Friday 1 February 2008

Pic of the day: I've kept it a secret from some of you, but in reality I am NOT married. (Unlike the nice young girl from the anime Okusama wa Joshikousei, who seems to have the opposite problem.)

"Tuva"

Yesterday was remarkable because we had a named storm. Those don't come often to Kristiansand, at least they didn't in the past. Luckily the damage was barely worth mention, and none that affected me. The office building is huge and sturdy, and largely ignored the onslaught of the rain and wind. There were no damages to be seen when I came home either.

The funny part is that the storm was named Tuva. Apart from being some kind of extreme singing and an area near Mongolia, it is also a fairly rare women's name in Norway and, I believe, Denmark. It is also not the name of my wife, obviously, since I'm not married and not going to be, despite being a reasonably nice person overall and even somewhat sane. (Though you would not so readily believe that after this.)

I think the "wife" part came from her global handle (name) in City of Heroes: "Swiss Army Wife". An obvious pun on the multi-talented Swiss army knife, the controller character even sported a red and gray color scheme (with a white even-sided cross emblem too, unless I misremember). By the time global handles and global chat were introduced, you got stuck with the first character name you logged on after the change. I had the foresight to log on Itland first, so I am now @Itland on CoH, which I thoroughly enjoyed. For some reason Tuva was stuck with @Swiss Army Wife. This was not a big loss at the time, since Tuva's offline identity is supposed to be secret anyway.

In any case, there was her nickname, and the fact that our characters would show up together most of the time she played, and perhaps there was some careless banter in the LiveJournal chat channel that also contributed. Suddenly I was elevated to the status of "hubby". A pretty strange feeling. Kind of flattering, I guess. But in real life, there is every hint I might need that God would rather see me dead than married. Of course, I am eventually going to die anyway, but hopefully not from marriage.

I'd think it would be a hint that Tuva usually logged off around midnight at the latest, while I often played an hour or two longer (or much longer on Wednesday nights for a while). I mean, what married people would go to bed at completely different hours? (Of course, I may have a distorted idea about what married people do at night, but that in itself should be a pretty strong hint.)

So in short: Dear future historians, I am not married, have never been and plans never to be. And the woman I am not married to is not named Tuva. I don't even know anyone with that name.

The storm however was real enough. It just didn't scare me nearly as much as a wife would have done.