About the Name:
My given name is Edward James Wesly, I sign my art pieces as Ed Wesly, but I go by what could have been my real name, Wiercioch, on Facebook. Unless you have an Eastern European tongue, that Polish surname would never be able to roll off the tip of it. My uncle and my dad decided that they could not be successful in America with a name no one could spell or pronounce, so they legally changed it to Wesly.
But instead of the Anglo-Saxon spelling Wesley, they left out that second e, which backfired on them as a sort of Polish joke (and yes, I can get away with saying that as all my grandparents hailed from there!) as now they had come up with a name that most everyone could pronounce, but not everyone would spell properly, as the reflex reaction is to spell it the English way.
I was the unwitting recipient of the butt end of that joke in first grade Catholic grade school, when a nun heavy-handedly corrected my spelling, even though I insisted teary-eyed, that was the way my parents taught me to spell it! But the evil penguin told me I was too stupid to know how to spell my own name right! A note from the parents straightened that out, but I wonder if the nun brought up that fact to them, that they were the cause of my problem, with them not conforming to the English language?
People thought I had an unlisted number back in the days of phone books because I was on a different page than the -ley's. Which is a feature, not a bug, when you are a schoolteacher, as you don't want the little bastards to bug you with prank phone calls. At my last full-time teaching gig, at Harrington College of Design, I had to sign a Non-Fraternization Contract, which specifically forbade faculty from friending students on Facebook, ostensibly to prevent grading scandals and other what-not. I could live with that, as I was boycotting Facebook, as some scurvy student knaves at that same place set up a Facebook Group entitled "Who wants to bitch-slap Ed Wesly?". I had my sons infiltrate that group, and send me a screen shot of the guilty, whose lives I made as miserable as possible for the rest of their careers at the Hogwarts of Digital Photography. And yet they still send me friend requests!
But when I heard that there was a Holography Group launched on FB, I just had to break down and join to follow the escapades of the inmates at the asylum. But I needed a pseudonym, just in case the Career Education Corporation goons were following up on the anti-fraternizing, so I picked the name that I could have been born with to throw them off the track, Wiercioch. It is pronounced "veer-chock". And hardly anyone calls me Eddie. Since Facebook makes it difficult or impossible to change the name on the page once it's been launched, why start a new page, since the cognoscenti know where I'm at!
Maybe if the name had been changed to the more normal, Anglo-Saxon spelling, I could have been lucky enough to be immortalized in a refrigerator magnet like this guy!