Why wisemandarine.com?
September 3rd, 2007The name
All right, I know the domain name is pretentious, but let me just give a little background. For this, let me take you back a couple of years ago, when I hardly knew the word ‘blog’. My personal e-mail address has the classical structure first.last@provider.ext. After I sent a birth announcement message to all relatives and friends, I started to get spam mail in my inbox. It was too late when I realized that I should not have used my personal e-mail address for such a broad communication. Now my e-mail was out in the spam world, with my real name in it for everyone to see. I have a very rare name, so if someone looks up my name in Google, all the results are about me: they’ll know what I do and in what city I live, and then if they look up my name in the phone directory, it’ll tell them my personal address.
I do not know about you, but that made me pretty uncomfortable. I decided that I’d keep my personal address as stricly personal as I could keep it (considering it is already in many a spam database), and I’d use a pseudonym on the web. One evening when I was prompted with a register form for Amazon or ebay or whatever, my beloved cat Mandarine was on my lap, purring as she does whenever she’s not sleeping or peeking out the window from behind the curtain, and I thought her name would make a very fine pseudonym. It would be easy for me to remember, and it sounded nice. I even chose a very common French last name to complete the fictitious character: Mandarine Lechat was born.
The cat and the blog
Mandarine became the central figure behind my public email address, then my personal web page, and then naturally my blog. I had not given too much thought to whether mandarine was the best blog title and pseudonym I could find, and whether the character fitted with the direction I was going to take with my blog. Over time, the feline orange fluff pervaded my blogging horizon, and I could not take my eyes off the dragon-like gaze in my banner. Now I am awfully obliged to my cat, because she was indeed the right character to choose for this blog adventure.
We do not have so many common points, but the ones we have are definitely the ones I want to cultivate with this blog:
- she likes to observe things
- she purrs first, then thinks
- she likes to be with people
- she can take a nap anywhere, anytime
- she never does anything hasty
- she keeps her life simple
- she is terribly fond of my wife
When I decided I’d move my blog to a real hosting service, I also had to find a domain name. Unfortunately, it was easy to guess that mandarine.com or mandarine.org were all taken. I was left with mandarinelechat.org, but I started to feel it was not the best choice. After all, the blog title is mandarine (just the first name), and not Mandarine Lechat. In addition, lechat could sound as ‘le chat’, as in ‘le gossip’ or ‘le talk’, when in reality it means ‘le cat’. Finally, there was always the issue of gender confusion with my blog pseudonym. Although I am comfortable with not showcasing my gender upfront, it is not my wish to deceive readers.
About wisdom
I had intended the blog as an outlet for amateur philosophy essays, and from the start, the subtitle was about wisdom. After all, that’s what an amateur philosopher is: a wisdom lover (all the more so as ‘amat-’ and ‘philo-’ mean the same thing). Somehow I wanted the ‘thinking’ part of my blog to show in the domain name. It could have been mandarinetriestothink or complex phrases like this, but when the portmanteau wisemandarine hit me, it stayed.
It conveys the cat, the thinking and the right amount of gender ambiguity. It remains simple enough that everyone can remember the url even after a hard drive crash.
There’s just one problem: mandarine looks wise, but she is not. You do not have to scratch too deep to find out that she’s as stupid as cats come. And I am no better. But we try hard.
Oh, Mandarine! Wise Mandarine! You don’t come across as stupid at all. Isn’t it funny how our handles come to us? I wanted to be MagicHands, as that is the name I gave my massage business lo these many years ago. but it was already taken, and the server suggested several permutations. I glommed onto healingmagichands, which is a handful to type but describes me pretty well.
I like healingmagichands. And I also like it when other bloggers shorten it down to HMH (which sounds halfway between HMS and HRH) or Mrs Hands.
Actually, cats are extraordinarily wise (for instance, it is very difficult, unlike dogs, to get them to do ANYthing they don’t want to do). And, of course, we all know how wise you are. Thus, the name is perfect.
You are lucky to know how wise I am; I probably never will.
(I mean, thanks).
I chose Smithereens because it means “broken in little bits” (although my posts are getting longer and longer) and I really like the sound of this word. I didn’t know there was a rock band with this name at all. It makes me laugh when people google “smithereens” to get music info and they get me instead! Do you sometimes have readers interested in citrus? I always thought your blog was a little tangy
I do not think I have seen citrus-oriented google queries pointing at mandarine. I am afraid my content is too rich (or scattered across a too wide semantic subspace) for google to have a clue what it is all about.
I’ll be glad when a google query like ‘a progressive-green philosophy and literature blog with nice pictures on the side’ returns mandarine as #1. (maybe it will, after I submit this comment).