How I Met Your Iconoclast

Ruth Mowry, who runs the
best damned blog on Planet
Earth, keeps insisting she
wants to know how people name their blogs. At one point, she was promising bags of Skittles or some such reward, but fell victim to the "all shall have prizes" syndrome. So what's my motivation? Being acknowledged by the Zen goddess who has something like 320 regular visitors, unlike this backwater. And she paid me such a nice compliment (no, I won't point it out, go and read her blog, for cryin' out loud! You might learn something!), that histories were the least I could share.

This blog's URL is impossible to spell, but its genesis should be obvious. Every possible combination of "iconoclast" has been taken, both within Blogger and WordPress, and also as an independent domain. That's because everyone claims to be an iconoclast, now that Prospect magazine has officially declared eclecticism the new cool (thanks John Voelcker).

Feh. Buncha poseurs. You don't know what eclecticism is, unless you've been grooving out to screeching vacuum cleaners and detuned accordions making a godforsaken racket, only to have a loved one say "You call that music?" Well, yeah. I save my mailing envelopes from Adris Hoyos, since she was the first to proudly offer brutal noise and ask, "What was music?" Now, that, my friends, is iconoclasm.

But how to differentiate? By being a grumpy old man! Calling oneself "iconoclastic curmudgeon" or "curmudgeonly iconoclast" doesn't cut it, it has to be Iconocurmudgeonclast. Thus was a blog born. Where's my cane? And better yet, Ruth, where's my Skittles?