Schreiber

Squigamunk was asking about the origins of the Choco-Frosh Icon/Dreamwidth handle. This is a bit of a story, and I'm not sure if I've covered it before, so here goes.

1) Pt. 1: Waaaayy back in 1997, I was a freshman - a Frosh, in local terminology - at Williams.
No, that's not the whole story.
I joined the local geek club (WARP), to which a number of readers belonged at one point or another. I also got assigned a work-study job at Driscoll Dining Hall, which meant that I wound up having a lot of meals there just before or after shifts. I thus inadvertently discovered that this was where the WARPies traditionally dined. So one lunchtime, I took my tray over to a table full of people I vaguely recognized, and made to sit down.
"Hi! I'm Josh. I am a Frosh."
"Does that make you Josh the Frosh?"*
"Ummm..."
Inevitably, the title stuck, at least until WARP got another Josh.

2) Skip ahead just short of eight years. Hurricane Katrina hits New Orleans, Europe has the rainiest summer on record, the German Left fails to stop the Merkel-Ferkel, while I'm in Regensburg on a language course. With assorted colleagues, all of whom are talking about the latest Harry Potter nonstop. I feel a bit left out.
Eventually, I cave in** and get a copy of Philosopher's Stone, except that I want to practice my language skills, so I get don't bother finding an English version. As a result, a) I always think of Hagrid now as Bavarian, and b) I learned a bunch of random vocabulary which I occasionally found useful later (shopping in farmers' markets for a Kürbis for soup, or encountering a Besenwirtschaft at Carnival.)
Since I love chocolate, I was particularly amused that the characteristic sweet of the Potterverse is the Choco-Frosch. Clearly, this is what *I* am! Hence the icon, and eventually the DW account.


*WARP already had a Josh With The Beard and a Josh Without The Beard, so it was getting hard to keep track. A similar phenomenon explains why my freshman hiking trip leader John got arbitrarily christened Rapture.
** A very boring train journey was also a factor.

There are some things that I swore that I would never do.

Getting a weblog (why would I want one?) or a cell phone (there are too many of them anyway, landlines are fine, and cell phone towers are ugly) were near the top of the list.
But I'm currently working on getting a cell phone (why is a story in itself...), and as you can see, I've also jumped on the bandwagon and gotten a livejournal account.

I'll be going to NASCAR races and shoppping at Walmart next.