Back in October of 2007, my family went to see a They Might Be Giants concert in Northampton, Massachusetts. We invited a friend of the family, Steve, who had introduced us to this group maybe 15 years before this when my son, here called College Boy, was just a snotty nosed child. We went to a brew pub before the show and during the conversation, we began talking about podcasts and soon enough, with the addition of much alcohol, we decided to give a try to creating our very own podcast. We enlisted CollegeBoy for technical support, because we were clueless about the mechanics of recording and editing and posting podcasts, and off we were. Not wanting to expose ourselves fully on the internet, we adopted pseudonyms for the show. The podcast, called Countless Screaming Argonauts (from the TMBG song, Birdhouse in your soul) had us adopting the names Maqz and the Penguin, as co-hosts. My moniker, the penguin, came from a long term fascination with the bird, from childhood. This included collections of them in all forms, and this even affected our internet consumption, as our first and most long term screen name was Werpenguin, as in "we are penguin."
The podcast, a left leaning, politics, internet and sports related commentary show, includes a variety of "guests", mostly played by my brother-in-law. He has several recurring roles, including Joshua, an Irish immigrant who may or may not have a green card, Denali, a flamboyant seer who has feelings about future events, Mark Twain (yes, he has contacted us from the dead) and our perennial favorite, Manhattan Man. That character is an edgy, New Yorker with strong opinions and stronger language, quite adept at talking sports, music, movies and books, and has logged easily the most podcast appearances. You may have noticed he commented on the SCSD blog recently related to my nickname because he was intimately involved and responsible for its creation. We have done well over 200 shows in the 3+ years we have been podcasting and in Episode 40, Manhattan Man paid tribute to the Penguin, renaming him, the Fabulous Penguin. Soon, this morphed into T Fab P, also at his behest and a great nickname was born and has been uttered proudly ever since.
This has continued for the last few years and last year included the launch of my companion blog to the podcast, which I called "Penguin Droppings." This blog focused originally on podcast issues but soon became more of a commentary on my own life. As I began to think about and talk about retirement, I began to focus on that process of deciding where and when. New England is just too cold and snowy and icy and the internet led us to the idea of New Mexico, specifically Las Cruces. It has been a struggle for my wife and I (her nickname on the podcast and blog is Mrsfabp by the way) to deal with the anticipated changes (leaving family), house problems in New England (too many to document here) and job issues (I am going to be forced into early retirement), and these have all been subjects of the blog. Through it all, we have continued to move ever so slowly toward that day of reckoning and have done so by always keeping the goal in sight, "making the dream of Las Cruces, New Mexico, a reality..."
So this is my story. Thank you specifically to Shane for encouraging the telling of the tale and to the various SCSD'ers who enthusiastically asked about the name and its origins. To hear about the birth of the Fabulous Penguin go here to the podcast opening, it all happens in the first 5 minutes but you should enjoy the whole podcast...
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