What is in a name? When I first got on the internet back in 1996/1997, I used the joke name “Lightningboy” because it was a joke with some friends at work when I worked at ProColor. It was a nickname that my friend Shane gave me that I pretty much hated. So instead of letting him win and get the best of me, I embraced it and ran with it to turn the joke around on him.
Well, one thing led to another and I got stuck with the nick name where it got to be so bad that some of the staff at The Weather Channel did not know my real name but only called me Lightningboy when we started up BNVN.
Fast forward over a decade later when I saw the storm chasing scene start to explode and the media started to call anyone with a video camera a “Storm Chaser”. I needed to come up with something else for a term and a name. While watching some celebrity TV news show, it came to me, Weather Paparazzi since the BNVN crew and myself are like the Hollywood Paparazzi except we stalk weather, not hunting down some celebrity.
Since the term Paparazzi is defined by Websters as “a freelance photographer, especially one who takes candid pictures of celebrities for publication.” so the name was perfect, except for within certain groups of the Storm Chasing Community but only because I thought of the name first.
Now fast forward into 2012, now there is a running name joke between a few of the StormChasingVideo.com (BNVN) crews. A couple of our guys, Chris Sanner and Brandon Sullivan with “Tornado Titans” storm chasing team and Randy Denzer and Verne Carlson with the new “Tornado Trojans” are doing battle.
While the Titans only have hats and T-Shirts, it looks like the Tornado Trojans” have a kick ass lightning rod uniform and 3CCD HD cameras to do battle with the Titans.
While I joked about having the Tornado Vikings storm chasing team, but that would mean I would have to look like the guys in the Capital One Visa Commercial. I’ll think I’ll stick with my current look that is somewhat clean shaven with my steal toed boots to take care of annoying people and wanna be chasers (and sometimes annoying wanna be chasers).
