about mariva

about mariva

about

interests

Entrepreneurship. Ideaphoria, business management, finance, microlending, small businesses, quarterly assessments, the bottom line, staying in the black.
Writing. Books, articles, blog entries, letters, personal journals, signature lines.
The great outdoors. I've ascended three mountaintops in California, complaining the entire way during each journey. I've bicycled up two Rocky Mountain passes and accidentally inhaled some of Northern California's Trinity River while white-water rafting. I've endured many sunburns, insect bites, blisters, and sore muscles and joints while hiking, backpacking, canoeing, kayaking, swimming, and climbing.
Movies. Blockbusters, rentals, TV movies, independent films, documentaries, animation, flipbooks.
Reading. Novels, short stories, nonfiction books, magazines, newspapers, blogs, comics, lost pet posters, bulletin board flyers, maps, cereal and tissue boxes, elevator license certificates, that annoying crawl-thing at the bottom of TV news channels and in public transportation stations.
Culture and interaction. Museums, theatre, libraries, parks, art exhibits, book signings, discussion groups, continuing education classes, live jazz, opera, Shakespeare in the Park, folk art, costumes, geocaching and IGORing, media stunts, performance art, street theatre, political demonstrations, road races, parades, culture jamming, conceptual art, thoughtful graffiti, word games, board games, guestbooks, eavesdropping in public places, spontaneous conversations with strangers, weird scenes on public transit.

my name

According to Dictionary.com, a palindrome is "a word, phrase, verse, or sentence that reads the same backward or forward." My full name, Mariva Hannah Aviram, may be the longest palindromic proper name in the world. The "Facts on File" department of the Guinness Book of World Records informed me in a letter that Guinness may consider my name for entry in the book if, in the future, it includes a category for palindromic proper names. An aficionado of unique names, the late newswriter Herb Caen featured my name in his famous column in the October 14, 1991 issue of the San Francisco Chronicle. My name had been included on the Public Domain Palindrome Page until the Web site mysteriously disappeared. Now, Kumud Kokal in India has included my name on his very long Ad Infinitum page.

Indeed, my name is unusual. I had never known anyone else with the name Mariva until the advent of the Web, circa 1994. Then I found out about a teenage girl in Portland, Oregon who was named Mariva after her Pennsylvania Dutch grandmother. A woman in St. Louis informed me via e-mail that her mother's name was Mariva, an amalgam of the Italian names Maria and Eva. I heard there was someone who had worked at Netscape named Mareva, said to be Brazilian.

The pronunciation is pretty much phonetic ("mah-REE-vah"), and sounds like "Maria" with a "v" in it. People of Latin American, South Asian, Middle Eastern, or Mediterranean descent have no trouble pronouncing it. The only people who have any trouble with it are WASPy Americans.