what's in a name? i am glad you asked!

he as we've mentioned 'round these parts before: the bride, she is all gestational once again. as usually happens when the womenfolk start makin' babies, the conversation has been known to turn toward the topic of names. as in: What in Tarnation are We Gonna Call the Unborn? now, more or less, we have come to an agreement (thank goodness we aren't having a boy because there was No Agreeing on the topic of appellations for the phallically endowed). we have chosen a name. i should amend that to: my babymama has strongly recommended that i accept her preferred choice of name. as she reminded me, with serrated blades shooting from her fiery eyeballs, the child will be getting my last name, after all. indeed. and so, we have chosen a name. it is a good name.

i am not going to tell you what it is. but i have it on good authority that in some regional Tlingit dialects it translates roughly to "Daughter of the Great One. And His Wife."

for those of you in the position of having to come up with a name, let me please be of assistance. i live to help. i am here for you, body and soul, but mostly body. this site is waaay better than the baby name voyager in that it trolls the 1990 census. it randomly selects first names and pairs them with randomly selected last names. just keep hitting refresh. i found some girls' names that i really liked, and i e-mailed them to my lady:

Iola
Minta
Spoon (i mean, does it get any more awesome than "spoon?")
Misha
Ola
Floy
Minna
Lisette
Ila
Ivey
Shin
Spoon
Mike (kind of rad for a girl, actually)
Eustolia!
Noemi

i love them all. i think i lost her at spoon, though.

then comes the hard part: the middle name. with our first child, we chose a traditional indian name, a nod to my masala mama's heritage. i am guessing she's inclined to do something similar this time. I AM GUESSING SHE'S WRONG. because LOD alerts us to the fact that Vlassic pickles will award a $25,000 savings bond to the parents "show their love and dedication to Vlasic® Pickles by making his or her middle name, 'Crunch' ..." so rad on so many levels. maybe the bonds will have yielded returns significant enough to pay for your child's therapy once she's ready!

finally, i'll point out that just this past march a company called the generations network published a book called "bad baby names" -- now in blogular form! -- which is a compendium of ... well, you figure it out hotshot. the books authors scoured the census from 1790-1930 as well as marriage, birth, death and military records. all the names included in this slim volume are for reals. like, Hysteria Johnson (b. 1881), Kathryn E. Coli (b.1894), Jump Jump (b. 1825), Jam Lamb (b. awesome), and Ima Hooker (no, for reals). but the highlight? quite possibly the best name ever known to man in all of earth's history? there it is on page 31: Wanna Funk, born in 1930 in kansas! Wanna Funk! born in 1930! this means she was 22 when Horace Silver's "Opus de Funk" came out, 33 when James Brown pwn3d the Apollo, 45 when George and Bootsy et al. boarded the Mothership. whew. talk about timing. of course, chances are she is/was probably just a big Lawrence Welk fan.