My own curious handles explained:
A long time ago (circa 1991-2), at a university far, far away, I was introduced to an addictive little Internet game called netrek. Now, just to set this straight from the beginning, you need not have any knowledge of or affinity for the Star Trek universe to understand and play netrek. Which is good, as I have little love for the Star Trek Sequel Factory. Or the Star Wars Sequel Factory, for that matter. But I digress.
Actually, netrek is still around, and with the advent of DSL even Win98 dweebs like myself can play at full speed.
www.netrek.org tells the tale. But, again, I digress.
Netrek allows you to select a name of up to 15 characters. This allows a fair amount of creativity, and eventually I became the Sybil of the netrek world, rarely using the same name twice. But I was just starting out at this point, so I wanted to think of a name that I'd stick with for a while.
As it happens, I had Jello Biafra's first spoken word album in heavy rotation in my collection at that point. One of the tracks is titled "Names For Bands," featuring Jello bemoaning the lack of thought that goes into many band names and suggesting a few twisted concepts of his own. Eventually, he starts running them off in rapid-fire fashion, with gems like Cancer Cures Everything, Dracula Was Gay, and the Ku Klux Flintstones.
One of them fit in the fifteen-character limit, and sounded bizarre enough to pique my interest: "Video Sex Pope." And, so, a nom de plume was born.
I've used variations of the name (usually vsp, sometimes simply pope or vspope) in my mail account names for years now. Old habits are hard to break.
Those of you who remember me from my dialup days may remember "Innocent Bystander" as my secondary name; that was (a) the name of my feature column for the NCSU newspaper for a year or two, and (b) the name of John Palumbo's first solo album, which was also in heavy rotation in my head at the time.
jeff. who's glad he wasn't as into Zappa then as he is now, or who knows what monstrocity of a name I'd be using