Samwise rides again

One for Brad, from Yahoo via Cherdan ( from Hawai’i ) …

A family court judge in New Zealand has had enough with parents giving their children bizarre names here, and did something about it.

Judge Rob Murfitt made the 9-year-old girl a ward of the court so that her name could be changed, he said in a ruling made public Thursday. The girl was involved in a custody battle, he said.

The new name was not made public to protect the girl’s privacy.

“The court is profoundly concerned about the very poor judgment which this child’s parents have shown in choosing this name,” he wrote. “It makes a fool of the child and sets her up with a social disability and handicap, unnecessarily.”

The girl had been so embarrassed at the name that she had never told her closest friends what it was. She told people to call her “K” instead

In his ruling, Murfitt cited a list of the unfortunate names.

Registration officials blocked some names, including Fish and Chips, Yeah Detroit, Keenan Got Lucy and Sex Fruit, he said. But others were allowed, including Number 16 Bus Shelter “and tragically, Violence,” he said.

New Zealand law does not allow names that would cause offense to a reasonable person, among other conditions

officials usually talked to parents who proposed unusual names to convince them about the potential for embarrassment.

UPDATE : Also on the Beeb.

Names which people have named their babies in New Zealand …

Violence; Number 16 Bus Shelter; Midnight Chardonnay; Benson and Hedges (twins)

… and names they weren’t ….

Yeah Detroit; Stallion; Twisty Poi; Keenan Got Lucy; Sex Fruit; Fat Boy; Cinderella Beauty Blossom; Fish and Chips (twins)

Aunty …

how do women named Lolita cope in a society where their name is laden with such potential offence it cannot be attached to items of furniture?

mostly they just called me ‘Lolly Eater‘

Ms Jones’ parents were from Latvia, where Lolita is a popular girls’ name. There is a Latvian Name Day for Lolita - 30 May - and Ms Jones still receives cards from her Latvian relatives on that day.

The shifting fortunes of the name Lolita can be seen in its declining popularity. According to the US Social Security Administration (SSA), the popularity of Lolita peaked in the US in 1963, when it was the 467th most popular name for newborn girls. It dropped after that, and has not made an appearance in the SSA’s top 1,000 names since 1973.

“Monica is a good example in the US. The name had been inching up and was at number 79 in 1997. The Monica character in Friends helped make it popular. But in 1998, after the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, the name slipped to 105 and went down even further the next year, never to recover.

“It was just too linked to odious qualities: abuse of power, sexual degradation… lots of things you wouldn’t want connected with your innocent newborn daughter.”

The name Katrina has also declined in popularity in the US following Hurricane Katrina.

In Britain, the name Myra declined in popularity following the Moors Murders. And names such as Adolf and Judas are now extremely rare. One man who has struggled more than most with his moniker is Lucifer Howse, a 33-year-old alternative medicine practitioner in Brighton.

Mr Howse only discovered his true first name in his late teens - prior to that, his family called him Luke for short. “I had a real crisis when I found out my name was Lucifer. I went off the rails”, he says.

When he picked up his driving licence a few years ago, the woman behind the counter barked Biblical phrases at him and shouted: “It’s you. I know it’s you.”

strange names can sometimes become self-fulfilling prophecies. “A study has shown that kids with a name like ‘Lethal’ are more likely to grow up to commit crimes - though of course parents who would name their child ‘Lethal’ are probably not aiming to be class mom.”

But, she says, more exotic, even formerly “outrageous” names - such as Juno and even Jezebel - are making something of a comeback. “Somehow these names seem ready for the playground again.”

All of a sudden my suggestions of naming children “Adolf Jesus”, “Nim Chimpsky” and “Minime” don’t seem so bad.

UPDATE : Lucifer is apparently a latin name meaning “light bearer” which is a “poetic” name for the planet Venus, also known as the Morning Star.

Just heard the word …

Baby Isabelle was born on Thursday the 17th of January at 8:40am weighing in at 6lbs 14oz, in the passenger seat of the car!

.. exciting stuff, obviously she is keen to join us :O)

Congratulations dude !

Mister Splashy Pants is in danger and we need you to save him!

By all means save the endangered creatures, but for the love of whales … do not call them Mr. Splashy Pants, it demeans us both.

‘Yes, Aunt Dahlia,’ I said, ‘you have guessed my secret. I do indeed love.’
‘Who is she?’
‘A Miss Pendlebury. Christian Name, Gwladys. She spells it with a “w”.’
‘With a “g”, you mean.’
“With a “w” and a “g”.’
‘Not Gwladys?’
‘That’s it.’
The relative uttered a yowl.
‘You sit there and tell me you haven’t enough sense to steer clear of a girl who calls herself Gwladys? Listen, Bertie,’ said Aunt Dahlia earnestly,’I'm an older woman than you are - well you know what I mean - and I can tell you a thing or two. And one of them is that no good can come of association with anything labelled Gwladys or Ysobel or Ethyl or Mabelle or Kathryn.”

Miss Pendlebury is an artist, and, in the opinion of Bertie Wooster, a dashed good one, too. However, he may be slightly biased because at the time of the remarking of the aforementioned statement he was well-and-truly head-over-heels in love with her, so much so that he entrusted her with the heavy task of painting his Aunt Agatha’s portrait. Unenviable though the job was, Gwladys had a dashed good crack at it, but the finished work was dismissed angrily by Aunt Agatha, and Gwladys became rather huffy with Bertie. Jeeves endeavoured to comfort his young, lovesick master by assuring him that the name Gwladys was not a particularly attractive one, on a par with Kathryn and Ethyl, all of which came about as a result of the pennings of Alfred Lord Tennyson.

The name Gwladys is borrowed from one of P. G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster stories, another allusion dropped, in which Bertie falls for a girl named Gwladys. His Auntie Dahlia is appalled. “No good can come of association with anything labelled Gwladys or Ysobel or Ethyl or Mabelle or Kathryn,” she says. “But particularly Gwladys.” You’d have to have read your Wodehouse, or The New Yorker, to know that all those ys imply an anti–Welsh slur. With Ethyl (an anti–knock gasoline additive, tetra–ethyl lead) may come a not–too–thinly veiled anti–petrochemical knock as well.

Through these names, Wodehouse shows the ineptness and unimportance of a label, such as name or class, in the defining of a real person or group of people. In essence, his choice of names serves to break down stereotypes, to show their innaneness, and assault those of the English class system in a humorous manner.

UPDATE : コンニチワ Tomokilog !

Aunty reports …

A vegan couple have been sentenced to life in prison by a US court over the death of their malnourished baby.

The baby died six weeks after birth after being fed a diet largely made up of soy milk and organic apple juice.

Defence lawyers for Lamont Thomas and Jade Sanders said they had starved their child unintentionally by adhering to a strictly vegan diet.

This is a tragic story and should never really have come to pass, one might say looking at the biology, milk production in the mother and high lactase production in the child, that milk is essentially, and essential, for babies. Most health studies are unanimous in claiming breast milk is best, though milk from other sources can also substitute, commercial babies milk is generally full of nutritional additives to compensate. On a side note, pasteurisation of milk destroys Phosphatase which is essential to calcium uptake. I would not suggest feeding raw non-human milk to a child.

The Vegan Society says on their web pages …

The first food for a vegan baby should ideally be breast milk.

Breast milk is a complete natural food and contains everything a baby needs. Many benefits are conveyed to the baby by breast milk. It contains antibodies which help protect baby from coughs, colds, chest and stomach infections and breast fed babies are less likely to develop allergies. It is quite probable that breast milk contains substances needed by growing infants that are not even known to be essential and are not included in infant formula.

From Wikipedia

The normal mammalian condition is for the young of a species to lose the ability to digest milk sugar (lactose) effectively after the end of the weaning period (a species-specific length of time often equal to roughly 3% of lifespan). In humans, lactase production usually drops about 90% during the first four years of life, although the exact drop over time varies widely. However, certain human populations have undergone a mutation on chromosome 2 which results in a bypass of the common shutdown in lactase production, allowing members of these populations to continue consumption of fresh milk and other milk products throughout their lives.

What this also shows is that milk consumption in adults is not necessary.

The article continues …

But prosecutors in the US city of Atlanta said the couple had deliberately neglected their child.

“No matter how many times they want to say, ‘We’re vegans, we’re vegetarians,’ that’s not the issue in this case,” Prosecutor Chuck Boring is quoted by the Associated Press news agency as saying.

“The child died because he was not fed. Period,” he said.

Wait … Prosecutor Chuck Boring ?

You can not make this shit up.

Crown Shakur weighed 3.5lb (1.6kg) at the time of his death in April 2004.

that probably indicates quite a low birth weight, although it’s claimed that a vegan diet during pregnancy can result in low birth weights, I’m getting the strong feeling this couple didn’t have a clue what they were doing. The Vegan Society has some guidelines.

Back to the story …

Sentencing the couple, the judge said the murder verdict made the life sentence mandatory.

Jade Sanders told the judge: “I loved my son - and I did not starve him.”

I think murder seems a little strong, manslaughter would have probably been more accurate, but then again as vegans, and even more importantly as parents, they should have done their background reading. Needless to say, although it could be argued this is Darwinism in action, I do feel very sorry for them for the loss of their child.

Mahalo to Jessica for bringing this story to my attention.

11:41 AM rizole: Dude, new baby, Tomas Zachary.

Congratulations Guys !

From her father

“Baby girl born at 8am yesterday. 8lb 12oz. Calling her Kitty.”

Congratulations dude !!!!

Some shit just should not be allowed, dressing up or even painting cats for instance .. oh the humanity !

Toupees for babies is another …. I saw a sketch on Saturday Night Live about this and thought it was hilarious, but someone obviously thinks it’s a good idea. Ok, so there is endless possibilities for dressing children up in ways that they will find embarressing in later life.

Actually I’m considering getting a natty dread wig for my godson.

We had a unexpected visitor at work today, lil’ Thaleia.

Her parents had big dark circles under their eyes, apparently Thaleia gets more sleep than they do.