A Bit of A Cock-Up On The Existentialist Front

I’ve been thinking of changing my nom de blog for quite a while; it really is a bit of a cheek to be pontificating on the internet under a name of a nation you have no connection with other than besottedness with its wildlife.

It came about in 2003 as a joke in a comment thread at the late lamented News Blog, a riff on Bush’s long forgotten quip ‘You forgot Poland’ – because of course they also forgot Palau, which was also a member of the ‘coalition of the willing’. Somebody had to speak up for plucky Palau…and it stuck.

I’ve been fancing a change anyway, what with 7-ish year blog itch, and I’m open to suggestions as to a new monicker, but keep it clean please, and at least a little bit suitable. Something SFnal would be nice. (None of this of course has nothing at all to do with an address at ocianiatv.palaunet.com turning up in the blogstats and me being rumbled, oh no…)

I’m leaning towards ‘Marie Of Roumania’ but I feel it might also be open to charges of misappropriation, even though she is decidedly dead. It’s also a bit lengthy to keep typing and has probably already been used by 20,000 other middle-aged women who like Dorothy Parker.

Much easier would be ‘Pilau’, the tasty rice dish, which would have the advantage of needing only the substitution of another vowel to effect a total change in meaning.

But there’s also the blog’s title too; when we started, the word ‘progressive’ was by no means mainstream and the liberal blogosphere had yet to explode and go corporately massive. Until around 2005-6 we could still do a daily digest of the best of progressive and left writing online on the transatlantic web and yet still be reasonably comprehensive.

But not now: put ‘progressive political blogs’ into technorati and it brings back umpteen zillion results. To be still be calling ourselves ‘Progressive Gold’ now seems more than a tiny bit vainglorious.

Then again, that’s the name all our links and pagerankings are in. What to do? Discard a blog identity that no longer fits (IMHO, Martin may feel differently) and start all over again, or keep flogging something that no longer does what it says on the tin?