Suffer the little children....

....who are given shocker names by their stupid, insensitive and highly impractical parents.

Yes, we all know the famous names, but I'll put in a few to nudge your flabby grey matter:
David's son Zowie Bowie; Paul Yates' kids Fifi Trixibelle, Pixie, Peaches Honeyblossum, Heavenly Hirani Tigerlily; Frank Zappa's poor little mites Dweezil and Moon Unit; Jason Lee (Earl, how could you?) poor little bastard - Pilot Inspektor; Mark Bolan's ego-defying sprog called Rolan Bolan; Bono's son Elijah Bob Patricius Guggi Q; Jamie Oliver's girls' Poppy Honey and Daisy Boo; and Nicolas Cage (why doesn't this surprise me) choosing Kal-El for his son's name. Poor wee fella, he's going to spend his entire life taking reservations for a middle-eastern airline.

Perhaps we can forgive the above over-paid, over-medicated, over-fawned celebrities due to their lifestyles of 'always yes, never no' and a society that encourages shallow success stories to permanently take residence up their own rectums. But what of the parents who supposedly live in 'normal' society?

Who was the mental mammoth who decided that Adolf, Idi and Gilligan would make good names for their brand new baby boys? And those regressive retards who decide to select 'a good old name' like Eunice, Dulcie or Hildegarde for their daughters?

Sapphire's school is full of clueless little kids (the sentence could end right there) who clearly have bogans for parents. No, it's not their enforced mullets, boy earrings by age five or only knowing to eat food directly from an oily paper bag, it is always the names that give away their pathetic parentage. We have a Hendrix, a couple of Axls, a Brock or three, Clint, Cher, Kylee, Dannee, Bylynda and Kadee. Their folks are just setting them up for a life in Salisbury with a 25 year old commodore on blocks in the front yard of their housing trust unit and an old couch littered with West End bottles on the verandah. Jaidyn and Schapelle will be parents by the time they're eighteen; he'll bugger off by nineteen and she'll go on to make five other babies with five other 'uncles' - Nathan, Tyson, Mundine, Kostya and Darryl.

I used to play tennis with a lovely girl called Valerie. She married fairly young - at age eighteen in 1988 and a couple of years later gave birth to a daughter, called Tuppence. Our small town was still recovering from the puzzlement and hilarity of that one when she had a son three years later, called Kevin. Still, it's heartening to know that she never ended up marrying her first high school boyfriend, Peter Nuss. I'm sure he's now in therapy, trying to get over the ridicule he always earned during roll call when the teachers only read out your first initial and then your surname.

Despite the above mockery, there were some odd names that seemed normal in our town; the kind of names that had always lived there, were from respectable families and that no-one ever thought to raise an eyebrow over. The Virgin family were not relatives of Richard Branson and their teenage daughters seemed to escape any torment. The same went for the Sidebottom household, my mother's workmate Fern Raintree (I kid you not), twins Austin and Mercedes (their father drove a bus) and brothers Teddy, Elvis and Jesus. The last three were all rather good looking which probably distracted the girls from anything other than the cut of their Levi californians...

It is comforting to note that old, cannon-fodder monikers such as Richard, Dick, Randy, Pansy, Fanny, Gaylord, Gay, Chuck and Faith have mostly been avoided these days. Despite this advance there always seems to be a new wave of parental stupidity to take its place, or place names to be precise. Warwick Capper, a retired footballer whose shorts cut off the circulation to his synapses named his daughter Indianna, yet admits to never having visited the place. There are also a few Jordans, Indias and Dakotas naively working their way through primary school that only highlights the lack of pride we Aussies have in using our own mighty country to select a name that singles our wonder child out from the rest.

How about Myponga? Wagga Wagga? Dead Creek? Halls Gap? Murray River? Or consider honouring our unique flora - Bottle Brush, Pig Face, Turkey Bush and Spinifex. Perhaps our unique fauna should be considered - Quokka, Fat Tailed Dunnart or Hairy Nosed Wombat. Other sense-challenged parents-to-be could consider moving away from naming their children after actors (Arnie, Cary, Cooper etc) or cars (Holden, Benz, Morris) and look at foods: surely Tim Tam, Dim Sim, Chiko, Burger Ring or Lamington are worth a burl? If I had a second child, I'd seriously consider one of my own favourite digestibles - KitKat, Twistie, FUIC, Feel Good or Pepper Pasty With Sauce. Just as long as it doesn't rhyme with 'poo' or 'willy' or form an unfortunate acronym....