What's Your Lost Name?

Of the many time-wasters the Internet has blesssed us with, one of the finest is the random name generator. You have your porn name generators, your soap-opera name generators, your prison name generators. But unless my Googling skills are poorer than I think, no one has come up with the much-needed Lost Name Generator.

You know what I mean. The cryptic, intellectual, historically referential name that is just allusive enough to drive fans crazy looking for clues in it. If the accepted porn-star-name formula is [your first pet] + [mother's maiden name], then I think your Lost name would be

[Grandmother / Grandfather's first name] + [first philosopher or scientist you can remember writing a paper on in college]

Call me John Sartre.

Are there any web-savvy Tuned Inlanders who could whip this up in the form of a functioning Javascript page? And maybe structure it so that I can collect people’s credit-card and Social Security numbers while you’re at it?

(ABC.com, by the way, has created a Sawyer Nickname Generator. I’m Rerun.)

TV Dinners: NBC Orders Hannibal Lecter Series

During the writers’ strike a few seasons ago, CBS experimented with rerunning Showtime’s Dexter in primetime. The episodes were edited for broadcast, and while they raised unsurprising protests over a major network airing a show whose protagonist is a serial killer, the problem in the end was that a dark, pay-cable drama is a better fit on a dark, pay-cable network, where it can be as dark and pay-cable as it needs to be.

It’s now 2012, and struggling NBC is run by Robert Greenblatt, who used to run Showtime. (You can thank or blame him for Smash, which he developed there.) And Greenblatt’s latest bold move is to order straight to series, skipping the pilot process, a drama about a serial killer: cannibal Hannibal Lecter, in a series set in the era of Thomas Harris’ novel Red Dragon.