It's not often that we get mail here at RNS (Unless you consider spam for natural penis enlargement mail, that is). We also don't really get any hate mail, unless you count the lady who called RNS a "hateful little site" because I said I was pro-choice in this post. So any activity in the RNS inbox is generally welcome, if for no other reason than to prove that my POP3 account is still working properly. Last night I got an e-mail from someone who is definitely not a fan of RNS, a guy named Leland Dulac (sent via an anonymous hotmail account, of course). Now, I can't do a Rachel. Style. Fisking. of this e-mail, since it is very short and contains nothing of substance. So instead, I will just supply you with the nasty little missive in its entirety:

What a shitty blog. The name sucks, you suck, your ideas are stupid, and your posts are stupid. You've only had 3,000 hits to this little shithole since you started it, and you think you have something important to say?

Leland Dulac

My first response was one of shock and denial. My blog's name SUCKS? I mean, say what you want about me, but my blog has a stupid name? I couldn't believe that any human being would be so mean-spirited and depraved to make fun of the name Random Nuclear Strikes.

But, after thinking about it, I wondered if Leland might have a point. I mean, could my shortcomings in the stats department (and we will have our 3,500th unique visitor today, thank you very much) really be due to the name of my blog? Perhaps people are mistaking it for an official military site, and don't want to come here for fear that they will be exposed to top secret government stuff, possibly leading to a late night visit by one of the Liberal Assassination Squads running rampant across America since the regime change coup failed. Perhaps people are afraid that the site actually IS nuclear, leading to high dose radiation exposure through their monitors if they visit. Or, most likely in my opinion, perhaps people are afraid that they can actually LAUNCH nuclear strikes from this website, and don't want to be responsible for starting WWIII. So, perhaps the name is to blame, after all. And, it certainly would be nice to have Glenn Harlan Reynolds type stats once the stigma of the old name was removed, right? Right.

So with some fear and trepidation, I started on a search for a new "stat-busting" name. At first I thought a friendly, inviting name would be best. Unfortunately, Happy Fun Pundit was already taken, so I had to look harder. Other "happy fun" names just didn't do it for me. Consideration of names like

the Content Bunnyhole
Chickenhawk Group Hug
Happy Wholesome Joyfulness Blog

almost made me puke on my keyboard (been there, done that - it smells bad for weeks, and the keys get all sticky). So, due to my sensitive constitution and inability to stomach syrupy names, this naming strategy was abandoned.

Then I thought I should just go for a purely factual descriptive title. One look at

Academic Veterinarian's Worldview

cured me of that nonsense. More likely to cost me readers than bring in droves of new ones.

My next strategy was to use a little deviousness and subterfuge. Perhaps I could lure a non-target audience here to bolster my seemingly inadequate visit numbers. Sort of the old "bait and switch" tactic used by porno sites. You know, where a seemingly innocuous URL is hijacked and re-directed to a porn site. Since porn is the most lucrative business on the net, surely I could lure lots of people here if I picked a pornographic sounding name for my blog. Sure, they would all leave once they found out that there was no actual porn on my site. But not before I recorded them as a unique visitor. This idea really seemed to have a lot of promise, and I came up with several possibilities:

Poontang Blog
Lesbian Sex Blog
Big Dildo Blog
Vibrator Fun Blog
Latex Sex Blog
Whips n Chains Blog

However, none of these really hinted at my "pro-war" stance, so I figured I needed to be a bit more clever in my naming. That lead to:

Poontang WarBlog
Lesbian Sex WarBlog
Big Dildo WarBlog
Vibrator Fun WarBlog
Latex Sex WarBlog
Whips n Chains WarBlog

Eh, maybe not as clever as I thought. My final ploy was to try and create a blog name that used my extensive expertise of medical vocabulary AND a war alliteration to try and draw in the masses. Not quite ready to give up on the porn idea, I decided that the medical vocabulary used should be associated with sex in some way. My first effort

The Clitoris of War

seemed promising, but not just quite right. Would everyone know what a clitoris was? Did RNS want to use the slang of clitoris, which is seen as a fairly vulgar word? In the end, we decided that this just wasn't the right anatomical reference to describe our efforts at RNS. Our next 2 attempts at naming

Scrotum of War
Mars' Prostate

were similarly flawed, and vaguely disturbing. Then it hit me, the perfect combination of sex, easy to understand anatomical reference, and allusion to my pro-war stance:

Tits of War

Yep, that was it. the perfect new name for RNS. Everyone loves tits, so who knows how many extra hits I would get just from that? And Tits of War sounds a little bit scary but tantalizes none the less. Imagine, then, my dismay to learn that someone else in the Blogosphere has laid claim to the title Tits of War in a way that I could never hope to compete with. And more than once, too. With a sense of hopelessness and despair, I continued to randomly scroll through the posts on Michele's blog. She owed me, dammit. She took my blog title, evil, bloodthirsty, breast having, warblogging trollop that she is, and she was damn sure going to offer up an alternative. And then I found it. Nestled away in an inconspicuous little post, almost a throwaway post dealing with the routine humdrum activities associated with working for a living. I just have 1 question. Do you think my new blog title of

The Cunnilingus Fairy

will be too high brow for most of my readership?

Oh, and I almost forgot. Leland, you can kiss my butt, you puling coward. Grow a pair and leave your comments where they can be evaluated by all, or shut the fuck up.