Michael has encouraged us to tell the “backstory” of how we named our weblogs, so here is the tale of how Consolation Champs came to be:
My web presence began in 1997 after I took a course in multimedia development. The course was 16 weeks long. 15 weeks on Macromedia Director and a week tacked on the end about “web page design”. After fiddling with hosted services like Rogers (my ISP), Tripod, and even Manila (remember editthispage.com?), I finally registered a domain in 2000. It wasn’t hard to come up with a name.
For years, my friends and I would sit around and come up with crazy band names. Some of my favourites were stuff like Carcinogenic Houseboat, Bonfire of Baby Heads, The Y-Fronts, Robot Pope, Black Jello. Silly stuff like that. But I had one name that I really wanted to use. I had played drums poorly in a semi-band called The Gitch Band when I was a teenager, but it was doubtful that I’d ever be in a real band. So I used the name for my new web site.
I’ve always been fascinated by non-winners. Silver medallists, nominees, also-rans, runners-up and has-beens are all close to my heart and so that’s where Consolation Champs was born.
A year ago, I began a related weblog called Runner-Up where I try to find and tell some of those non-winner stories (and I’m looking for co-contributors!).
Here are some other blognameorigin stories.