What's in a name?

A lot, apparently, if it's a movie you want to sell in the U.S.A. You can find lots of lists of changed names, many of them just silly. It may or may not be necessary to include those where the name was changed before release anywhere, but still primarily for the US market. These, of course, allow people to argue endlessly (and pointlessly) about whether or not the name was changed.

They do it to books as well, but at least it's still the same book inside. Or is it? There is currently a lot of Web space devoted to arguing about the name of the wolf in the Narnia movie and, as usual, everyone is convinced that they are right. If you want to see the arguments, just search Google for both names together.

Every copy of the book I have ever seen has Maugrim, so that is the name as far as I am concerned, and I don't like Fenris Ulf, which doesn't sound right. (As far as I know, the one in Norse mythology was known as Fenris Wolf, but never mind, that's not the argument I want to have now.)

Fenris Ulf is apparently used only in US editions, and some people claim that Lewis made the change himself. I am not convinced that, even if the change came from Lewis, he was making a genuine revision, since the change never appeared in any British edition.

I suspect that a clue to the change lies in the words that appear on the back cover of my copy (Puffin Books, 1959 reprinted 1974) -

For copyright reasons this edition is not for sale in the U.S.A.

This makes me wonder if the change is just a marker for the US editions, in the same way that map publishers put in deliberate mistakes.

The Universe is full of gold coins

In about 1976, a group of Dungeons and Dragons™ players had a competition day - everybody start a character, then go through a sequence of "rooms", each run by a different dungeon master.

In the finale, there was a pedestal with a single gold coin on it.

"What sort of coin?"

"Just something fairly common (for a gold coin)."

"I'll take the coin"

"Where have you put it?"

"In my pack"

A short while later...

"You are being pulled backwards by the weight of your pack"

"I'll take off my pack to have a look inside"

"Your pack crashes to the ground splitting open and scattering gold coins everywhere."

"I pick up a coin"

"You have two coins in your hand ... you have four coins in your hand ... most of the coins have fallen out of your hand."

And the whole thing ended with the last two players having a sword fight while struggling to stand on an ever-growing pile of coins which had already buried the entire known world. I don't remember who they were, or who won.

In those days, Dungeons and Dragons™ was just some small books of rules and ideas published by TSR Games, and no computers were involved.

So now, 30 years later, in the on-line virtual world Second Life, one or more players have apparently used the game's scripting language to create a self-duplicating object. The operators of Second Life are reported to have called in the FBI because this amounted to a Denial Of Service attack on their servers.

I'm not going to enter into the rights or wrongs of that, but perhaps after the FBI has finished with them, a certain former Dungeon Master could sue them for theft of the concept.

What's Going on Here?

The name goes back to the late seventies, and never referred to a real person (or place or anything), but it makes a handy pseudonym.

And this is not "my life is my blog is my life", just a place to put occasional thoughts that should be expressed.