Je m'appelle ....

Even though this is a meme that appears to be targeted toward LiveJournal users, I decided why not fill this one in ... H/T to JunoMagic.

1. My username is ______ because ______.

I use a couple of different ones. Once upon a time, my handle was ChemicalGrl. I came up with that one when I was a graduate student in the Chemistry Department at Clark University. I continued to use that handle all through graduate school. There are a few places where I am still known as ChemicalGrl, but at this point, those places are few and far between, indeed.

My other handle: cartilagineol. I jokingly call it my alcoholic username. Why alcoholic? The -ol suffix says it all. As one would generally learn in Organic Chemistry, the -ol suffix indicates the compound is an alcohol. (Methanol, ethanol, propanol, butanol, futanol, to borrow a quip from my friend Herb Seltzman ...)

That handle gets its origins from a compound I isolated and identified when I was a graduate student. Cartilagineol was isolated from red algae (Laurencia sp.) isolated off the coast of Taytay City (Philippines).

Of late, I've been using Lyn F. It's short, and it's easy.

2. My name is _____ because ______.

Erm ... I guess I've explained this above.

3. My journal is titled ____ because ____.

Organ-ic Chemist. It's a play on words. I am an Organic Chemist by education and training, and I also happen to be an organist.

4. My friends page is called ____ because ____.

I guess this is a LiveJournal-specific thing. I do have a Blogroll, which I suppose is Blogger's equivalent. I call it "Lyn's List O' Blogorific Sites."

5. My default userpic is ____ because ____.

Again, I suspect this is a LiveJournal-specific thing. My userpic for most of my pages (including this one, my Facebook, and MySpace pages) was taken in one of the Medicinal Chemistry labs at RTI International. You see behind me, in one of the fume hoods, a couple of dedicated stills. We had three in that lab: one for tetrahydrofuran (THF), one for diethyl ether, and one for methylene chloride. They were in constant use, so were constantly maintained.

6. My LJ name is:

Okay, definitely does not apply to me. But whenever I post on blogs that use OpenID, I've been identified as either Organ-ic Chemist, or by the URL of this blog, musical-chemist.

If anyone wants to play ... try to fill in this meme as best you can.