"The misuse of language induces evil in the soul." - Socrates

It's the end of an era, or at least a significant period of my life.

I first "got online", and discovered the Internet, at my first job after the Army service. That would have been the fall of 1994, some fourteen years ago. Whoa! Shortly thereafter I found alt.callahans, that most special of virtual Bars, where shared pain really is lessened, and shared joy increased (thus we refute entropy, don'cha know?). This was back in the days when Speaker to Minerals was having his terminal battles with anybody who dared cross him. Myself being somewhat shy and soft spoken at the time, I merely lurked in the rafters. Sometime in 1997, I started posting more and more, and became a regular patron. This is when I bonded with dearest 64tbird, and some time later with gh4acws.

I was still unsure of myself, and was somewhat "provincial" and closeted by the uber-liberal standards of most of the denizens (not to mention Radically Plain Vanilla). I had no formal education in the art of debate and hated public-speaking with a passion. I was also just starting to come to terms with just how abusive my late father had been, what a pretty mess my greater family was, and what a convoluted mass of lies my father's "life story" was. It seemed he often lied just to amuse himself. For example, he had claimed his elder sister and been in a Rock-N-Roll band with three others, and that they had gone by the name of Three Pros and a Kahn (playing on 'con'). So this whole pan-galactic debate forum of Usenet was pretty surreal to me. You mean I can just write whatever I want and within hours thousands of people all over the world, will not only have seen what I wrote, but also responded!? Nifty. I remember the thrill of waiting-reloading until the Server would show some comment/post I had written. Initially, I sometimes wrote provocative things, just to make people jump/react/whatever. It was a Really Cool Game! Really. Never mind that the "lifestyles" and "values" of many of the people I was encountering were so utterly unbelievable to me.

So in this vein, I chose a handle for myself:which, years later (six years ago), I derived the name of this journal from. I have since entirely left usenet and alt.callahans far behind me (the signal to noise ratio there makes it too "different"), and while I still have many friends from there, it is because of who they are, that I keep them around.

Beyond the obvious play on con-man, "being the Kahn man" had a much deeper meaning to me. When my great-great grandparents (and children) immigrated to the USA from "Russia", nearly a century ago, they changed the family name to Cohn and Kahn. One sister later changed it back to the original Kam, after her tragically brief marriage (fatal traffic accident on her wedding night). Of the five siblings in my great grandfather's generation, my grandfather was the only son. Of my grandfather Leonard's two sons, my Uncle Toby Kahn married a gentile (and has a single non-Jewish son, my first cousin Lucien). At the time I took that handle, my kid-brother Shimi (aka Yaakov) wasn't even Bar-Mitzvah yet. So I was literally the [one and only Jewish] Kahn man alive in my family. For years, any Google search for "Kahn man", would bring you straight to me (now I'm not even in the first 100). While Kahn is a common Jewish family name, not a single other of all the myriad Kahns were of any relation to me, other than the three Kahns mentioned. This makes playing Jewish geography somewhat awkward. Another sticking point is that Kahn is the German derivation of Cohen, but I'm not a Cohen myself (rather a Levite). This also tends to cause confusion.

But the funny thing is, as I've said above, is that Kahn really isn't the family name to begin with. As a amateur genealogist who's also a stickler for detail, I've wanted to change the name "back" to the "original" Kam, since I was sixteen. My father also wanted to change the name, but said he would NOT do so, while my great-grandmother was still alive. Guess what? She outlived both her son , my grandfather ("That was a dirty trick Lenny did on me"), and my father, being almost a century old when she died twelve years ago (My eldest Bat-El is "named" after her English nickname Beati, from Beatrice). After my father died, I didn't change the name out of respect for him. Seeing as at present I have absolutely no connection with anyone who knew my father (other than good ol' Aharon Sheer, who was actually my friend first), I finally said enough of that, and changed the family name. Twenty years of anticipation, culminated in twenty minutes of bureaucracy.

I am now Shmuel Aharon Kam.

As my brother also inter-married, with a nice Russian girl, it likes there will be NO Jewish fifth generation Kahns. Liberal America and Reform Judaism have decimated the Kahn family. While Kam as a name has no special meaning (that we know of), it is also the Hebrew word for arose, i.e. "he got up" - third-person male, past tense of "rise". So the Kam family has finally returned to it's Orthodox roots and name. Let's hope this shall be a change for the better, and we shall all arise in our Divine purpose and roles.

Now, "all" that I have to do, is decide what to rename this journal to, as Kahnman, just won't do. Obviously I just MUST be a play on the 'com-' prefix, but what of many options to choose? :-p