t was summer 2001. The outdoor party season. FnF Willits party.

The main characters: enola, thrusty (tripster?), me.

Supporting characters included ribena, mo, dvb, b0b, jib, yertle, etc. GEEKS. How did I come to be hanging out with these geeks even though I didn't go to UCSC? Well, I had many things point me to these GEEKS, but the most obvious one was the band: Skyliner. lerner, pinniped, enola. I was the bass player. pinniped was working at a company called publicis for my friend james. I met KT through him, we started talking about bands, and when she mentioned My Bloody Valentine, I just knew we had to play together.

It took another 6 months or so before I managed to get together with them, but we finally played together, and Skyliner was born. Okay, then it died two years later. But I still hang out with them and the GEEKS.

But I'm seriously off track. Why man-bridge? Why such an absurd login? On this particular sunny day at the lovely Camp and Son's in Willits, we were floating NUDE in the pond. enola and thrusty were sharing a floating raft thingy, holding on to each end, facing each other. At one point, thrusty reached his legs out and put them around enola's waist and said, "Look! I'm forming a Land Bridge."

enola misheard, and was convinced he said Man Bridge. And so a login was born. Nice!! It was an inside joke for the rest of the weekend. And an absurd one (I like absurd ones). Several weeks later, Tammy finally badgered me into trying icb. I discovered that my cloudfactory shell account had an icb client. So, I fired the thing up and kicked the tires. Surprise! Nearly identical to IRC, which I had wasted many, many hours on in the early 90s.

So, one of the first times I fired up icb, I joined a large group with geeks that had been to Willits. I changed my nick to man-bridge as a joke to see who in the group would figure out who I was. Most got it immediately. It was never meant to be a permanent login, but it was very popular from the get go, so it stuck.

And so now, I'm infamous for being man-bridge, when really Tammy gets the credit for mishearing Todd. At least I'm also somewhat famous for "Nice", "ANGRY", etc.

--mike