465 thoughts on “Del Arroz Files Suit Against Worldcon 76”

1. I was surprised to find out that there are other people named Lorien Gray out there. But I’m not even the only one in Southern California. Or the only one that is a SF/F fan in Southern California that happened to attend the same Worldcon. But so far, all the other Loriens out there have been younger than I am, so I hold fast to the thought that I’m the original (in the U.S. at least). The pirated copy of LOTR: Return of the King was published in the U.S. in 1965 and I was born within that same year. The name Lorien appears in the appendices, which is where my father got the name.

2. Paul Weimer: “I’m clearly the boring Paul Weimer.”

   Well Paul, I have to say that you’re not very good at being boring. 🙂

3. @Contrarius: Speaking of Utah, my last name is rare – unless you go to Utah! This was fun/amusing for us as kids when our family did our driving tour out West one year. We’d check a phone book at a hotel or phone booth when we stopped anywhere in Utah – we knew to look* – and marvel and seeing so! many! ____s! when the only ones near us were my uncle and one unknown person.

   * We have family geneology books and knew to look for our last name in the phone book. Eons ago, someone in the family went to Utah and was fruitful and multiplied. So most of them are distant relatives. 🙂

   My first name is unusual and I’ve only found 2-3 other people with my first + last name combo on the ‘net. Add my middle initial, and I appear to be unique.

   Due to traditional wife-name-change-on-marriage patterns in the USA, though, searching for my first + last name finds my grandmother, too. (Kendall is a family name in my case.) Anyway, I don’t know if I’m related to the other Kendall ____s I found.

4. As far as I can tell my first name/surname combo is unique in the UK, even before you factor in my middle name. My first name is fairly rare here, although less so in Wales (it’s a Welsh name), and my surname is moderately uncommon and English, which nixes the Welsh factor. But my middle name is fairly common, especially if you count all the various permutations (mine is a short version), and especially in my age group (there were three or four girls in my small Brownie pack with the long version), so there’s that.

   Could be worse. My grandmother’s maiden name is even rarer – there’s two families with it. And the other family pronounces it wrong! 😉

5. Dear Soon Lee,

   That’s awfully cruel.

   Saying that Paul is not only boring but unsuccessful!

   Reprehensible.

   pax / Ctein (exhibiting the same reading comprehension as our beloved PLA)

6. Damn, Ctein, you hit that nail on the head (ugh, now the nail will be accusing me of inciting violence).

7. As far as I know, I’m the only person with my particular name. My surname is not particularly common and most other people who share it are probably related to me in some way. And my first name is very uncommon in Germany.

   Though there was a German adult film star, who only went by “Sexy Cora”. For a while, I got a lot of hits on my website from search term combinations such as “German Cora sex”. A few years ago, the actress died due to a botched breast enlargement surgery and the searches eventually ceased.

8. I am very proud of having caused the creation of all searches for “Mark kitteh”! Who would have thought that wouldn’t have come up till I started using it, what with the preponderance of both Marks and kittehs on the internet.

   @Glenn Glazer: Isn’t one of the other John Scalzis also a Florida meteorologist? This may be worth looking into.

   @Chad: Seems to be the difference between just Chad and being Chadwick.

   Also, we’ve learned that Paul’s boring and Cora’s sexy. Or not.

9. Love the positive and entertaining turn this thread took.

10. When Google started, I was pretty much the only Bruce Albrecht who came up in searches for my name, and then for a while, most of the first page of searching was for a professor of meteorology in Florida. I’m sensing a conspiracy, folks!

    Currently, the most popular guy when I search for my name is a fertility doctor. or maybe an investment banker, and I think my first mention is down around # 75. Given the nature of the internet these days, I suspect that’s a good thing.

11. I had the impression that Hitchcock is an old but thinly-spread name. (I’ve found only one other in fandom, plus one whose family took the name as a replacement for something even ruder.) However, Googling my legal name gets 2 ~local obits and an assortment of other cites.

    @Hampus: Eckerman is not that common and we actually spell it a bit different from the family branch I’m guessing that branch doesn’t spell it Egerman — it would be too Bergmannesque….

12. Because of the spelling issues (At least 4 ways to spell Steven, and a ridiculous number to spell Schwartz) I’m almost un-googlable. 🙂 OTOH, I have been told by someone with a perfectly straight face that I looked very young to have written Godspell (Stephen Schwartz) and my name has caused consternation for people who had a low opinion of a member of Pacific northwestern fandom (whom I have never met, so there may be an exclusionary principle at work.)

    Given that I am regularly mistaken for other people for how I *look*, let alone my name, I am sometimes surprised I’ve held on to my identity — it should be fragmenting like a character in a Tim Powers novel. 🙂

13. My full name is Julie McGalliard. As far as I know there’s only one other person on the planet with my name, and she’s an Australian fan.

    The “McJulie” handle goes back to college — we had two Julies in the SF group, so I was “McJulie” because everything was “Mc” (McNuggets, McMansions) back then. When I started using it, everybody understood it as a McDonalds reference, but when I was still using it years later, people often assumed it meant EMCEE Julie & that I was a DJ, which amuses me greatly.

14. “I’m guessing that branch doesn’t spell it Egerman — it would be too Bergmannesque”

    This joke passed right over my head. I’m not very Bergman-educated, I’m afraid. No, it is spelled Ekerman if I remember correctly, at least it was 300 years ago.

15. We often get our family name confused with that of Goethe’s secretary, Johann Peter Eckermann, but they aren’t related.

16. I don’t know of any other Anne Shellers out there, but there may be some. They most likely wouldn’t be related to me; my father changed his name shortly before marrying my mother. She didn’t like his original surname, so he modified it slightly. The original was a German or Austrian surname, with possible spelling changes over several generations in Hungary. We once lived in a city with several other Sheller families, unrelated to us (well, we’re all related, but not to a traceable degree).

17. We’ve also learned that if you’re a man who thinks you have a fairly unusual first and last name combo, there will be a meteorologist in Florida with it.

    Florida probably also has any number of Ste(v|ph)en S(c)hwar(t)z’es.

18. Lurkertype: Florida probably also has any number of Ste(v|ph)en S(c)hwar(t)z’es.

    The meteorologist of that name doesn’t live in Florida.

    YET. (cue ominous music)

19. Back in the early 90s when I was accessing the internet at large via a local dial-up BBS and a text-only interface, mostly usenet, I did an internet search on my name for the very first time and was alarmed to see the following caption describing a bitmap in some usenet group: “Nicole LeBoeuf and [male name I didn’t recognize]!!!”

    I was in high school and very new to all things internet, but adapting quickly. So of course my first thought was OMG SOMEONE HAS NABBED A PICTURE OF ME AND PASTED IT INTO SOME PR0N!!!

    So I downloaded all the bits of the bitmap, then I downloaded a program for putting the bits together, and I applied the one to the other, and finally I could see what the heck this picture was. It turned out to be some gal I didn’t recognize posing for a picture with some guy who it turns out was a musician in a band she was a fan of. Like you do. (If I remember correctly, the band was Gravity Kills.) [Emily Litella]Ohhhh. Nevermind.[/Emily Litella]

    We probably were related. I’m told most every LeBoeuf out there can trace their name back to the same family that got kicked out of Canada with the rest of the Acadians. Even Shia’s probably a distant relative, since he also gets the name via Cajun extraction, though I maintain he spells it wrong.

    There is a journalist in Canada by the name of Patricia LeBoeuf who followed me on twitter on, I presume, the strength of the shared name. She retweets news of interest.

    I have yet to come across another LeBoeuf who married into, and hyphenated with, the name Little. But the world is full of wonders, also LeBoeufs and Littles, so it’s only a matter of time.

20. Rare first name (Bret) very rare last name (Grandrath), I’m the only one with the combination.
    And here is the SF related story about my name : years ago (might have been (LACon IV) Harry Harrison signed a copy of Stainless Steel Rat for me. I asked him to make it out to Bret with one “t”, he said “Of course, two t’s is for officers.”

21. My wallet name is rare, but there is literally another person in Florida who wears it. Yet in 7th grade there were literally five people in one class with my first name.

22. Back in the early days of the Internet my name was unique, but then there was a rugby player who got a fair bit of coverage (definitely not me!), and then a few others appeared, though they usually had middle initials, which my parents didn’t believe in (my brother reacted to this by giving his three kids middle names (even if one of them is a rather pretentious one which links the kids’ mothers’ family to the local Parliamentary commander in the English Civil War), and two of his three grandkids have two middle names).

    My problem’s always been that a) English people never hear my first name properly and think it’s something else (“Arnold” was popular at one stage); even when they do hear it, they can’t spell it and insist on using 2 ‘L’s – surely it’s no secret in Britain that Welsh ‘ll’ is pronounced completely differently from ‘l’? b) Even when they do see my name spelt, they can’t pronounce it properly (it’s a short ‘a’ and you need to put some effort into the ‘r’). Nowadays, on the rare occasions when I buy a coffee, I avoid the hassle by giving my name as “Dave” – after all we’ve got a TV channel in this country called Dave because “everyone knows someone called Dave”. I can only sympathise with my cousins’ son, whose name is Ll?r (damn, not sure if that comes out – the third letter (second letter if you go by Welsh standards and count ll separately from l) is y-circumflex) which is cognate to the Irish Laoghaire, or the Manx Lir, or Shakespeares’ King Lear (though it ain’t pronounced like that!); he’s avoided some of the problem by making his career in Wales….

23. @lurkertype

    I’m prepared to split my internet fame with you, 50:50!

24. My mom was a Babbitt, and when the notorious book of the same name came out, my grandfather (Grandpa Kip) was sometime accused of being its model. I never met him, as our dates don’t overlap. He came along just after the time period covered by the Babbitt genealogy book I used to look at when we visited them. My cousin has the book now, and I’ve requested multiple times for him to copy out the pencil notes from it and send them to me. I found another copy of the book at Archive, and it tells me that all Babbitts in this country (USA) are pretty much related, except a very few who had the name stuck to them at Ellis Island because the clerk couldn’t deal with their real surname.

    So here we are in NY state, where we moved ten years ago. Within a year of coming here, I found the grave of a Babbitt from 1806 less than a mile from my house. The shallowly scribed surname could still be read when I first saw it, but now the red sandstone is encased in some kind of opaque stone rust encrustation. The town historian told me there were another couple of Babbitts living near the canal until the 70s. Yet another Babbitt comes to the Irish jam that I go to on Mondays, and he has a copy of the same genealogy.

    See also “World: Smallness of, after all.”

25. @Hampus: Egerman is the lead male role in Smiles of a Summer Night — probably best known in various circles as the source for the Sondheim musical A Little Night Music (which has many good points but debases some of the original).

26. Lurkertype: @Glenn Glazer: Isn’t one of the other John Scalzis also a Florida meteorologist? This may be worth looking into.

    Indeed. Sarasota to be precise: the other Scalzi.

    JJ: Lurkertype: Florida probably also has any number of Ste(v|ph)en S(c)hwar(t)z’es.

    The meteorologist of that name doesn’t live in Florida.

    Were I still going to conventions, I might try to get the three pairs of fen and their meteorologist namesakes to a con in Florida (Megacon?) for a group selfie with the meteorologist Schwartz as a definite stretch goal.

27. There’s someone with my full legal maiden name living in Oklahoma (including the somewhat-rarer spelling of my middle name). I married into a very common last name, so my legal name is not-uncommon, but I don’t see any iterations of my First-Maiden-Last name on Google. But I’m actually rather shocked to find out that someone named Cassie [Maiden-name] — no relation that I know of — lives only about twenty miles from me. I thought for sure that combination was unique; my maiden name is not particularly common and my nickname (especially since I spell it correctly, with a Y) is very uncommon indeed. I never met another “Cass(ie/y)” until I was at least forty. In fact, I think the few Cassies that I’ve met since have uniformly been spelled with ie.

    (I have a friend whose daughter’s friend is named Cassie. This trips me up Every. Single. Time. Because on some deep level I know, beyond reason, that I’m the only Cassy in the world and therefore if someone mentions that name they’re talking about ME. “Wait, what? I’m not in a high school band….”)

28. @Arwel —

    Nowadays, on the rare occasions when I buy a coffee, I avoid the hassle by giving my name as “Dave”

    I feel yer pain. I always give my last name in situations like this, because it is soooo annoying to have to explain to people first how to spell, and then how to pronounce, my first name Every Single Time. 😉

    @Nicole —

    I am cracking up a little bit about LeBoeuf, just because I read this story about True Grit and this review of the new Borg vs. McEnroe movie starring Shia only last night. It’s a LeBoeuf week!

29. @Arwel & @Contrarius: At restaurants, I’ll give my other half’s name and he’s all, “That’s not your name!” (My response frequently is: “They asked for *A* name, not *MY* name.”) Even when alone and getting something that requires a name, I usually give his name.

    My name’s not tough to pronounce (though I’ve seen some odd-to-me misspellings), so you’d wonder why I do this! But somehow, people have managed to mangle or mis-transcribe or mishear it just enough in that sort of situation that it annoys me, so I figure it’s much simpler to just give a super-easy name. No one even blinks an eye when my credit card doesn’t match the first name I gave. 😉

30. I get the “How do you spell your name?” thing too for my first name.

    Sometimes, it’s hard to believe that it is simply spelt the way it’s said. Nothing complicated or unusual. #itsatrap

31. >Is there any consequence for filing a suit that does not go forward, either for some technical reason or because the plaintiff doesn’t pursue it? (I.e., do courts penalize people for wasting their time?)

    Because Jon is filing in CA, I would expect his suit would get a serious hearing. The state seems to take minority status, and especially Mexican heritage, fairly seriously. Events open to the public need to be careful about any appearance of discrimination.

32. I’ve gotten Kipp, Skip, Kit, Kim, Kemp, Chris, and Kimp, among others. AARP just sent something to us with my name represented as Kyz, but I figure that’s more to do with Cathy’s handwriting on some form, coupled with a wider range of possible names in these here degenerate modern times.

33. We’ve also learned that if you’re a man who thinks you have a fairly unusual first and last name combo, there will be a meteorologist in Florida with it.

    Well, as I said, I’m the only Ray Radlein, but… I did grow up in Tampa, and my sister Robin Radlein (probably the only person with that name ever) was a meteorologist, so there you go.

34. Dear Cassy & Lela,

    California law provides penalties for both “vexatious litigants” and frivolous lawsuits. Since our favorite PLA has not filed any significant number of lawsuits, he would not be a vexatious litigant (mouthing off doesn’t count, the Court only looks at actual suits).

    Frivolous lawsuit is a fairly high bar; the idea is that you don’t want to discourage legitimate lawsuits, even far-fetched ones. There are many incompetent lawsuits as well as “one party is just being a ridiculous pain in the ass” lawsuits, but that doesn’t rise to the level of frivolous.

    Some claims could be trivially and summarily dismissed, such as “removed from the premises” being taken as a threat of violence. That’s standard boilerplate. The Court will not be impressed with PLA’s attempt to creatively reinterpret that. That doesn’t make the entire suit frivolous.

    Although the filing repeatedly brings up how proud our favorite PLA is of his Hispanic heritage, unless I missed it in my cursory reading of the PDF, he does NOT claim that Worldcon is discriminating against him on the basis of race/ethnicity. What he’s saying is that he can’t be considered a racist because he is Hispanic, which is not the same thing. He is claiming discrimination solely based on political affiliation — unless I missed something while skimming. if I didn’t, the Court will not be paying any attention to his Hispanic origins (except as it applies to claims of racism on his part).

    Honestly, the filing reads far more like a PR effort to appeal to PLA’s alt-right audience than anything else. The Complaint is not particularly well-written. But, legitimately, the Court does its best to look beyond that (although it’s hard) because clever wordsmithing is stock in trade in that business.

    I’d love to see this case go to completion, because I can’t imagine a better test case for establishing the legal right of a Con to do exactly what Worldcon 76 has done. But I’d be very surprised if it does. It may not even make it to the Case Management Conference.

    – pax \ Ctein
    [ Please excuse any word-salad. Dragon Dictate in training! ]
    ======================================
    — Ctein’s Online Gallery. http://ctein.com 
    — Digital Restorations. http://photo-repair.com 
    ======================================

35. @Soon Lee: “Sometimes, it’s hard to believe that it is simply spelt the way it’s said. Nothing complicated or unusual. #itsatrap”

    Oh yeah, an ex-friend from college had the last name “Scissors.” He got so irritated at being asked how to spell it. I still remember him telling me about how much it ticked him off – gesturing with a hand like a pair of scissors and exclaiming, “Why is this so hard?! It’s Scissors! Like the implement!!!”

    ETA: He also had problems with people mispronouncing it. Somehow, seeing a regular word as a name made people presume it couldn’t possibly be pronounced the same way, either. (I forget if that rage he expressed was over spelling or pronunciation, come to think of it.)

    As you say, people presume names aren’t like normal words. I’d probably ask you, too (if I hadn’t seen your name here, only heard it). Then when you told me, I’d remember my friend and I’d cringe. 😉

    @Lela E. Buis: The problem being, they don’t “appear” to be discriminating. 😛 And they definitely aren’t discriminating (over “Mexican heritage” or anything else), which methinks is the more important thing.

36. Kendall: My response frequently is: “They asked for *A* name, not *MY* name.”

    As as native Californian, I often give my name as “Donner”.

    Kendall: Oh yeah, an ex-friend from college had the last name “Scissors.” He got so irritated at being asked how to spell it. I still remember him telling me about how much it ticked him off – gesturing with a hand like a pair of scissors and exclaiming, “Why is this so hard?! It’s Scissors! Like the implement!!!”

    So you are telling us that there was time when you ran with Scissors?

37. Sorry Lela, but you’re about two days late to be on topic, this is now the “random facts about your name” thread.

38. @Kendall,

    The way I view it: people ask because they care enough to want to spell your name correctly. So I appreciate the sentiment & do not take offense. We can all have a laugh about it.

39. @Glenn Glazer: “So you are telling us that there was time when you ran with Scissors?”

    ::groan:: Go sit in timeout with the others!

    @Soon Lee: Oh for sure, totally agreed! It can be frustrating, but it’s innocent and even well-intentioned. 🙂

40. @Mark (Kitteh): Gak, much better response than mine. Sorry! I was too quick on the trigger. 🙂

41. Rather than saying then spelling my first name at takeaways etc, I routinely give my common, short, middle name.

42. Kendall: ::groan:: Go sit in timeout with the others!

    My work here is done. 😛

43. For takeaway/Starbucks I routinely give my name as “Gwen”, which is my SCA name. I do sometimes have to spell it, or make sure they didn’t write “Wen/Wynne”, but since even coworkers who’ve seen my name in writing regularly call me Lenore or Loreena, it is simpler.

    I also answer to it naturally enough to pass. Less so since I’m not as active in the group, but my best friend once woke me at 2 Am on a rainy night to say, “The tent fly’s come off!” (It was a teeny tent, the kind that *says* it’s for 2 people, and there was no way she was reaching the door without waking me by climbing over me regardless). So I went out, fixed the fly, came in, towelled off the rain, and only back in the sleeping bag thought about it and said, “Wait, did you call me Gwen?”

    My husband once answered someone’s confusion at my names with, “Yes, she’s Gwen. Short for Lenora.”

    (She was worse. For the longest time, there were some friends who genuinely didn’t know her legal first name, and at least one person who thought her then-boyfriend now-husband, the only one to use her legal name in her social rather than work circle, was dating two people.)

44. Glenn Glazer, As as native Californian, I often give my name as “Donner”. So that when they call you, they say, “Donner, party of two”?

    (I’ll join the others in the corner.)

45. Cassy: Got it in one!

    See also Some one at the forestry service has a wonderfully twisted sense of humor.

46. My first name is so astoundingly common that the times people misspell it are truly memorable. I once received a piece of mail addressed to “Ronert.” The only explanation I can come up with is that they must’ve asked my name by phone while I had a cold… but seriously, you’d think they’d ask before keying that in.

    They screwed up my last name, too. Chopped off the first letter and made me an orb-holding alien decades ahead of time.

47. Rev. Bob: I once received a piece of mail addressed to “Ronert.”

    The B and N keys are adjacent, so speaking as one of the world’s worst copyeditors, I propose it was an overlooked typo.

48. My name is fairly common – it’s an old Pennsylvania Dutch family so there are distant relatives all over the US – but the way my first and last names are spelled is weird, and that trips people up something fierce. Can’t count the number of times I’ve carefully spelled my name out only to see people immediately record them incorrectly. Back when I was writing for the tabletop game industry regularly, I learned to insist that they check my byline for accuracy every single time before a book went to the printers . . .

49. In theory, my name should be easy to spell. Okay, it’s no surprise that I have to tell people that Elisabeth is spelled with an s, not a z, but Carey? How hard is that?

    Very hard, apparently.

    I’ve become convinced my name is really “Elisabeth,with an s, not a z, and Carey is spelled C-a-r-e-y.”

    As far as I can tell, no one who is not a native New Englander can even hear the difference between Carey and Kerry.

    And even people who are starting at a business card apparently can’t see the difference, either, and I still have to spell it.

    Even here on File 770, people looking at Lis automatically type Liz more often than my hopeful mind expects, even after a lifetime of experience.

50. These days autocorrect has a lot to answer for. I know I’ve had trouble spelling Lenora here before (though my system has now learned it). Lis comes through fine. I have a friend named Noa whose name gets “fixed” to Now all the time (I just had to correct it back). That doesn’t explain Ronert, of course.

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