Hey folks.

So I’m off to run errands and do things today, but I’d like to generate some cat names, so that I/we have something good to choose from when I meet the cat, if this indeed works out. And I want your help. Here are some notes:

  1. Can’t reuse a name that we’ve already used/had/have on an animal in this household/family (Mouse, Fred/Phred, Ribbon, Crosby, Nash, and Montana are out).
  2. We generally try and avoid giving people names to animals on the occasion that we might come across someone with the same name in our day to day life, so no Johns, Jims, Stuarts, Chris', Brians and so forth.
  3. This is a boy cat. I prefer cross gender pet names that are absurd--eg. girl dogs names Rodney, boy cats named Alice--to more subtle example of this naming genre--eg. boy cats named Rydra (the protaganist of Samuel Delany’s novel Babel-17)
  4. Naming after minor celebrities/passing fads is probably something that I’d like to avoid. Thus, there should be ample argument with the suggestion to name a cat something like Ianto or Starbuck.
  5. Naming after living folk/academic idols that I might--even conceptually--cross paths with at some point even if I think they’re really awesome and way too famous for me.
  6. I consider naming anything living or otherwise after a character in a book/story (but not a person) whose dies tragically, to be bad luck, generally, and avoid it.

I’ve been thinking about something sort geeky/literary/sf-y/queer. Authors, nicknames, good characters from books, Here are the ideas that I’ve had so far.

  • Kip (after one of the main characters in Brightness Falls from the Air by James Tiptree, also I just realized in my novella from earlier this year, though I spelled that Kyp.) I think this is leading. Has diminutive possibilities of “Kipster” and “Kiptron”. Heh.
  • Pace (from Brightness, very minor character)
  • Delany or Tip(tree), though conflict with number 5, on the former.
  • Trouble (after leading character in Melissa Scott’s Trouble and her Friends, though I think Melissa actually had a cat named this, and as she’s a contact in the extended social network, I think that would be potentially creepy. Also possible jinx regarding “trait” names, and minor boy/girl ironies unintended.)
  • Saphir or Whorf (after the saphir-whorf hypothesis.) Though the latter has possible confusion with a certain Klingon silent-h) and the former isn’t as worth commemorating. Other (dead) good anthropologists/social scientists? Gertz is hard to name for: and No cats named Clif, I think.
  • Any post-structuralists worth naming after that aren’t asinine? Deleuze, for instance, is probably a no go.

Please do elaborate. Other writers/characters I should think of?

Vote early and often!