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For reasons unknown to me, the Trib published the vital statistics column today, a Sunday, instead of on its regular Monday schedule. That means you don’t get to start the work week with Bad Baby Names. Instead you get to leisure over them during a lazy Sunday!

Marysa and Shaylyn are the traditional Y-attack names. While bad, these are getting to be a little old and tired.

Luckily Xayton was born to come wake us up. Xayton sounds like a name from the future, possibly the name of an evil robot overlord. In that sense it’s a cool name, but it’s no name I’d want to saddle a little boy with.

The emotional favourites for today don’t really have a bad name, they’re just appropriate for the day. Two sets of parents named their kids Angel. One boy, one girl. Isn’t that nauseating?

But the winner is Ja’miesha. Complete with apostrophe. Jamiesha isn’t even a good name on its own, but throwing in that apostrophe brings things to a whole new level. In Hawaii the ʻokina is used to represent a glottal stop. Does this mean that we’re supposed to pronounce Ja’miesha with a glottal stop in there? Or were the parents just idiots and thought that their little girl’s name would look pretty with an apostrophe (it’s not even an ʻokina because Jamiesha isn’t anywhere near Hawaiian)? I vote the latter.

After last week’s bumper crop I suppose a letdown is in order. A letdown is what we got with today’s Bad Baby Names. Just your garden variety bad misspellings, really.

A few good examples of this is Elaynah, Kaelyn, and Raedyn. They’re bad names, sure, but not gut-wrenchingly bad.

A Bad Baby Name is definitely Legacy. It’s spelled correctly, but it’s still bad.

And today’s Bad Baby Name winner isn’t even the little boy’s first name (which is Landen). His middle name is Ora-A, which is just kind of weird.

Sarah Palin, 2006:

3. Will you support funding for abstinence-until-marriage education instead of for explicit sex-education programs, school-based clinics, and the distribution of contraceptives in schools?

SP: Yes, the explicit sex-ed programs will not find my support.

Sarah Palin, 2008:

Our beautiful daughter Bristol came to us with news that as parents we knew would make her grow up faster than we had ever planned. We’re proud of Bristol’s decision to have her baby and even prouder to become grandparents.

Huh.

Hello Bad Baby Names devotees! It’s been a while since I’ve brought you the baddest of the baby names, as I’ve been off on vacation for the past month. Luckily (or unluckily!) for us, the Tribune-Herald offered up the largest collection of baby names I’ve ever seen. This means that this week quantity trumps quality, but some of the Bad Baby Names are still quite bad.

We’ll kick things off with my favourites, the Y Brygade! There’s Shaleyah, Kayden, Shayde, Izayah, Mavryk, Kolby, Kyston, Blayne, Kysen, Jaydin, Peityn, and Gavyn. Their leader is the illustrious Shayden-Sione. Her parents missed a golden opportunity to have a double-barrelled Y Brigade daughter, though! Come on, it could have been Shayden-Syone!

There were two sets of twins born, too. Only one of them had bad names though: Passion and Patience. How precious. How sweet. How absolutely disgusting.

I have to think little August was named that because his parents are idiots and would forget when he was born otherwise. “When’s your birthday, August?” “Yes.” The jokes write themselves.

Little Beau wins the “I Would Have Had A Boy’s Name Had They Spelled It Bo But My Parents Decided To Tart Shit Up And Now I Need A Sex Change Operation” prize.

And today’s winner is Tullimwar KS Jr. Casio. That’s his full name. Note the awesome first name. Note the use of initials for the second name. Note how his third name is “Jr.” Normally “Jr” comes last. Oh no, not in the Casio family, they’re bucking the trend!

I missed the beginning of this, so here’s just some notes and braindumps.

for $wq qw wq qw {
  print $wq;
}

…prints:

q
q

You can do things like @list = <Damian Matthew Lucifer Conway> and have it just work.

sub RESPECT { print "@_\n" }
(R.E.S.P.E.C.T)->('find out what it means to me');

Oh god.

sub *{'='} = sub { print "@_\n" };

or

*= = sub { print "@_\n" }

Damian is an evil evil man. You can change the name of anonymous subroutines:

my $anon1 = sub {
  local *__ANON__ = "Bruce";
  carp "We'll just call you Bruce, okay?";
};

That’s the only bit of useful stuff in this talk. Here comes some more useless scary stuff: while ( $count –> 0 ) {. $hash<-{$key} is a substitute for an empty string.

You can slurp a whole file in a single line: my $content = readline!open!((*{$!},$/)=\$file); — I think that’s right.

And that’s a wrap!