This is my first blog written for WordPress, and I thought it would be fitting to use it to celebrate the sixty-fourth anniversary of India’s independence. It has been a long and turbulent ride for both India and Pakistan, which were both created at the same time in 1948. At the time there was mass violence as millions of Muslims and Hindus emigrated to avoid getting stuck behind the wrong boundary line. Read Ved Mehta’s books about that time for background, especially Daddyji (1972) and Mamaji (1979). He may be blind, but Mehta saw more than most sighted people.

I thought I would also mark at this time the rather complicated history of my blogging activities. I started in 2005 writing for Yahoo! 360, which is no more. The name I used was Solnabanya, which is Slovak for “Salt Mine,” after the salt mine where my father worked from the age of ten.

Then when Yahoo! 360 blinked out of existence in 2008, I moved to Blog.Com, where I wrote under the same name I’m using now, namely: Tarnmoor. There weren’t too many people at Blog.Com, so I felt as if I were an elf fart at the bottom of a deep well. When Blog.Com started getting a bit shaky, I moved to Multiply.Com, where perhaps you knew me as Ixtaccihuatl, after the Mexican volcano next door to Popocatepetl.

So here I am—as Tarnmoor once again. Here, from something I wrote for Blog.Com, is my explanation of the name Tarnmoor:

Many years ago, when I was a graduate student in Film History and Criticism at UCLA, I collaborated with several of my friends in writing a column for The UCLA Daily Bruin reviewing the various ethnic movie theaters in town. At the time, there were five theaters showing nothing but Japanese films and several showing Mexican and other Spanish language pictures. We adopted as our pseudonym the name Salvatore R. Tarnmoor.

As it happens, we were not the first to use this name. A somewhat better-known author, Herman Melville of Moby Dick fame, published a number of pieces under this name. We even used a line drawing of Melville from a Signet Classics paperback edition as our picture.

At some point in the Cenozoic Era, when I started using the Internet, the name Tarnmoor sprang to mind, and I started using it for various accounts.

Welcome to WordPress.com! This is your very first post. Click the Edit link to modify or delete it, or start a new post. If you like, use this post to tell readers why you started this blog and what you plan to do with it.

Happy blogging!