Tiny Pineapple

ananas comosus (L.) minimus

About “Grettir”

Grettir

Grettir (rhymes with “better”) is a pseudonym/nickname I picked up quite a while ago.

Grettir Ásmundarson was the hero of the 14th-century Icelandic saga entitled The Saga of Grettir the Strong. In the introduction to his 1914 translation, G.A. Hight wrote the following:

“The reader comes to know Grettir as a living being of flesh and blood: the man of strength and courage and essential good nature whose natural hastiness of temper turns to a rash impatience, blighting his life and condemning him to long years of outlawry. He finds the loneliness and desolation all the harder to bear because he, the strongest and bravest man in the whole of Iceland, is nevertheless afraid of the dark.”

But I vigorously deny that there are any similarities between me and my namesake. For one thing, I’m not a man of “essential good nature.” Especially not in the morning.

In real life:

Occupation(s): Single father of two beautiful girls. Geek, writer, actor, and film school drop-out.
Location: Drangey/Utah
Sign: Gemini

About
Tiny Pineapple

During a community theater production of “My Fair Lady,” my dear friend, Kate (an unabashed turophile, though that has nothing to do with this particular story), was asked by the director to approach a street vendor holding a fruit basket, improvise some dialogue, and then move on.

To fulfill this obligation, she would approach the street vendor, pick out the same alarmingly small plastic pineapple each time, examine it with great animation, and then say, in the thickest (and loudest) cockney accent you’re every likely to hear this side of the Thames:

“WHAT A LOVELY TINY PINEAPPLE!”

For reasons that only make sense at musical theater rehearsals well after midnight, we all found it terribly amusing.

After the production, the tiny pineapple in question began to show up in the oddest places at the oddest times. It would appear on someone’s doorstep in the middle of the night dressed as Elvis, or you’d open your underwear drawer and there it would be, perched atop your skivvies. It even made a transoceanic flight to Italy in the luggage of an unsuspecting traveller.

So, when it came time to choose domain name, what better name could there be? I’m sure people thought that “Google” was a goofy name, too, and look what happened there. (Of course, the founders of Google are all billionaires and I made 28¢ last month in referral fees from Amazon.com, but the comparison stands.)