Quite stunned to read this morning about the family court in New Zealand who were forced to make a 9-year old girl a ward of state, in order to help her change her name legally from...get this: "Talula Does The Hula".

Sheesh!

Now, I've personally known a couple of good Kiwi blokes with dodgy names including: "Donald McDonald" (bad) and: "Dwayne Kerr" (worse! much worse!), both of whom have always had my heartfelt sympathy and honest respect...especially after years of bullying (which only served to make them both harder than a coffin nail and certainly capable of cheerfully beating the living crap out of anyone who took the proverbial), but by comparison to this poor kid, they got off lightly!

Not only should the court have taken the action it did to help this poor kid, but they should have also jailed the parents for inflicting mental and emotional damage on her.

Weirdly, New Zealand (a country sensible in most respects) seems to turn these out every now and again...in the past we have had people legally name their kids things like:-

• Benson and Hedges (they were Twins!)
• Number 16 Bus Shelter
• Six-cylinder Ford cars
• Violence

No idea what makes them do it...perhaps it's something in the water (or...more worringly in the beer!), but whatever the cause is, we need to fund some sort of research program, in order to identify the cause and cure.

And in the meantime, we ought to chain the guilty parents to the nearest cell wall and let their long-suffering offspring bitch-slap them into a coma.