A blog by any other name

Terra Incognita was actually my second choice as a title for this blog. Originally I'd planned to call it "One Hand Clapping," because I thought that sounded all tongue-in-cheek-zen and esoteric and what not; it seemed like a good name for a blog about faith, words and spirituality. But when I googled "one hand clapping" I discovered that the name was already taken... and this by a po-mo-emergent-Christian-blogger-type whose theological interests included things like the intersections between ecology and faith and guys like N. T. Wright. Go figure. I followed Onehandclapping for a while, just to see if fools seldom differed, after all. We differed once in a while, but it is an interesting blog: I'd recommend it.

So I settled on terra incognita, a title that came from what was one of my favorite D. H. Lawrence poems, back in the pre-fully-devoted-follower-of-Jesus days. But I was curious today about who else might be using terra incognita as a label for their paricular creative endeavors, and, a few google searches later, I had a sizeable list of organizations and individuals exploring the "unknown regions" of their own areas of interest, passion or enthusiasm. For the curious (and for lack of better post-fodder) I offer my top ten here:

10. Terra Incognita (the album)-- the title of a 2009 album by rocker Juliette Lewis.

9. Terra Incognita (the RPG)-- a "roleplaying games [sic] of exploration, intrigue, and mystery, featuring adventurer-scholars whose exploits span the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries."

8. Terra Incognita (the novel)-- a novel by Ruth Downie about the Roman Empire in the time of Emperor Hadrian.


7. Terra Incgonita (the travelogue)-- Sara Wheeler's account of her 7-month journey to Antarctica.


6. Terra Incognita (the (other) blog)-- a blog about "Spirituality, shamanism, ethnobotany, visionary art, images & photos, roots reggae and other good listenings, bizarre & interesting things, cult movies, trips & travels, underground & counterculture..."

5. Terra Incognita (the documentary film company)-- a company that makes documentary films that "map the unknown territories of our current knowledge."

4. terra incognita (the arts organisation)-- "a British, not for profit, visual arts and curatorial organisation, that tries to challenge both the London art world and wider society with their proposals for other ways of doing things."

3. Terra Incognita (the museum exhibit production studio)-- an "interpretive design studio that produces interactive educational experiences for museums."

2. Terra Incognita (the eco-tourism outfit)-- a tourism company that promotes "responsible travel to natural areas that conserves the environment and improves the well-being of local people"

1. Terra Incognita (the screenplay (that James Cameron alegedly ripped off for the film Avatar))-- apparently James Cameron is being sued by a Vancouver reseranteur named Emil Malak, who claims he sent the screenplay of his 1995 novel Terra Incognita to James Cameron, and heard nothing from him. But when he saw the movie Avatar, he noted uncanny similarities to his work that couldn't be mere coincidence.