Thursday, 30 Nov 2000

In Edith Wharton related news, a South Kingstown man returned home to find that someone had vandalized his home with pickles and pickle juice. [story]

Tuesday, 28 Nov 2000

A couple more “odd name” links. Environmentalists reviewing the signatures of “thousands of scientists ready to debunk the theory of Global warming” discovered several famous people previously unknown for their scientific acumen. Included in the list of signatories were those of the fictional detective Perry Mason, the fiction writer John Grisham, and the fictional medical doctors Frank Burns, Honeycut and Pierce.

www.funnyname.com has a great concept for a useless web site, it attempts to document all those “funny” but true names in the phone book. I left feeling a bit dissatisfied and should probably chalk it up to humor being so subjective, but I think the problem might be me. I thought that browsing through the “Body Parts [residence]” listings would be interesting, but it’s just a list of people whose last name is a body part. This is of course exactly what I should have expected it to be, but for some reason I was expecting an intangible “more”. Maybe my humor meter is just off today.

Tuesday, 28 Nov 2000

Ever wanted to design your own Macey’s day inflatable “blimp”? The people at the Boulder Blimp Company could turn your ideas into a really large inflatable object. These are not the rooftop adorning amorphous vaguely animal-shaped mascots of many a childhood nightmare, these are hi-tech, very detailed creations. I have to wonder what Andy Warhol might have come up with if he had collaborated with these people. [Check out one of the slide shows for a quick glimpse of what these people can do]

Monday, 13 Nov 2000

Naming things always seems like a significant undertaking to me. Out of all the names in the universe, this is the one I choose for this thing. I even second guess screen names I use when signing up for online services at places who I don’t want to know my actual name. Naming a person seems like an even more significant undertaking, because after all, the most innocuous sounding name today can turn out years later to have some new unforeseen potentially negative or embarrassing connotation. I had a cousin who when growing up was known by her middle name of “Gaye” until the name started having some sexual-orientation-related connotations and she started using her original first name. This was confusing for everyone since she was known to family and friends alike as “Gaye”. But when a name already has connotations that could lead to taunting in the schoolyard I am at a loss to understand the thought process. I worked with a seemingly fairly rational man who in the early 80’s named his son “Gayrod”. Granted it was an old family name, but he seemed to not even have any inkling that a name like that might increase his son’s odds of being made fun of. His reasoning was that one could never tell what connotations some now-innocent name might have so it didn’t really matter what you named your child. I also wonder whether there is a higher incidence of people in the entertainment business giving their kids really odd names like Dweezil, Ahmet Rodan, and Moon Unit(Frank Zappa) or Fifi-Trixibelle, Peaches, Pixie (Bob Geldorf & Paula Yates), although the Geldorf/Yates names might be the responsibility of the mother since her child with Michael Hutchence is named Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily”) or whether it is merely that we hear more of the weirdness of celebrities (and there is another odd pattern I can’t quite put my finger on; Demi Moore and Bruce Willis named one of their girls Scout Larue (another is Rumer Glenn), and Gillian Anderson named her daughter Piper Maru. These both sound like characters in an 1920’s era exploration adventure), then we do with the person down the street. I think it may be the public eye explanation because there seems to be a lot of of suburban culture parents naming their kids after car models or US States or Anglicized Native American Tribe/Nation names (e.g. Dakota). If they were getting some kind of college tuition in exchange for naming their child after a product, or received a tuition voucher for the state college the child is named after then I could understand - if not agree with - the motivation. Of course on the other hand one could rail against the auto makers for appropriating names already in existence - maybe we could pass a law that auto maufacturers can only name cars after made-up words?