A Rose by any other name

Tourist Guy
As terms of endearment go, we like to give those people we are close to pet-names or nick names as a public claim to connection and a statement of close informality.








I have had several nicknames over the years and most of my friends today call me "Momo" (which can also mean peach in my language) and when I was younger I was called "Tomochan" by many, both being derived from my given name of Tomomi. The "M" in Momo was also used as "Em", short for Emerald Tsunami, and my screen name that I used as an alternate name as Jazz first began. Usually I have to be an impartial writer but not here on my own blog so I don't think I'd want to describe any nick name given to me here by people who have little liking for me. (laughs). Well! Would you? I have another name that I use but that is for a separate side from here and so cannot be mentioned.

On the internet I am almost universally known as "Jazz", a name I have come to adopt as much as the names given me by my Mother. If I was walking along somewhere and someone shouted "Hey Jazz", I would turn to see who called me! There is a story on the net circulated by those who know me that my name 'Jazz' came from 'Jasmine' in English or ジャスミン {jasumin} in Japanese. In some obtuse form of logic, you could shorten 'jasumin' to Jazu" which is the Jazz music we all have heard of and it sounds so reasonable and is therefore easily accepted and slowly then, as with many good tales passed by word of mouth (or e-text), these assumptions and imagining and ideas are passed on and fall into legend and internet folklore and are passed around as truth. These stories are quite romantic in a way and I do very little to dispel them and in fact may actively encourage them. Yes! I'm often asked if my name is simply chosen because I like Jazz! Conversation of this topic is offered to me as an ice-breaker regarding the greats of that genre. I shall consider myself fortunate that even without hindsight, I did not choose "Pussy Galore" as a name, like the pilot in the agent 007 movie, 'Goldfinger', what manner of conversation topics would that have inspired?

So where did my name of 'Jazz' come from?
Ha ha, I'm a girl easily influenced by romantic notions, you just have to check my writings to see how true that is and I have really and truly forgotten the origins but I think it is more likely that when I first ventured into Yahoo and I was asked to choose a screen name for the first time that I may have taken "Jazz" from a CD cover or the DVD cover to the musical "All that Jazz".

My Yahoo identity of "tourist_gurl", which everyone in Yahoo knows me by came from a much more interesting but rather tragic origin. Shortly after that terrible attack on the twin towers of the World trade center, a photograph began circulating across the internet and was passed to millions of emails. The photograph in question is the one in my post header and was supposedly of a man on the trade center roof posing for a city scape picture when the imminent tragedy was bearing towards him from behind. The story continues that the camera containing this image was found in the ruins of "ground zero" after the collapse. It became a morbid fascination, the last smile of a tourist before the horror that was to come. It became an internet sensation of the time for a variety of reasons.

But it was a hoax and the truth slowly emerged that a 25 year old Hungarian man named Péter Guzli came forward as the real tourist. He did not want publicity and did not originally release his last name. Guzli took the photo in November 1997 and was also responsible for the initial edit. He edited the image for a few friends, not realizing it would spread so quickly across the Internet. He provided the original undoctored photo and several other photos from the same series as proof to a Hungarian newspaper.
After this was declared a number of 'other' photos appeared, made by photo editors, of "Tourist guy" showing him in a variety of historical scenes, some tragic events, some historic events and some just funny such as the creations you can find in this Gallery (click here).

ORIGINAL TOURIST GURL IMAGE
It was this event that inspired me to playfully cut myself out of some of my photos and paste them into other photographs. One such photograph adorned my old Yahoo profile and I named myself as tourist_gurl as a credit to the inspiration of the original tourist guy. Gurl is not a misspelling, 'gurl' means a girl's girl! Here is the original. They are easy to do if you keep it simple. For the more complicated image editing you need a more professional editing software like photo-shop, which I do not have at home and would need some instruction of layering and other such processes before I could use it. Below are a couple of images I composed on my very simple photo editor as an amusement and demonstration.



Beatles cover
"Who's that girl?"

Tourist Guy and Tourist Gurl in danger of Star trek vessel hitting WTC.

Momo-zila? Haha.
Tokyo in ruins!











And a special moment for President Nixon and Elvis, tee hee!

Wait! Who's that behind Mr President?








You can copy the image file in a .png format of tourist guy if you want to add him into some of your photos by clicking the small image of him at the head of this post, it will open a full size of him. Please be sure to let me see some of your attempts.
Thank you.