot. (an economy of letters, and looks keen in a runic sort of font. I held a belief for a while that the letters C and Q didn’t serve much purpose, unless paired with the letters H or U repsectively. I wanted to rework CH into a new single letter, and replace QU with KW where needed, and drop Q entirely. I was a weird kid.) That phase has mostly passed, as Scotto works fine for me these days.

My last name is a bugaboo for all sorts of people. It’s two words, the first one all lower case. “von Berg”. Bad computer databases have a *lot* of trouble with that. They either want to combine them, and caps the von- “Vonberg”, chop off the data after the space – “Von”, or mix up the data so that one of the words is the first name. I can’t tell you how much junk mail comes addressed to “Mr Berg”, Dear Von! You need your grout cleaned! (or whatever). I often wonder if people with hyphenated names have the same trouble, but the one person I know that is hypenated hasn’t really had to deal with it that much. Not the worst of it, back when I filled out stuff including a full name, I’ve gotten mail addressed to “Dear Mister Third”, too.

I wonder if it’s a common occurance. There are so many names that can be spelled a few different ways, or unusual ethnic variants. Erik/Eric, or Lori/Laurie, etc. I’d love to see how people have hosed the names of others, but I know “real life” names are tricky for a lot of people on LJ, even just first names. Perhaps there’s a way to do it more anonymously, but a way to phrase a question about it.