What's In A Name?

One of the early defining moments of your Derby Career has to be that joyous moment when you see for the first time, your chosen Derby alter ego on the official name list (as you can see from the crappy photoshop image above), which recently I had the pleasure of happening to me, as “Rudyard Crippling” is now officially registered and all my own to merchandise the hell out of, should I feel the urge to. Still it’s good to know that it’s all official and that I won’t have the ever present risk that my chosen Derby name snatched away from me by some equally witty person, who happened to submit their name registration before me.

Derby names are within the community one of the most important parts of the sport, outside of general skating ability and toughness, for these names form the basis of the characters we choose to play and it’s these characters which add to the colour and general fun of the sport, while helping us to escape yet further still from the hum drum of our work day week, which if your working week is anything like my own, will generally consist of listening to people complain about minor issues while generally trying to get through the working day as quickly as possible. Unsurprisingly the idea of getting to escape this necessary daily grind and play around as your warped alter ego, who when it comes to my own Derby ego is still a work in progress, but at least with my name being made official it at least means that I can now start to build a character, rather than create one and have to start completely from scratch when the name gets rejected.

Meanwhile with the team edging only closer to fielding our first official team and my confidence as a ref growing, I decided this week to update my Facebook profile to reflect my Derby alter ego, especially with so much of my Derby communications happening on there, not only with my own team but also with other teams and refs as well.

The original plan had been to have “Rudyard Crippling” in quotation marks between my first and last name, but alas for all the money which Facebook makes on a daily basis, it can’t for some reason handle this request. What is more frustrating about this situation is that some of the wenches have been able to get their name set out like this, which according to “Smack Torque” is down to harassing the admins, who are nigh impossible to contact, though honestly I would have thought that it would be easier to have the site accept quotation marks, than having to justify my reasons to the admins, for what is essentially a straightforward and simple request, still despite the fact the site makes millions of dollars a day and has had it's film legacy secured by the uber amazing David Fincher, I must continue to battle out my name rights with them.

So for now I'm not going to grumble but instead work on merchandising myself like a Mutha Trucker!