I'm sure I told the tale before, but here it is.
Literally,
"iguana tonante" is Italian for
"thundering iguana". It all started with a cheap necklace I bought from a street vendor many years ago, you know, one of those lame pseudo-tribal things (kind of like
this one), but it looked cool and I liked it. The one I had was shaped sort of like a lizard. Much to my chagrin, people inquired
constantly about the meaning of it, as if it were a secret symbol or something, so I conjured the tale of the mighty and wise Thundering Iguana, god of truant lizard that liked to lie in the sun, and whose long, powerful tail whipped around causing the unexplained thunders you sometimes hear on cloudless summer days.
I loved the sheer silliness of it: the gentle, peaceful iguana shrouded in mysterious and vaguely Wagnerian overtones. I always told it with a straight face: most people laughed at it, but some were genuinely intrigued by it as if it was some sort of ancient cult. With time, it got out of hand, and people started calling me Iguana for real. Somehow it stuck even when I stopped wearing the necklace (I still have it, tho), so when I needed an anonymous handle for the forum, it was the first thing that sprang to my mind. The rest, as they say, is history.
The avatar is much more recent: I had pictures of iguanas for a long time, then I changed to the current one for the last World Cup (during which, incidentally, Italy
sucked so hard they could inhale soccer balls through a garden hose), but I was too obstinate to change it after we were eliminated in the first round. True to my namesake, laziness made the rest. I may change it again for Halloween, tho.