Prose and Kaa

Why 'kaasirpent? Why 'Prose and Kaa'? I'm sure these questions have been plaguing you since at least the length of this very sentence. Maybe longer. Maybe as far back as three sentences! :)

The answer is a bit odd, perhaps.

( This got long and rambly. For the short version, don't click this. )

I adore The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling. Adore. It. So I went through the characters, trying to roleplay them: Mowgli, Shere Khan, Bagheera, and Baloo, before finally settling on Kaa, the snake.

I'm big into puns, see. And on TinyTIM, I could use that to my advantage. I programmed myself to hissss everything, sso that anything I ssaid came out like thiss, with all my ssibilantss doubled. I worked out ways a snake could shrug and do other actions, and I went to the (online) party.

I sort of never went back to S'thel. I created another character called Kaa, moved to it, and left S'thel for special Weyr occasions.

In essence, I became Kaa sometime in the late fall or early winter of 1991. And I have used Kaa, KaaSerpent, or some variation of it every since. Chances are, if you see a 'kaa' or 'kaaserpent' user on a forum, there's a very good chance it's me.

Then, in 2003, I noticed that the usual crowd on TIM was getting smaller and smaller. The conversations we were having were becoming disjointed. I was hearing the second half of conversations people had obviously started elsewhere. I asked.

"Oh, it's this 'blog' called LiveJournal. We're all over there. You should check it out." (By all, they meant some fifty or sixty people.) [EDITED 7/13/2018 to note that I have since ported my LiveJournal to DreamWidth, where you're reading this, thanks to LJ becoming a tool of Putin's insane campaign against the LGBTQ+ community.]

I resisted. I had nothing to say, really. I had an old website some TIM-friends were hosting on their server for free, but it was full of rants and drivel, updated weekly or more. It was 'kaa.trippy.org,' and it's still there if you're masochistic enough to go look for it.

So I finally had to come to LiveJournal. I wanted 'kaa,' but some Russian guy had, annoyingly, already taken it. Then my love of puns came out. Instead of getting 'kaaserpent,' I thought to myself that 'kaa serpent' sounded like a name and title. Kaa, Sir Pent. It's like a (really awful) pun. Which was all I needed.

And thus, kaasirpent was born.

A few years later (2008ish) when I got serious about writing fiction again, my love for puns came out again when I was redesigning my theme for LiveJournal. I needed a name for the blog. Before this it had been "Kaa's Lair" (yawwwwn).

I liked writing. I liked Kaa. I liked puns. I liked ranting about stuff. So, "pros and cons" became "Prose and Kaa."

And thus endeth my (extremely long and rambly and probably very boring — I'm sorry) story about How My Blog Got Its Name.

I have three blogs. The stories of those are here (Philosophidian) and here (WriteWright), respectively. This was the longest one, I promise. The other two are quite short and sweet and to the point.

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This post is in response to The Writer's Post Blog Hop 2014 #4 prompt, Explain the Name of Your Blog. The host is Suzy Que. Other entries are linked from her blog post.

Someone asked me the other day why I had chosen the name "Kaa." I was absolutely sure I had mentioned it on either LiveJournal or my old website. The old site has a little of the story, but I have never said anything on LJ. I have bemoaned that Russian git who "stole" the kaa account and is making no use of it that I can see. But that's neither here nor there.

Here, then, is the history of...well, me. Online. :)

( I feel like James Burke doing an episode of "Connections" )

Here's the somewhat smoother answer off my old website. I leave out all the stuff about trying the other Jungle Book characters first and portray me as going directly to Kaa. Not strictly true, but not altogether false, either. :)

Why "Kaa"? I've been asked this a number of times. I'll try to answer. One of my favorite films of all time is Walt Disney's "The Jungle Book" Gotta love that cuh-ra-zy jazz, man! But before I saw the movie as an adult (I'm sure I saw it as a child, but I have little or no recollection since it was released when I was three years old), I had read and thoroughly enjoyed Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book. When I saw the movie, I realized that Disney had villain-ized Kaa. I can understand this—he is a snake, after all, and snakes are (rather unfortunately) viewed in our society as "evil." All because of some misty-eyed fairy tale about a woman, an apple, and the wrath of a god. But I digress. In Kipling's The Jungle Book, Kaa is not strictly a villain. He is, at worst, out for himself. If the needs of others coincide with his own best interests, he'll help. But next time, he might just decide the same people he helped last time are now good candidates for dinner. He's not about to go slithering through the jungle like some herpetic Mary Poppins, looking for people to help. In short, he's misunderstood. As a much younger me, I felt misunderstood. So when I was looking for a new persona for my online role-playing, Kaa came to mind. He's great to role-play.

Remember in the Disney movie how the monkeys steal Mowgli from Baloo while Baloo is being his usual, lazy self, and then Baloo and Bagheera rescue Mowgli from their clutches? Would it surprise you to know that Kaa is actually the hero of that story? Well, read "Kaa's Hunting" by Rudyard Kipling. That's the story they "Disnified" to turn into the King Louie sequence in the movie. They took the hero out, turned him into Shere Khan's whiny stooge, and pandered to the masses who think of snakes as evil. It also bears repeating (no pun intended) that the character of Baloo was also "dumbed down" by Disney. In Kipling's book, he's a wise creature who is the teacher of the Law of the Jungle to all the cubs. Disney turned him into a lazy idiot. Only Bagheera and Shere Khan escaped absolute Disnification.

Because of role-playing Kaa, most of my e-mail addresses are 'Kaa@somethingorother.com/org/net/etc.' This gets me in trouble because 1) it's only 3 letters long, so I get spam addressed to "kaa, kab, kac, kad...."; 2) it stands for a number of things, including Korean-American Association, Kids Across America, and Killian and Associates, all of which are fine organizations, but they're not me; 3) a lot of people have the initials KAA; I get cubic buttloads of misdirected e-mail to Kristen, Kyle, Kevin, Kamali, Kathy...; and 4) people who think they're getting kaa@isp.com where I already have that address don't seem to be aware that the isp is automatically appending random numbers after their e-mail address, so I get replies from people who were originally mailed by kaa123@isp.com. It can be very frustrating. But I persevere.

So, there you have it. Two explanations for the price of one!

An excerpt from a Usenet post in response to something I posted:

I happen to be in a mood that makes me want to point out your folly, though. Nothing personal.

Obviously this guy knows that what he is about to say WILL likely be taken personally, yet he tries to cover his ass with the Universal Erase Words "Nothing personal."

Nothing personal, but you're a moron.
Don't take this the wrong way, but you're a moron.
I mean this with all due respect: you're a moron.
You're a moron--but I don't mean that in a bad way.
You're a moron, but I mean that in the best possible sense.

There are dozens of ways to say it, but what it comes down to is, "I'm going to insult you, and I know I'm going to insult you, but I think you're such a moron that I'm going to try to convince you (and perhaps myself) that I don't mean it as an insult if I use this little Universal Erase Phrase."

You're probably going to take this the wrong way, but...
I don't want you to get angry, but...
I'm not trying to start a fight, but...

Let's all do each other a favor. Let's do our best to eliminate this particular stupidity from the English language. If you have something to say, then say it. Don't use waffle words to try to convince people (or yourself) that you don't mean something you're saying. If you say it, MEAN it.

And if you really are trying to say something unpleasant, either find a kinder way to say it (if you actually care how the other person takes it) or just be blunt and say it. You do our language a disservice by trying to find a way to weasel out of meaning what you say.

And if you say something and you mean it and someone comes along and shows you to be incorrect in some way, have the grace and dignity to stand by your original statement and accept defeat without trying to say something like "you just took my words out of context."

Take a minute to actually think about the wording instead of just vomiting words onto the page.