Emptybottle.org

I'm knee-deep in geekdom, grinning like a rocket-powered lemur, fiddling with code. Sure and it's a heap of fun, laddie. So rather than write something new, I thought I'd cheat and whack up this explanation from my Metafilter profile of where the StavrosTheWonderChicken thing came from...

In the winter of 1992 (I think), Rick and I had just finished the Mumbles Walk. This is the pub crawl along a seaside stretch of watering holes in Wales, near Swansea, that apparently used to be a regular night out for Dylan Thomas. I'd like to say we were appropriately reverant, but we were just shambolically pissed, basically.

At some point, we stumbled by a phone booth that looked out over the mud flats and dejected-looking rowboats that had been stranded by the outgoing tide, and decided it was a simply great time to give our buddy Derek, back in Vancouver, a collect call. When the operator asked for a name to give for the call (this was back in the last century, before this stuff was automated), the name "Stavros The Wonder Chicken" just bubbled to the top of my brain, with no precedent whatsoever. The operator balked, but we begged, and when we overheard her telling James, his roommate, that she had a collect call from "Stavros the Wonder Chicken", we laughed like the drunken poets we were.

A few minutes after his roommate James accepted the call, we found out that Derek had returned to his hometown because he'd found out that day that his father had died.

We went back to drinking.

Ah-yup? comments.