That last post may have seemed very random. Well, life is like that. It’s not neatly wrapped up in a simplistic series of causes and effects.
However, my mind requires that life is like that, so when I gather my thoughts to tell a story, the pieces must be there no matter how spurious they seem. I’m also using this opportunity to re-introduce myself. I’m certainly not the same person I was when this domain became a blog in 2005.
One piece of that puzzle is this domain, lonelocust.com, and what it means to me. The story of this goes back even beyond 2005.
In the early 1990s – before I had two children (both legal adults now) and before I met my wife, I was a dilettante writer/video maker. I became fascinated with public access television, which was a thing back then.
I, and a group of my friends, created a public access TV show that aired for several years locally in the Phoenix area called Fusion Patrol. It was really nothing like the podcast that currently operates under that moniker, although they are spiritually linked.
I’ll spare you the origin story of Fusion Patrol as a TV show, but all the info remains online here at the Fusion Patrol FAQ. An FAQ so good that another public access show elsewhere in the country plagiarized much of it word-for-word, and I had to be a bit unpleasant with them.
Fusion Patrol originally started under the Bleeding Obvious Productions banner. Bleeding Obvious was apt because it reflected the type of humor we were attempting. It was not meant to be subtle, yet, at the same time, it was meant to reflect that we were going to bury subtextual references to other sources like Monty Python as homages in our work. (A very early example of “if you know, you know.”)
(That has been a consistent theme for me going back into the ’80s to my original 1200bps FidoNet BBS – 114/12 The Crunchy Frog BBS.)
The inspiration for “bleeding obvious” is a line from the Fawlty Towers episode, Basil the Rat, where John Cleese has the line, “Next contestant, Mrs. Sybil Fawlty from Torquay. Specialist subject – the bleeding obvious.”
That name soon changed to Lone Locust Productions. That, too, is a television quote. In this case, it was from Space Ghost: Coast to Coast when the character of Zorak (a mantis, not a locust) uttered the now immortal words, “I am the lone locust of the apocalypse. Think of me when you look to the night sky.”
I fell in love with the concept immediately. The very idea of a singular locust pushes all my funny bone buttons in just the right spots. It’s absurd. It’s a bit sad. It rolls off the tongue with a pleasing alliteration. And it felt like my role when making Fusion Patrol. I was the lone locust trying to get a group of grasshoppers to swarm.
So it came to pass that lonelocust.com and fusionpatrol.com were the first domains I ever purchased.
Lonelocust.com was initially intended to be a catch-all top-level domain as a parent to all the named projects, like Fusion Patrol, that I would do over the years. It also became my social media handle of choice.
Next time – Part 3, the Internet’s original Ninja Team.