Considering "Ralph"

You know, a sufficient amount of fuss has been made about the names Sarah and Todd Palin gave to their five children, and plenty of stale and pedestrian jokes have been made about such on late night television and elsewhere, but I don't agree with any of this poo-pooing and tittering, so I would like to take this opportunity to say that the names she gave those kids are really the only thing I actually like about Sarah Palin...That and the fact that she looks alot like the woman who is #3 on my 2008 Laminated List, but that's an entirely different issue I won't get into now, or ever...

"Consider for a moment the beauty of the name 'Ralph.'" - Frank Zappa on The Joan Rivers Show

By now you should be aware of my great love for Frank Zappa, naming this very HOT POOP blog after one of his songs after all, and I happen to agree with Frank's philosophy on names and the naming of things, be they children or studios or your favorite fountain pen or touring vans or sandwiches, or all ten of your wife's toes...Life's too short to be boring, first of all, and secondly, what kind of leg up are you giving your child if you name him Ralph or Steve or Brian? Those are names custom made for Accounts Payable, you know? But more to Frank's point, "Ralph" is just an ugly fucking name.

Frank Zappa named his four children Moon Unit, Ian Donald Calvin Euclid, Ahmet Emuukha Rodan, and Diva Thin Muffin Pigeen...

If you don't see "Dweezil" on this list, that's because the hospital refused to put that name on the birth certificate...Ian Zappa's name wasn't officially changed to Dweezil until he was five years old, and at his own, Dweezil's, request...As the well-known story goes, he is named after one of Gail Zappa's pinky toes...Seems quite natural to me...Of course, his first official name is derived from three Mothers Of Invention members - Ian Underwood, Donald Preston and Euclid James "Motorhead" Sherwood - and Frank's best friend and graphic artist Cal Schenkel, and I think that's pretty cool...Rather conventional, too.

As for his other three children...Well, I'm not sure what the meaning of Moon Unit might be, though I can tell you that "Unit" is her middle name...The name Moon itself, is quite hippie-ish, which is baffling to me because Frank had absolutely no love for the hippies...Hmmm...Perhaps his wife Gail actually named their eldest child...Again, if you don't consider "Unit", Moon is a pretty conventional name for a year like, oh, 1967...

Ahmet Emuukha Rodan is a damn fantastic name in my book...The first name, Ahmet, is a derivation of the Arabic name Ahmad, meaning "highly praised", and is one of Prophet Mohammad's many given names...Now that's a name to live up to, and again, is an incredibly conventional name in many parts of the world...Emuukha was a name of Frank's own creation, and also the name of one of his groups, The Abnuceals Emuukha Electric Orchestra, and Rodan, of course, was/is the winged dinosaur nemesis of Godzilla...A strong, masculine name, and all in all, a very fine name for a young man with which to make his mark in the world...

Diva Thin Muffin Pigeen was the loudest baby in the the maternity ward, and that's how she got her first name, a name which prefigures the whole "diva culture" that has become prevalent over the past decade or so, and once again Frank proves scarily prescient, and has given her a name readymade for greatness...With a name like Diva, anything seems possible, and probable...As for Thin Muffin, well, who doesn't love a muffin, even a thin one? And let's not forget, Frank's studio is named The Utility Muffin Research Kitchen (UMRK), and as much as Frank loved that studio, and lived much of his life in there, you gotta believe naming his youngest daughter after his studio is a damn fine way to keep her in this thoughts when he's slaving away over tapes down in his dangerous kitchen...Pigeen? Ya got me.

"People make a lot of fuss about my kids having such supposedly 'strange names'. But the fact is that no matter what first names I might have given them, it is the last name that is going to get them in trouble." - Frank Zappa in The Real Frank Zappa Book

Enough about Frank Zappa's kids...What about Sarah Palin's children?

Track...I'm not sure what Track Palin's middle name is, but the name Track is a very strong and masculine name, evoking trackers, and the tracking of animals, or even those who blaze trails through the wilderness...Trackers are smart and sensible and fearless, and so a name like this is outstanding in my mind...Of course, we shouldn't forget father Todd Palin, who happens to race snowmobiles, among other manly, Alaskan pursuits...Racing those snow machines around, ayup, race tracks...All in all, the name Track is an athletic and manly name, a name to aspire to...

According to Sarah Palin, daughter Bristol is named after Bristol Bay, where her and her husband have both pursued commercial fishing careers, a decidedly rugged and demanding occupation in a certainly beautiful body of water, and an Alaskan body of water at that...It is a name that evokes home and hard work and beauty and nature, so how can anybody make fun of that?

There have been no official explanations for her other two daughter's names, Willow and Piper...It has been noted that there is a small Alaskan town called Willow & Piper, and that seems like an easy explanation...Willow isn't an entirely uncommon/unknown name for a girl, and one thinks perhaps of Sci-Fi Fantasy novels, and of course, the lesbian witch character Willow from Buffy The Vampire Slayer...Taken as is, it is another perfectly fine and lovely name for a daughter, as hippie-ish as Moon Zappa, and fairly conventional at heart. And the name Piper is just as conventional, an Old English name that according to my googling, is the 240th most popular name for a girl in the past decade...If I'm not mistaken, actress Gillian Anderson has a daughter named Piper...Of course, the Piper Super Cub is a very popular small engine plane used extensively for tracking and hunting...

Speaking of tracking again, we finally arrive at Sarah Palin's youngest child, her infant son Trig. Our first thought when we hear this name is Trigonometry, of course, which just so happens to be the mathematics of triangles, the measuring of their sides and angles...From there, we must consider triangulation, the process of finding the location of a point by measuring angles to it from other known points...Trig Points are beacons placed out in wilderness terrains, especially hills and mountains, to help rescuers locate missing people and vehicles and small aircraft such as Piper Super Cubs...Trig also happens to be an old Norse word meaning "true" and "strong", and again, taken in context like this, is a completely masculine name that makes all the sense in the world to me...Anyways, the baby's full name is Trig Paxon Van Palin, and his middle name Paxon, is named after "one of the most beautiful spots in Alaska" according to Sarah and Todd Palin. But finally, Sarah Palin has joked on record that she chose Van as his second middle name because Van Palin sounds like Van Halen, and being a rather big fan of that band's original line-up, I don't even really consider this a joke at all. Seems perfectly cromulent to me...

My point to all this blather is that I find the names of Sarah Palin's kids to be not only normal, but actually rather striking and powerful...They are names that might be helpful to them in finding their own identities...Names to aspire to...Names to become...They are certainly not boring names...They are not the names of Inventory Managers or Chiropractors, and so all the jokes on late night TV and zipping around the internet just aren't funny to me...

As Frank Zappa noted in his book, it's that last name that's gonna give 'em trouble...Many might think Sarah Palin gave her kids unusual, even funny, names, but whatever obstacles those names might incur, they're nothing compared with being Palins...And the only thing funny about that is Tina Fey...

You Hotcha! Henry Ezekiel Mohaski