"Perfesser Fishhawk" is a reference to the character Cosmo Fishhawk in
Jeff MacNelly's wonderful cartoon strip, Shoe.  As soon as Shoe started
to appear in the Wisconsin State Journal in the mid 1980's, I knew that
Cosmo was destined to be my alter ego.  Cosmo is a journalist, not an
astronomer, but we had a lot in common.  I'm about the right shape (heavier
than my doctor would like).  My hair is gray, thinning (alas more so now
than then) and usually disheveled.  Glasses down on the nose.  And I've
got a couple of war horse tweed jackets and a red and blue "old school" tie
I wear a lot.  Cosmo has a perpetually messy desk and the mess on my desk
is of legendary proportions.  So I adopted Cosmo as my own.
     About this time our department computer became one of the first few
hundred nodes on one of the first government wide area networks, SPAN, the
Space  Physics Analysis Network, a predecessor of the Internet.  E-mail became
astronomy's stock and trade long before the general populace had ever heard of
it.  Everybody cool had an e-mail handle or moniker and so I started using 
Perfesser Fishhawk.  As we geared up to launch WUPPE (the Wisconsin
Ultraviolet Photo Polarimeter Experiment) on the first Astro Space Shuttle
mission in  1990, I rigged a Shoe panel showing Cosmo at his desk with the 
balloon modified to make the snide remark that, as messy as my desk was, it
was superior to the utterly lame data-base/communications software called OMIS
that NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center insisted we use.  This was displayed
prominently at my station in the Payload Operations Control Center in
Huntsville and drew many, ah, comments. 
     It was about at the same time between Astro-1 and Astro-2 (March '95)
that 1) Jeff referred in a strip to Cosmo as "Road Kill on the Information
Superhighway" and 2) our department computer system began the change over
from a VMS operating system, with which I had became reasonably familiar,  to
UNIX upon which I have yet to get back up to speed and with which I continue
to have a VERY uneasy relationship.   So it was a natural to tack the "Road
Kill"  bit onto my moniker.  And that really got comment...requiring this
explanation.  
     So enjoy Shoe in the paper or via the link on my home page.