Popping The Cherry
In the event someone actually requires the definition, the phrase “popping the cherry” (at least according to Urban Dictionary) means one of two decidedly related things.
Most generally, it simply means the process of losing one’s virginity. More graphically, however, it can refer to the circumstance (although I’ve applied some copy editing here) in which “a male penetrates a virgin female too fast, and rips or tears the hymen, causing the vagina to bleed slightly.”
It is with those definitions in mind, then, that someone once used the phrase as the subject line of the very first post to the Bandwidth forum on an old system called MindVox (scroll down if you really want to find it), and I myself used it as the title of the very first entry to a now-defunct weblog with which you might, possibly, be familiar.
It is that particular usage upon which I’ve called in the past to inaugurate two different incarnations of a prior website, and it is that usage upon which I call yet again as I inaugurate this one, clean of content and starting out in a state of innocent purity, a virgin with a miraculously new and fresh cherry to pop.
For what it’s worth, I don’t tend to talk this way in actual conversation. But it’s become a long-standing tradition to open a new site this way, and there’s no reason to stop now.
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None of which explains the site’s name, although in all likelihood its header graphic gives most of that away. Here, from the Dollhouse episode “Man On the Street”, is the filmed scene in its entirety.
Let it just be said that, as far as I know, no one has ever actually asked Joss Whedon (who wrote the script in question) if the twitchy, unreliable-looking substitute handler Bicks in fact was named after the name by which I’ve been known for more than a decade now, despite the more mundane spelling.
While it’s true that, upon learning that there is only One True b!X, Joss once said that the worship of false b!Xes should stop, and while it’s equally true that he once claimed to have beaten up a couple of such false ones at Comic-Con, for all anyone knows, the character could have been named for television writer/producer Jenny Bicks, who has the doubly relevant virtue of working in television and having the same spelling.
Nonetheless, I and some others in the fandom found it far more entertaining to appropriate the association, even if in fact it be a misappropriation. No doubt it was, in part, the character description — twitchy, unreliable-looking (portrayed quite well, I thought, by David Barry Gray) — that led some of us to want to assume the association.
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Neither of the above explanations do anything to explain why this site exists in the first place, especially when there are others that I’ve used in the past and to which I could easily return. That’s because I have no particular explanation for it. I wanted the domain, and I thought I might once again want to occasionally write something longer than the 140 characters afforded by Twitter.
As you can see, I’m perfectly capable of carrying on for such longer stretches, even (or, perhaps, especially) if it doesn’t appear to be headed anywhere in particular.
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If all of this seems somewhat shamelessly self-promotional, I can only point out that it’s the inaugural post on a new site. I’ll have to come up with a different excuse next time around.
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Comments will be turned on once I’m certain I’ve gotten a handle on everything, since I’ve been kludging Derek Powazek‘s awesome DePo Skinny theme a bit (including widgetizing the “sidebars” at the bottom) and want to make sure it, and various plugins, are working properly before opening things up.
