Spam
 

I wanted to update all of you -- I am not just a church-goer, but a black/colored/mocha/African-American/islander church-goer. I got some kind of spam for "my" books advertising "African-American books."

I wonder if I now own a hat?

More progress in the struggle for practical robotic sex toys.
 

Are you fucking kidding me? What part of "sex toy" and "vibrator" didn't you understand?

More progress in the struggle for practical robotic sex toys.
 

No, I am not fucking kidding you. I thought it would be a NEWS STORY on such a vibrator.

Edited to note: Now, if you had said "click here to purchase" I would not have been surprised where I ended up.

More progress in the struggle for practical robotic sex toys.
 

Oh. Well. That explains it.

Edited to make it less snide and more apologetic, to reflect a sincere change of heart on the matter.

More progress in the struggle for practical robotic sex toys.
 

Bite me. It was reasonable.

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In the Mr.'s family (which is, in fairness, exceedingly waspy), they've been doing this for generations. Women are often given last names as first names, or men's names. Which, given the traditional women's names in the family is a huge improvement. There is a Hortensia in living memory, and that's not the worst. For men, one of the benefits of th3e scottish thing is that a lot of last names are already common first names. This makes geneological reasearch a huge pain inthe ass, though.

Actually, come to think of it, they've been doing it in my family for years, too, at least with middle names. One of my mother's names is a grand-uncle's name. Her dad has a family surname as a middle name, as did his father. My paternal grandmother's middle name was a surname that goes back so far I haven't been able to find its source.

I don't think this is as new or as weird as y'all seem to think. And I'm sort of fond of made-up names (though not just bad-spellings of names). At least they are usually prettier and more interesting than a lot of "normal" names.

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Dear Lord. Time to head to the bunker in Montana.

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I think the point was the use of multiple extremely WASP-y names with an extremely non-WASP-y last name.

dude, spookyfish is the shorter, fatter Bob from Office Space (acutally, he didnt leave an indelible impression outside of being from OH and being kinda middle american , but this sounds about right) Atticus is the other Bob, the one who likes Michael Bolton. NCS is a tall thin actress for me but i cant think of who. Tm is Mister T.

I am Sandra Bernhard, not BRC. BRC is more like an older woman, nicely dressed, but I picture long frizzed out hair and big eyeglasses for some reason.

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My great-aunt Valorais wins the prize in my blood family, although her sister-in-law Violenta (married to my great-uncle) runs a close second.

Valor I can see, maybe. But violent?

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The point is, giving such names within your own family is proper. Using such names when they are not family names is not.

I was just discussing my lament that one of my family names became popular in the 90s as a first name. It is my brother's middle name in a variant spelling, and several cousins first or middle names as the variant or the original family spelling.

Now, I cannot use this name for my own children because it has become not just common, but, frankly, trashy. It always reminds me of the simpsons episode when Cletus is calling the kids out of the shack: "Taylor, Sheridan, Dylan, Montgomery, etc"

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DS

I dont think you read my post, or dtb's clearly. The trend is to *sound waspy*. Growing up, we all knew the waspy dreamboats named Taylor and Winthrop (names of two men I dated back in the day), They were real wasps. Card carrying descendents of someonby Important in the Seventeenth century. Taylor's family owned one of those big ole homes on Bellevue in Newport and Win was decended from the guy who killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel.

Today's young Taylors and Winthrops are merely pretenders to the wasp throne. Your Hortense and co. aer actual wasps it soudns like, and of course they have done the family name thing for hundreds of years. Its wasp tradition. Its just when Tony and Amy Gambiadini of Suburb, NJ name their kid Montgomery that you scratch your head a little. Unless it was after that fine, gay actor Montgomery Clift?

dude, in case you've forgotten...spookyfish is my current on-line make-believe boyfriend...

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Perhaps her parents can't spell, and really meant "Violetta"? Or perhaps the parents were milquetoasts, and thought a tough-sounding name would help their daughter stand tall?

P(think a guy who marries a chick named Violent is pretty brave)J

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Or that fine nuclear power plant owner.

My family used to do the family-names-as-middle-names thing. As a result, my mother has five names. Although all her siblings have patiently carried on that tradition, she and my dad stopped it, because it was in her words, stupid. When I was little this bugged me because I wanted to be different with three middle posh-sounding names.