oz_bandicoot... #blogjune

On Twitter, I am @oz_bandicoot.

Why oz_bandicoot?

Oz_bandicoot was 'born' on the blogging site LiveJournal.

I thought long and hard about my public blogging name on LiveJournal.  This was 2004 (yikes) and I'd been blogging privately on LiveJournal, but not done much publicly.

Internet names are hard to choose, I think.  I've never been much for "online handles" or nics.  I'm not really a soul that was born on the Internet.  But I come here to visit and usually the natives are welcoming! I've only had one online nic and that was "RachREL" when I was part of the Usenet group 'aus.tv.x-files' (ATXF) (now part of Google Groups and probably full of spam!).  RachREL was a nic that was coined by $tephen Dann and embraced by the rest of the group (as well as myself).  I think I did a search and there was no "RachREL" on LiveJournal.   It didn't seem right though, to use RachREL.  It belonged to a different place and a time that, even ten years ago, was past.  Not to mention having an intrinsic meaning that belongs to the ATXF world.

So... what then?

I decided oz_bandicoot for a couple of reasons.

oz is pretty obvious! I'm Australian and proud of it. It's a key part of my identity and who I am.  Besides which, plain old "bandicoot" had already been taken! :-)

Bandicoot is, in part, in honour of my mother's father.  Apparently he used to call me a little bandicoot when I was little as I was mischevious and would get into everything!  (Some would say not much has changed - apart from not being little anymore!).

I also *like* bandicoots. When I was a teenager, I had a poster on my wall about saving the Eastern Barred Bandicoot.  Bandicoots are little known Australian marsupials.  They are also found in New Guinea.  They're nocturnal and usually hard to see.  I think this is why most people don't know much about them.  They're not glamourous like koalas or abundant and easy to see like kangaroos.  They're also not really all that cute.  They do, after all, most closely resemble rats!  Many of the varieties of bandicoots are endangered or listed as vulnerable.  This includes the Eastern Barred Bandicoot, as well as the Southern Brown Bandicoot (see also: http://www.sharkbay.org/Southernbrownbandicootfactsheet.aspx) and others.

Bandicoot also has a place as a unique Aussie word.  When I first wrote about choosing this name, ten years ago, I said "These days, Aussie animals are very trendy and I'm sure many kids know bandicoots from Sony's "Crash Bandicoot" game".  I wonder how popular Crash Bandicoot is today?

It's really the personal angle that made me choose the name, but I can relate to the bandicoot being endangered and not well known.  I feel a bit that way myself sometimes!

My LiveJournal user icon was created by my hubby.  He drew an Eastern Barred Bandicoot using a model from The Australian Museum Complete book of Australian Mammals [edited by Ronald Strahan, Cornstalk publishing 1991].  The picture was then scanned and made electronic.  It's wasn't quite what I had in mind, but I liked it. 

Later, we encounted a bandicoot in a car park on the Great Ocean Road and a photo userpic was made.

Even later again, when I joined Twitter and some other online sites, I used oz_bandicoot as my user name.  If I was choosing it today, I'd do away with the underscore.  But underscores were the thing (back in the day).
 
And that, as they say, is how oz_bandicoot got her name! And although this blog post was mostly written in 2004, I think the 2014 version is better.  Sadly, many (all?) of the links from the 2004 post are no more.  I did wonder if Wikpedia had been invented then (it had), because I didn't use Wikipedia links in 2004.  Today, I've replaced some links with Wikipedia ones. 

I'm sorry to say the Eastern Barred Bandicoot is still endangered, but I'm pleased to say that dedicated individuals continue to work to save this little marsupial. 

#blogjune