Little Red Riding Who?

It occurs to me that Little Red Riding Hood is an odd name to give anyone. In fact, it's not a name at all, it's a description, and worse, it's not a description of a person, but an article of clothing.  In which case, why, when we say Little Red Riding Hood, do we immediately think of some anonymous little girl rather than something to wear? How did she get to be called that?  Did her parents go in for the modern fad of oddball children's names?

Yet, in spite of being called after an article of clothing, there's a famous fairy-tale about her in which a wolf wants to eat the child, puts off eating her until he's eaten her grandmother as an appetiser, and then, just when everything seems to be going his way, is chopped open by some woodcutter - in front of the child's eyes.  Extraordinary.  Exceptionally Freudian.

How did a story with such an odd name come to be so popular?

We'd be unlikely to read - let alone buy - a children's book entitled Horseback Riding Pants.  Even though a book entitled Horseback Riding Pants might be about a little boy, the youngest of three brothers, who goes off to seek his fortune when his aged father marries a wicked stepmother. Even though Horseback's bigger brother might be called Long Riding Crop, and his oldest brother, Safe Riding Helmet.  But the name of the book is a real turn-off.  (The older brothers' names don't help much either.)  Horseback Riding Pants isn't likely to go whizzing off the shelf, or get downloaded by the hundred-fold from Kindle.

So why on earth is Little Red Riding Hood still popular after all these years?  There's even been a movie made about the story recently - admittedly a story which has taken the bare bones of the fairy-tale and turned it into something in the horror genre, with a werewolf, and a priest who can exorcise the man trapped inside the wolf's garb.  Try selling a movie entitled Horseback Riding Pants. I don't think it's going to happen somehow.

Name tags

Ouch!  Yesterday Eva Radich, on the midday programme, Upbeat, got told by the person she was interviewing that her interruption had made him 'lose his train of thought.'  Today she's actually arguing with the person she's interviewing: Avi Shoshani, the Israel Philharmonic Secretary General.  I find Eva tends to not let her interviewees just speak; she's always telling them what she already knows and what they should be saying to the listeners.  Which is a pity, because she has a great run of interviewees on this programme.

However, in regard to this programme one thing has improved, and that's that the Radio NZ website now lists the people Eva is talking to each day.  Often in the past if you missed the introduction you might have no idea who she was talking to.   In those days we could have done with audible name tags.

Strange names

Cape Fear is one of those movies that was successful first time round, and then rather odd in the remake. Okay, so what?

The only reason I said that is that I had no idea that Cape Fear was an actual place until I came across the name in a site that’s advertising real estate on the North Carolina (NC) sea coast.

Cape Fear is apparently part of the Wilmington, North Carolina area.

You have to wonder how places get their names, don’t you? On my travel site, I’ve mentioned a few of the really odd place names in Britain, and in the widget at the side there’s a link to an article I’ve written on strange British place names.

But are they any stranger than the following pieces of Wilmington NC real estate? Kure Beach (how would you pronounce it?), Topsail Beach and North Topsail Beach, Bald Head Island, Oak Island (what, only one oak?), Figure Eight Island (could it be that complex?), Burgaw, Bolivia (in the middle of North Carolina...), Calabash, Shallotte, Boiling Spring Lakes, Supply (supply of what?).

We get used to the strangest place names, and then along comes a stranger like me and thinks they’re outlandish.

B & B

No doubt most of you will pick this one up easily, but where do you find these oddly-named locations?
Adirondacks
Capital-Saratoga
Central-Leatherstocking
Chautauqua-Allegheny
Finger Lakes
Greater Niagara
Thousand Islands-Seaway
They’re all in the state of New York. None of them sound much like the city of New York, which is what most of us think about when we think about NY, but it just goes to show that NY state is much more varied than we usually consider it to be.
(Greater Niagara reminds me of a couple of villages near where we’ve been staying in Norfolk: Great Melton and Little Melton. Curiously, the latter is the bigger place!)
Anyway, in all these places you can find a New York Bed and Breakfast.
And these are just the general area names. Within each of these are twenty to thirty more options, with names from origins as widespread as American Indian, Dutch, English and French. Amongst them are a Rome, an Amsterdam, a Dundee, a Berlin, and a Naples. Then there are a range of English placenames: Essex, Southampton, Durham, Grenwich (not Greenwich) and Windham (rather than the ‘proper’ spelling of Wymondham). Corinth, Ithica, (and Ithaca) Utica, Hector, Troy and Syracuse add a Grecian touch.
None of them are quite as odd as some of the English place names that I’ve come across in Norfolk, but I’ll save that subject for another day.

Too well known on the Net?

No doubt, like me, you’ve sometimes put your name in the Google box to see what results come up. Mike Crowl is a fairly common name, as it happens, and there are quite a few of them in the States, and thus quite a few results. (I’m the only one in the whole of New Zealand, however - in fact, until my children grew up, we were the only Crowls in any telephone book in the country.)
But I found I get even more results when I put in my username. It turns up everywhere. That’s a bit scary. There is another ‘mcrowl,’ who’s known to the Discuss Cooking forum. And the same one, or another, is a member of the Spring Sonlight Curriculum User group. Spring, as it turns out, isn’t the name of the season, but a place in the States. And Sonlight Curriculum, as you might guess, is a Christian homeschooling syllabus.
Meanwhile, this mcrowl’s life reels before his eyes: Trade Me, Blogit, myLot, Zillion, Link and Blog Challenge, Netscape, Digg, Widgetbox, Epinions, the chess games of Arthur Frank Crowl (my dad). Gold Age Forum, reviews, free videos on the Internet – in Spanish (nah, that can’t be me). My first ever email address still shows up. It’s In My Way forum (a recycling site) to which I've contributed almost nothing. Even eBay, where my reviews from Epinions are used without any permission whatsoever. (As no doubt many other reviewers’ words are.) I’m ubiquitous!