More Items from the Fearmongers Catalog

I assume this is for real: I Hate My Name - Or How Not To Name Your Baby, by one Digby Milo Jones.

Remember that line from The Empire Strikes Back when Luke tells Yoda he's not afraid to go forward with his Jedi training and Yoda bugs his eyes, smiles wickedly and says, "No. You will be"? Same deal here:

What's in a name?

Chosen the right baby name yet?
You think you have?
Are you sure?
What if it’s not right?
What do you mean?
Have you considered what will happen if it’s not right?
What could go wrong?
Everything!
Will it have a negative effect on your baby?
ABSOLUTELY!

Ai! Fetal Crouch Alert! Buy this book or someone will beat the crap out of your child!

But all is not lost! For only $8.95, you can encase that child's moniker in kevlar (snotty comments most certainly mine):

Inside the book you will learn and receive:

- How the secret of great parenting is choosing the right name for your baby - and how to do it properly (And here I was thinking it was a matter of constant attention, love and discipline. Silly me.)
- Not to trust family, friends, neighbors or strangers (Instead, I guess, trusting this book)
- How to choose the right name! (My advice? Use the old army approach - Keep It Simple, Stupid)
- How to prevent your child being bullied at school! (Ouch! You can't hit me - my name is Harrison!)
-How to visualize your child at every stage of their life with the name you choose today! (I think this means that while "Twinkles" is fine for a baby, it's not going to look very good on her med school application)
-Powerful examples of how not to name your baby! (I'm guessing "Charles Manson" is probably in there somewhere.)
-How to avoid painful mistakes! (I wonder if this guy's parents know he wrote this book.)
-How to get it right the first time! (Wait, isn't that why we had more than one kid?)
- How to give them a name they can live with! (Better have a couple standing by in reserve just in case you find them out on the ledge one morning.)
- How to use the ‘quick baby naming guide’ (Thereby presumably being able to bypass all the bother of having to put any serious thought into your name choices.)

But it gets even stranger. Despite purporting to separate the wheat from the chaff in terms of baby names, the book is claimed to include 14,735 of them. I'd be awfully hard-pressed to come up with anywhere near that many names, much less a list devoid of bad ideas. In fact, I'm not so sure how exclusive this list is - Down at the bottom of the page, you get some examples, conveniently split out into various ethnicities. From the "English Boys' list, we get names like "Addaneye". Yeah - no issues there. And there's a whole list of Latin Boy's names, any one of which I would think would just about guarantee a rough time of it for the kid.

From the rest of the copy, it appears that this opus is at least in part an exercise in auto-therapy to help the author get over his angst about his own name. In fact, I don't have any reason to doubt the guy's sincerity. But it strikes me that this book is a kind of psychological hot potato - the guy pours all his own crazies into it and passes them on to, well, the sort of people who buy into this kind of new-parent fearmongering, thereby making them even nuttier.