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did your mother name you ronald?

In 2018 I was looking through some very old email. I found this reply to someone who asked me the rather odd question "did your mother name you ronald?"

My response:

No, in fact, it was the nurse. My mother was a deaf mute whose hands were paralysed in childbirth, and so she was unable to communicate her desires with regards to my name. My father was, how to put this delicately?... My father was not around at the time of my birth. I was the result of a brief, sordid affair, and as soon as I was conceived, my father, a demigod, returned to his celestial kingdom. Rather than give me his name - "Mars" just sounded too odd, especially at the height of the space race in the late fifties - the nurses decided to have a contest, a raffle sort of thing, and "Ronald" was drawn out of the barrel.

It's not an entirely sad story. With the money raised from the "Name The Bastard" contest, I was given very expensive corrective surgery which, combined with my divine (on my father's side) nature, endowed me with amazing healing powers. I healed my mother of her manual paralysis, deafness and inability to speak, as well as a huge disfiguring growth which distorted her entire head into the shape of a catcher's mitt, and she went on to star in her own television program, "The Donna Reed Show." I was an occasional guest star: I played the couch.

Curiously enough, I never did know the true story of the origin of my name until last summer, when I hunted down the nurse who came up with "Ronald" - she was living happily in a shoebox behind an Amsterdam hash emporium, with sixteen and a half children, all of them named "Ronald" - and killed her. I am now serving time in prison in Holland, awaiting trial. But I choose to look on the bright side: I can still retrieve my email.

george bernard shaw | a splendid torch

"This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one. Being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it what I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations."

George Bernard Shaw, surfer