G.I. Joe Classified Series

With middle names... My grandfather wasn't given one when he was born, but when he signed up with the Marines during WW2, they assigned him a middle initial. I don't know if that's a thing or the clerk just had an issue with leaving any spaces on the paperwork blank, but after that he had a middle initial at least. I actually think about that a lot when I see all the middle initials on the file cards, heh.
 
Ru1977 said:
With middle names... My grandfather wasn't given one when he was born, but when he signed up with the Marines during WW2, they assigned him a middle initial. I don't know if that's a thing or the clerk just had an issue with leaving any spaces on the paperwork blank, but after that he had a middle initial at least. I actually think about that a lot when I see all the middle initials on the file cards, heh.
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My father was supposed to be named after his dad (first name) and grandfather (middle name) - Joseph Alfred. When he was fully like, late 48s, they found out that his father's first and middle names were reversed on his birth certificate (Jeremiah Joseph, not Joseph Jeremiah), and HIS father thought his name was Alfred his entire life but learned near the end of his life Al was short for ALEXANDER on HIS birth certificate. So my dad's name is a complete fabrication. (In their defense, my grandfather grew up literally on the streets eating out of dumpsters, so paperwork was... not a priority).
 
Ru1977 said:
That's gotta be mind blowing though.
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It really was. He never stopped laughing about it. Still a solid name even if it was all wrong. Not as bad as his brother who got his birth year wrong and found out he was 47 and thought he was 46 one Easter Sunday. Watching a grown man realize he lost a year off his life cos his math was wrong? HILARIOUS.
 
My buddy in High School, his dad had two legal names for a short while. When his dad was super young, his dad owed somebody a hefty gambling debt, so he gave him his two kids as payment. So new guy brought them home and gave them new names.
 
I actually have two birth certificates with two different names.

The first birth certificate my mom named me what she had discussed hypothetically with her "husband" - turns out it was a non-legally binding ceremony in Mexico - but when he found out she was pregnant he told her it was a 'nope' for him, checked her into a psych ward because she became 'hysterical', and fucked off. He was a Spanish professor so my name at birth was Jordan Maceo de la Luna Caldwell.

When I was 4 months old my mom met my dad. He would later tell her he had to marry her to get me in his life, which I always thought was sweet. Anyway when it came time to enroll me in school my mom, dad, older (step) brother and little sister all had the same last name, but legally I didnt. My mom fibbed on school paperwork and gave me the same last name as the rest of the family. Three years later I asked my dad why he didnt want to legally adopt me, and so a few months later we went to court and I was legallty adopted and they issued me a newly minted birth certificate with my dad listed on it and my name legally changed to Jordan Cooper Davis.

I think the second name would look better on a GI Joe file card than the silly first one, but who knows...Larry Hama might have like the nonsense spanish
 
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Larry would've loved your name. Mine's boring--if you say it as fancy as possible, mine's as interesting as Recondo's name, meaning not cool enough to be cool, not weird enough to be weird. I would also love to know what happened the year I was born that like 35% of white boys born that year were all named Matthew. You could yell Matt in my elementary school and half the boys would turn around.

So funny on-topic thing - for all my complaining about how every. single. viper. I ever bought had a stuck hip... months ago I shock oiled them all, and it didn't stick. Still stuck, but now also greasy. Stuck AND greasy. So I rinsed them off in hot water, let them air dry for a few days, and the ones I don't have on display (I don't display the vipers cos I'm ACTIVELY MAD AT THEM... I break them out for photo shoots only) went into storage.

I was on another wander tonight, just opening boxes and examining figures while listening to Critical Role in the background, and.... ALL MY VIPERS ARE FIXED. Maybe just enough shock oil set in that, with the hot water, loosened them up! I have SO MANY FUNCTIONAL VIPERS NOW. Maybe even TOO many.

BUT, hilariously.... Mindbender is still fucked. I've decided to play it as if Mindbender got into a horrific BDSM-related accident in his early 30s that wrecked his right hip and now he can't have full range of motion. (Also, as someone else noted earlier in this thread, his cloak definitely bled onto his arm.)

All that being said, I cannot look at that Mindbender figure and not think: I have literally a dozen friends for whom Mindbender IS THEIR TYPE. They would be so thirsty for Mindbender at the club. Dude would pull.

Also: I've decided I absolutely have to pull down all the HISS-adjacent figures this weekend and take some nice pics. Between the tank and crew, the missile launcher accessory, and the fire team, those figures REALLY tell a story. I've also decided that canonically, in all my collection, every Cobra character is vaguely afraid of the range vipers. There is an assumption that range vipers are psychopaths and are treated accordingly. the 788 range viper TERRIFIES the officer in that squad.
 
All brilliant.

Well if we're getting into the names, "Ru" for the record is short for Ruadh (Roo-ah), which was the only Irish word my mom knew when I was born. And to bring it back to GI Joe, "Sean Ruadh" was definitely the name on the file card when I did a Steel Brigade figure in the 80s.
 
Damien said:
Sort've but not really. It's more that, like with a lot of things pre-1990, it was really common for left-handed people to be taught to use their right hand as their dominant hand because they were being taught by right-handed people in a way designed to teach other right-handed people.

And in many/most forms of fencing, which hand you hold the sword with actually does matter for techniques and how you approach your opponent. Rather than re-configure the entire way of teaching, it seems more like people just taught right-handed techniques and left-handed people had to adapt or try to change the techniques themselves. That's still sometimes true today.

Also, like... left-handed people seem to have been about 10% of any population since before Feudal Japan. And in Feudal Japan, about 10% of the population were samurai. So like... 1 guy in about every 300-year period was a left-handed samurai and therefore no one cared about that guy and how he managed to fight isn't going to be accurately/adequately recorded.

Some people have postulated that Mushashi may have been able to fight with two swords because he was left-handed originally, and being forced to be right-handed essentially made him fully or partially ambidextrous.

That concludes the 'no one actually cares' portion of the Joe thread.




Same. I was legitimately furious all the time with Budo and Destro. So close to being my favorite figures but those stupid swords. At least Budo had another sword. Destro just had a glorified decoration. Wild times.
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Yep. Back in "pioneer" days the local school teacher would deal out corporal punishment for kids who used their left hands as a means to correct the "evil" action of the devil. You know whatever bullshit justified corporal punishment back then (and even today).
 
canprime said:
Yep. Back in "pioneer" days the local school teacher would deal out corporal punishment for kids who used their left hands as a means to correct the "evil" action of the devil. You know whatever bullshit justified corporal punishment back then (and even today).
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Dude, I was born in the early '80s, started schooling in the mid-to-late '80s, and even I had teachers that tried to get me to write right-handed at first. They would take the pencil out of my left hand and put it in my right hand and then 'show me how.' We're talking about a couple years off from 1990, not 1890. Nutter butter stuff.


Justice said:
Fair enough I guess. I use my left hand often to perform the devil's actions.
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I use both. Get to my level.
 
One of my dad's best friends (born in the 50s) had the left-handedness beaten out of him by nuns and he developed a lifelong stutter he's pretty sure was caused by that. Sometimes it's amazing how recently some of our most ignorant behaviors were still in full effect.
Ru1977 said:
All brilliant.

Well if we're getting into the names, "Ru" for the record is short for Ruadh (Roo-ah), which was the only Irish word my mom knew when I was born. And to bring it back to GI Joe, "Sean Ruadh" was definitely the name on the file card when I did a Steel Brigade figure in the 80s.
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My mother only knew one phrase in Portuguese growing up (Irish mom, Portuguese dad), which she pronounced VERY wrong (my family is VERY monolingual). Her grandmother used to yell at the kids that they were "crazy in the head." I asked a friend who was fluent as a teenager what my mom was ACTUALLY saying when she'd yell that at us, and she told me: "I know she's trying to say 'crazy in the head,' but it comes out as crazy in the Polish sausage.'"
 
I swear I've been a fan for a few decades at least, and I've had my Arashikage tattoo for almost a decade, but I literally just found out that "Arashikage" is legitimately Japanese for "Stormshadow." 😅
 
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