Due to my slight depression from, well, you know, and due to the fact that I was already feeling pretty crappy today (as Kim can attest to), I spent my lunch cleaning out my Yahoo! mailbox, which was up to 96 percent a-gain. Usually I just clean out the big files with attachments, but today, I started at the oldest e-mail of the 659 in my Inbox, which was the following:

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Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2001 12:28:09 -0700 (PDT)
From: "Matthew Prins"
Subject: ME
To: mdprins@yahoo.com

Sudbury. Chapman. Victoria.* Rivendell.
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So that was cryptic. Turns out, after Googling those four names, that those were bed and breakfasts that Kim and I were considering for our 2001 New England vacation. Freaky.

Anyway, anyway, a few e-mails after that, I had one from Ed, who was responding to this early How Perfectly Swell post looking for a character for a short story:

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Pick and choose...

Gordon, a twenty-something with an affection for grilled cheese sandwiches and an enormous collection of Debbie Gibson paraphernalia

James, who believes he is the true "king of the wild frontier"

Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of England (1599-1658)

Zelda, a calligraphy enthusiast with a slight overbite and hair the color of strained peaches (stolen from Weird Al's "Albuquerque")

Stephanie, who never uses the same letter twice in a sentence

Erin, a young single mother just trying to make ends meet in this cruel world

Julia, the hooker with a heart of gold

Phillip Seymour Hoffman, star of such movies as State and Main and Magnolia

Albert Fall, the U.S. Secretary of the Interior under Warren G. Harding indicted in the Teapot Dome scandal

George, who spends most of his time watching old episodes of "The Dukes of Hazzard" and "The A-Team"

Sister Ann, a former-prostitute-turned-nun who enlists her old friends from the underworld and a Belgian kickboxer to help her in an attempt to kill space dinosaurs attacking the earth. For more info on Sister Ann, watch Future War, available for rent at your local video store (it's actually at our local Family Video) or on MST3K. As Crow said, "You know, it's not in the future, and there's no war."

Steve, a former superhero who has retired from fighting crime but retains many of his superpowers, albeit in a diminished capacity

I'll see if I can come up with any more.
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But he never did. Still, that's awesome, dude, and it is becoming clear to me that the final film in my "Women With Unusual Names" trilogy needs to be completely off-the-wall and strange and wack and you get the picture. And Ed's list of characters is going to be a starting point. Point two will be a lists of characters that you provide nowish, a list which I will try to supplement. I obviously will not use them all, but the more I have, the more wack -- that is my word of the month, by the way -- the tentatively titled "Its Chloe" (grammatical mistake intentional) will be, and that will be a good thing. I am hoping it will be a good thing.