A blog about television by TIME’s TV critic James Poniewozik.

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.)

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