"My Name is Potato," Rita Pavone (1977) (SLYT). [more inside]
posted by WCityMike on Sep 15, 2009 - 24 comments

The Hobbit Name Generator: You have a secret name. Discover it. [more inside]
posted by chillmost on Dec 16, 2008 - 86 comments

What, no Phở King? BWE's Top 50 Punny Store Names.
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur on Jun 6, 2008 - 80 comments

Need to name a character? Use this random name generator. Hit refresh to, uh, refresh. Explanation here. [via]
posted by dersins on May 2, 2008 - 51 comments

John Ivan NN Janez Sultano Bērziņš "John Doe" around the world.
posted by mdonley on Mar 11, 2008 - 13 comments

Here is an alphabetical list of the most popular music stars real names.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane on Jan 30, 2008 - 48 comments

Thousands of new products and businesses every year need names. The creation of these names, is a business in itself, and is usually a pretty secretive process. But Igor, a naming and branding agency, offers a surprisingly detailed and illuminating primer on the naming game. Igor describes how they do it and who they’ve done it for. Igor’s naming taxonomy charts for various products (including one for the company names of naming companies) help illustrate the research portion of the process. Check out: studies of successful names like Pepperidge Farm’s cookie names, and why AT&T Canada’s name change to Allstream was a bad idea. And don’t miss Igor’s two blogs (metablogged here): Snark Hunting, “all about naming and branding in popular culture” and Wordlab, on “naming and branding issues.” For fun, try Wordlab’s own tongue-in-cheek naming tools, like the Drug-o-matic drug name generator, Name Your Band, and the Morpheme generator.
posted by beagle on Sep 7, 2006 - 25 comments

Foucault’s Pendulum Art Inspired by Umberto Eco’s novel, entitled: Foucault’s Pendulum the artist Lukas Arciniegas has created a series of beautiful illustrations. Also of note: The Holy War: Mac VS Dos [Do check out the sidebar] "Faith in Fakes"? Also see: an actual pendulum. And Dan Brown? Bleh...
posted by Unregistered User on Jun 30, 2006 - 33 comments

Call me Ol' Angelo Fatnose. In anticipation of the return of The Sopranos on Sunday night, I'm wondering: what's your Mafia name?
posted by mickeyz on Mar 10, 2006 - 34 comments

Smurf Name Generator. It doesn't suck, that bad.
posted by Bag Man on Sep 11, 2004 - 26 comments

Attractiveness of your name is linked to attractiveness of your face. Even more interesting, the so called "professional" researcher used the service "Hot or Not" to conduct her research by uploading fake profiles.
posted by banished on Aug 12, 2004 - 12 comments

The name "Firebird" was chosen by Mozilla to rename their Phoenix product. However, Firebird is also the name of a popular and long-standing open-source database project -- and the Mozilla organization was clearly aware of this naming conflict before making their decision. Some feel that such an action, within the context of the open-source community, is unfair and constitutes bad etiquette, at the least. The discussion is ongoing, but LinuxWorld reports that the Mozilla organization has deleted recent message-board comments that criticized their decision.
posted by TreeHugger on Apr 16, 2003 - 18 comments

Famous Name Changes What a turn off when you find out Paul David Hewson, Vincent Damon Furnier, William Michael Albert Broad are your favorite rockers (inside)
posted by Voyageman on Dec 20, 2001 - 18 comments

Name Distributions in the Social Security Area doesn't sound like hours of fun, but it's wasted a lot of my time today. After visiting a list of the top 100 names for births in 2001 you can check out similar lists going back to 1880.
posted by fnirt on Nov 30, 2001 - 46 comments

Osama's Place... "In a town full of soldiers, on the edge of Fort Bragg, there could be worse names for a restaurant these days than Osama's Place, but it is hard to think of any."
posted by stchang on Sep 28, 2001 - 14 comments

North Dakota considering name change to get rid of lowly "North" tag and switch to plain "Dakota." The people making those commemorative state quarters are giving them stern looks...
posted by Sellersburg/Speed on Jun 26, 2001 - 55 comments

Bruce Springsteen didn't win the rights to BruceSpringsteen.com, because 2 out of 3 arbitrators decided that The Boss has no right to the domain name. Which is quite surprising considering most other celebs have won the rights to theirs. [ via Signal vs. Noise]
posted by riffola on Feb 11, 2001 - 2 comments

Don't just sit there, go buy some un-used 3 Letter Acronym domain names for the heck of it.
posted by riffola on Oct 2, 2000 - 12 comments

Homophobic decision in my home state is to be appealled. Requests to change one's name are very rarely denied. This judge has really stepped over the line by worrying about "the appearance of [the requester] being married. . . [and] . . . how this would appear to our neighbors, to our shopkeepers and to society at large."
posted by fpatrick on Sep 22, 2000 - 4 comments

Look at the silly boys with their cute little grindcore band names. Oooh! I'm threatened! I'm quivering! I'm shocked and saddened, saddened and shocked! So scary.
posted by Mo Nickels on May 21, 2000 - 3 comments

Start the "formerly known as formerly known as..." jokes now: I find this tremendously disappointing, but the first person to actually adopt an icon as his name has reversed the decision, a scant 7 years into the adventure.

Prince is, once again, Prince. R.I.P.
posted by anildash on May 16, 2000 - 11 comments

Have you helped name the next decade yet? I personally prefer 'the empties'.
posted by grant on Nov 20, 1999 - 1 comment