My pal Tim Virkkala (or Wirkman Virkkala, depending on the day, or the context, or something) has been updating and expanding his web presence with a few new sites outside of the redesigned Instead of a Blog, among them a Geocities page explaining the coolness of one of his email addresses:

Houyhnhnm, to be pronounced as a whinney (whinnem), is the name Swift gave to his rational horse creatures in the final book of Gulliver’s Travels. They rule over the bestial hominids, the Yahoos.

When, years ago, I decided that I would try Yahoo.com’s excellent Web-based email service, I blanched a bit at the domain name. I was no Yahoo!

So I decided on the email name houyhnhnm, which would distinguish myself, I thought, from all the yahoos. And was pleasantly surprised when the name was available; it seemed such an obvious moniker to choose. Arguably, houyhnhnm@yahoo.com is the best email address on Yahoo; perhaps on all the Internet.

I’ve known about this email address of his since 1998, and although I recognized the “houyhnhnm” reference immediately, I never picked up on the fact that “yahoo” referenced the same thing! I guess I had just associated yahoo.com with a single context for too long. So, even though I admired the first part of the email address as a cool, semi-obscure literary reference, I had missed the whole point . . .

One of Tim’s other new web efforts is the revamped wirkman.com, which is shaping up to be a small portal that includes a featured link to yours truly and lots of stuff for sale! As a satisfied buyer of several of Tim’s eBay-auctioned items, I can assure you that if you see something on his page you want you’ll be getting quality stuff with a hassle-free transaction. So go pick something up before I get to it first.