Whither Batman, Emerge Triple Threat Tony

She had me from “Batman”.

Meet Acorn’s newest intern, shown above in Santa Fe

It is intriguing to observe the cultural differences between the communes and New York City.  On the last Point A trip, Acorn’s newest intern (who back then was called Batman) introduced herself a few dozen times over the trip.  No one blinked.

It was as though they had had dozens of people call themselves Batman before.  Knowing there must be some revealing or at least interesting story, none of them thought it would be appropriate to ask for it.  While on the communes, this introduction reliably drives the next part of the conversation.

But the origin of Batman was problematic, it hailed from a romantic partner who was no longer in the picture.  So I suggested a naming party, and she embraced the possibility.  She wanted a dual purpose new name.  One which could embrace the exotic strangeness and quirky freedom which the communes could offer, while also having a more mundane nickname version which she could answer the business phones with.  Nickelodeon could become Nick, for example.  Prof Pocket could become Po.  She, having a traditionally feminine given name, also wanted something which sounded masculine.

We are not going this way

But Batman was a cool name and some communards were reluctant to give it up.  Strandbeest in particular wanted to contribute by keeping the old name with a new origin story.  When Batman challenged “What will I say when people ask about my name?” Strandbeest (who is now called Jayne – along with a half dozen other things – after the Firefly character, who is apparently both stupid and mean) countered “Because I am the hero Gotham deserves”.  Which in the early moments of last night’s naming party was pretty compelling and almost derailed the entire event.

There were a few other attempts at new origin stories to rescue the old cool name from the ash bin of history, but it was not to be.  Our vivacious new intern had fully embraced the idea that a new name was an opportunity and was compelled by the daring prospect of having a group of friends rename her from the very long list of possibilities.

She had lots of options

She did of course whittle down this list.  She was not going to be called Styrofoam, or Lasersnake or Ronald Raygun.  Though to her credit she was willing to consider Styrofoam if there was a clever Babylon acceptable nickname which was spawned.   But despite our best efforts none was revealed.

The group decided that a tie would make me more official

Acorn does not do naming parties like Twin Oaks does.  We don’t name our cars or our buildings generally.  Names appear comically or organically or mysteriously without explanation.  The event was well attended, perhaps because of it’s novelty but more likely because she is an unusually well-liked new addition to our colorful hyper-family.

Surveying all she can see

Besides the attempted new origin story, we also tried some new things at the naming party.  It is not uncommon for us to reduce the list of names thru a number of binding polls.  The first is usually that you have 5 up votes and 3 down votes.  As an experiment after we had done a couple of elimination rounds, we did a non-binding round with three negative votes and single positive one – just to see what people were grumpy about. The least favorites were the more bland options, such as Dylan and Neil.

The revised list

In the end, we choose “Triple Threat Tony”, in part because this was a name that she herself quite liked.  It satisfied the male identification aspect with Tony.  It has the option of endless entertaining sub-names (I am calling her Triple Threat, others have compressed to just “Trip” or “Tone”).  She will still answer to Batman, which some Acorners are unwilling to part with (perhaps this will lead to her name drifting into free fall).

And despite the name change, for me she will always be hero that Gotham needs.