Wow, that’s really coo-… er, interesting!

For reasons which are no longer clear to me, The Doktah, Jersey Girl and I made up fake middle names for ourselves and for Baseball Cap Guy. Actually, it may have been just The Doktah and Jersey Girl. I forget mine, but Baseball Cap Guy’s was “Fritz,” The Doktah’s was “Juanita” (pronounced “Juanitaaaahhh”), and Jersey Girl’s was “Tellulah.” And for reasons which are clear only to me, The Doktah, and Jersey Girl, we found this hilarious.

The week that we came up with the middle names, I was giving a chalk talk. (Chalk talks were interdepartmental mini-seminars, ostensibly presented as a lecture with informal chalk notes, but which were actually always Powerpoint presentations.) So in my acknowledgements slide, I put The Doktah’s, Jersey Girl’s, and Baseball Cap Guy’s fake middle initials instead of their real ones.

The Doktah was in the audience, and I had her in stitches. She could barely contain herself. Her friend was sitting next to her, and he leaned over to ask her what why she was laughing. “Because!” she gasped. “Those aren’t our real middle initials!”

Yeah, I know. But chalk talks were on Fridays, and sometimes, the weeks could be really long, so you took what funny you could get. And also, we’re gi-normous geeks. I was just talking to The Doktah tonight on the phone, and she said something about how anytime she or I thinks something is cool, it’s really not. We should therefore always describe cool things as “interesting.”

But we both still laugh at the middle names. C'mon, Tellulah? That’s GOLD!