No sooner had Ras and I decided to create this blog than we were stuck with having to name it. We wanted some catchy play on words to attract people to a blog about story telling, particularly story writing. But we learned pretty soon what to expect when you try to think up a phrase that hasn’t already been used by someone, somewhere, on the Web. It reminded me of the old saw about an infinite number of moneys—that if you could put an infinite number of monkeys in front of an infinite number of keyboards, sooner or later one monkey would bang out the complete works of Shakespeare.
So then it struck me that Infinite Number of Monkeys might be a cool name for our blog—whereupon I googled it and got 2,890,000 hits, including a wikipedia entry on the Infinite Monkey Theorem and a melancholy little poem called “An Infinite Number of Monkeys,” by a professor of English at Pasadena City College in California named Ronald Koertge. Our increasingly forlorn and desperate googlings eventually convinced me that there really are, in fact, an infinite number of monkeys on the Web, of whom Ras and I are merely two.
At 3:17 a.m., we gave up trying to find some original yet instantly recognizable name for what we were doing, and just decided to call the blog “3:17 a.m.” We googled it and got . . . 38,600,000 hits.
Ted the Cat (1994-present) is a domestic shorthair blogger and vers libre poet. He also enjoys sleeping, eating, and lurking. Ted the Cat co-habits with Kaze,
also a blogger at 317am.net.
