Some of the international responses to Tone's performance have been pretty great - like that widely quoted LA Times piece.
Actually, it's entirely made up. It dates from my childhood, when I fancied myself as a fiction author. I coined Axver as the last name of three brothers in my main story, the lead protagonists (I'm not entirely positive but I think it was a corruption of a river name from a book I'd recently read). One of them, Amak Axver, was the character obviously based on an idealised version of me; anybody who's got my email address will recognise that name. When I signed up on a messageboard for the first time in 2002, I used Axver as my screen name for reasons long lost to the mists of time. Probably I'd been working on the novel at the time and it didn't sound like anything that anybody else was using. It stuck and I became Ax very quickly.
Now I'm pretty grateful to have an Internet pseudonym I can use anywhere, rather than something generic based on my sign-up date, location, or a song that I like. Imagine if I'd called myself GoldCoast11OTT or something stupid like that, simply because that's where I lived when I signed up for Interference and 11 O'clock Tick Tock was my favourite U2 song at the time.
