Who is Mr. Velocipede?

I confess. You have been misled. There is no Mr. Velocipede. In fact, there's not even a Mr...
but I hate being Ms. because it's such an unpleasant-sounding noise.

I have a certain amount of trouble with my name. No one seems to like the way it's spelled. The people at the bank persist in calling me Morgan, but in fact it's Morgen. It's from the German word for morning, which is ironic since I hate waking up early. The other difficulty, of course, is that Morgen could be either male or female...so from time to time I get offers of insurance, or credit cards, or requests for donations to charitable organizations, addressed to Mr. Morgan Bell. This entertains me, and sometimes confuses people who have never met me in person.

When I was younger, it used to bother me a lot that I didn't look particularly feminine. Someone once assumed that my brother & I were twins, which wasn't particularly flattering to either of us (especially as he's three years younger than I am). Now that I'm old enough to drink coffee and pay taxes, it's less of a problem. But I still get mail addressed to Mr. M. Bell.

And of course that's no good...it should get sent to my dad if it's going to be Mr. Bell. I need to be Mr. somebody else instead. Someone with a silly & preposterous name, since the whole thing is fairly silly, after all. I sorted through lots of Industrial-Revolution-era typefaces, obsolete machinery, Sears catalogs, Dadaist confusion, and archaic phrases, and ended up with Velocipede. It's a nice word to say: Velocipede. It goes well with Nineteenth Century Man (sometimes known as the Professor). And it confuses people even more than my real name. Excellent.

Mr. Velocipede enjoys taking the air with the Professor, drinking lemonade and sarsparilla, the study of Natural and Unnatural History, and making fractals. Aren't the fractals a bit anachronistic? Well, yes. I'm a fictional character; you can't expect me to be completely consistent.