I Named My Child Skrillex

People name their kids all kinds of stupid shit these days. As if there wasn’t a plethora of suitable names to choose from, its become some sort of twisted underground competition in which eccentric parents around the globe look for the most impressive way to scar their children for life. When ‘David’, ‘Sarah’ or ‘Adam’ no longer became acceptable for these attention seeking caregivers, the mission was on to find atrocities that would ensure their offspring forever feared ‘roll call’ at school. I’m not sure if the parents then parade their little creations around and show off their exotic, foreign-to-most names, but when you name your kid Icy Eight Special K (true story, a child named after the drug Ketamine), he or she really does become more of an experiment than a human being. The particularly sad thing about it all, is that the child in question isn’t going to stand up just a few days into his life and go, “Seriously guys, are you fucking high? Don’t call me Potato Mustang! I’ll be teased forever!”. Perhaps its this aspect of it all that makes it a little bit less painful when some 20 year old guy knowingly changes his name to GoldenPalaceDotCom because some shitty ass local Casino paid him $15,000 (true story).

So how bad do the names get? Well in Sweden, things got so ridiculous they brought in a law which allowed the government to deny a name if it was deemed inappropriate. Lucky they did so, given a couple in 1991 tried to legally name their (poor, defenseless and undeserving) kid ‘Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116‘ and claim that it was pronounced ‘Albin‘. Clearly they gave no consideration to the child’s future signature or the amount of time it would take him to write his name on a test sheet paper. They obviously don’t have laws against changing your name in the US however, a fact solidified by animal rights activist Christopher Garnett when he decided to opt for KentuckyFriedCruelty.com as his calling card. Obviously not a marketing major, it’s pretty obvious to most that changing your name has close to the least amount of ‘return on investment‘ for your cause, unless of course you are famous in the first place.

Lets hope that eventually people realise calling your kid Istanbul, C3P0 or something with DotCom in it, is not only a fad – but extremely cruel. At the same time, save the ‘re-branding’ for logo designs and don’t change your name to promote a cause. No matter how smart you think you are, everyone else thinks your an idiot and no one is going to hire some guy named ‘Megatron’.