Explaining a joke, E.B. White once said, is like dissecting a frog (you can do it, but the frog tends to die in the process). Nonetheless, I’m providing this explanation of the name Naked Fracas to make sure no one gets the idea it’s anything creepy, and for my daughter, who upon first visiting the site immediately said: ‘What’s a frack ass?’

Naked Fracas was the name I always imagined my rock band would be called. As it now appears there is a marginal chance that I will never be the leader of a rock band, I’m using the name here.

Its genesis was a comment I once read or overheard. Someone said that if they had a rock band, they would call it Free Beer, so that the clubs they played would have to put up a sign “Free Beer tonight.” Recalling a newspaper story I had read about a wild bar fight (something like ‘Ten Hurt in Naked Fracas’) I decided ‘Naked Fracas tonight’ would be an even better draw.

I suppose I could say that, beyond “fray, fight or brawl,” FRACAS is also an engineering acronym that stands for Failure Reporting and Corrective Action System, a process for identifying failures and analyzing them to improve design. There is certainly nothing like writing to reveal flaws in our thinking, so this blog could serve as my personal FRACAS.

But, the naked truth is simply that I like the way it sounds.