{"id":405,"date":"2005-12-09T21:57:38","date_gmt":"2005-12-10T05:57:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lee.org\/blog\/?p=405"},"modified":"2011-02-06T15:07:13","modified_gmt":"2011-02-06T23:07:13","slug":"why-the-name-gadlen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/2005\/12\/09\/why-the-name-gadlen\/","title":{"rendered":"Why the Name Gadlen?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Update… Hmm, I’m rereading Sandman and I may have misremembered. I have to follow up on this. Or maybe the character names shift \u00a0Here’s a start<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Here’s my original answer…<\/p>\n

I often use the name “Gadlen” online. A lot of people have asked where the name comes from so….<\/p>\n

It was originally a character in Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman<\/a>. (a very sophisticated, grown-up comic). There were these two characters, Gadlen and Hobbes who took care of Dream’s castle while he was away. They are quirky little characters, very much sideline characters… getting just a tiny bit more stage time than the more famous pair, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.<\/p>\n

I liked that. I liked the allusion to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and the buzz about “the two least known characters in Shakespeare”. I loved Tom Stoppard’s “Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead” and how absurd the movie, Shakespeare’s characters, and Gaiman’s characters are.<\/p>\n

I liked their jobs, immortal caretakers… janitors in an impossibly beautiful castle. I liked their boss (Sandman #50 still sends a shiver down my back).<\/p>\n

I liked even more that when I did a search on the internet in 1992 or so and I didn’t find the word in use by anyone else. It’s good to have a unique name on the internet. Even today, if you google for “Gadlen<\/a>“, many of the 150 or so links are to me. Having to get an email address like baseballfann5798@aol.com is no fun.<\/p>\n

I have used the name in a live action role playing game. I played D. Gadlen J. Chimeran, Dark Hobling of the Fourth House of Inverness. It was quite a bit of fun. I’ve used the name Gadlen all over the ‘net, it’s a bit of a pen name. I’m Gadlen on Gmail, Yahoo, AIM and a mess of other places.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Update… Hmm, I’m rereading Sandman and I may have misremembered. I have to follow up on this. Or maybe the character names shift \u00a0Here’s a start. Here’s my original answer… I often use the name “Gadlen” online. A lot of people have asked where the name comes from so…. It was originally a character in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-405","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/405","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=405"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/405\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}