Melanie, when I had my first computer, a Dell, with Windows Millennium Edition, it came with a free year of dialup Internet from AOL.
At that time, I used to post a lot on the message board from the ABC reality/ game show, The Mole, under my original Internet handle, "realnametaken". On the message board, I made a game where each player tried to solve cryptic clues posted by other players which, if deciphered correctly, would give you their e-mail address and server. If someone solved someone else' e-mail address riddle, they would send that person an e-mail, and the person who received the e-mail would post on the board that they had been "killed" by so-and so.
If someone else solved the same riddle, they would be credited with an "afterkill". Kills were worth three points, and afterkills were worth one. Having been killed did not knock a player out of the game, it just meant one or more other players received points. My clues were in the form of a rhyming poem, in which many of the words rhymed with "Mole", or were spelled similarly, or looked like they should rhyme with 'Mole', to someone illiterate or foreign to English.
My poem had lines like 'winning is the goal', 'grassy is the knoll', 'newborn is the foal', and 'Rueben is the mohel', (Mohel, pronounced like 'moil', or 'moy-Hell', with the 'clearing your throat' sound for the capital H). A mohel is a circumciser; the job pays twenty-five bucks an hours, plus tips, and all you can eat from the lavish buffet served at the bris ceremony. I mentioned 'Bob' twice in the poem, 'Bob is the Dole', (Bob Dole lost the 1996 US Presidential Election to Bill Clinton), and 'BOB is the owl'.
In the poem the Bob and BOB was the only time I used more than once, and 'owl' was the only fourth word that didn't sound even remotely like 'Mole', so that was the clue for my e-mail server - if said like a word, instead of an acronym for America On Line, "AOL" sounds like "owl". Everyone who has read the thread from the beginning already knows about BOB, the villain from the TV series Twin Peaks, so I won't repeat all of that part.
I met some good friends through the game, but I lost touch with all of them when I was offline for about eighteen months, a year or so later, (and no, I wasn't in jail). When I returned to the Internet, I adopted the bobistheowl handle, hoping to reconnect with some of those people, who would make the connection between the new handle and the old one, and I've used bobistheowl as my Internet handle, everywhere, ever since.
