Mom crowdsources baby name for $5,000
In conjunction with Web site Belly Ballot, a Los Angeles mom is asking random strangers to choose what her baby will be called. How about "Troubled?"
Some decisions in life are very hard.
Which flavor of ice cream truly is your favorite? Should you eat goat's cheese rather than cow cheese because goats have beards? If you buy shoes with skulls on them, will someone think you're a necrophiliac?
And then there's naming your baby.
Some choose the easy way out. There are names handed down through their family, saving the need to buy baby-name books. Some try -- and even succeed -- to be creative, as was the case with my favorite Starbucks barista's mom who decided to name her little girl Kurshina.
Then there are those for whom it's all too much -- or something. They just wish someone else would take the decision and give them, say, $5,000.
That seems to be the case with 26-year-old Natasha Hill. She won a competition on the baby-naming site Belly Ballot for the privilege of having complete strangers choose her little one's name. (The little one is due in September.)
As KTLA-TV reports, the idea is that you, me, anyone can have a say in this young one's future identity.
There are two stages. First, on March 18, the shortlist of names -- chosen, quite staggeringly, by a cabal of Belly Ballot's owner Lacey Moler, her staff and, gosh, advertisers -- will be published for public consumption. Then you will have four days to vote.
One imagines that this fine publicity wheeze will wheedle out the truly cruel names at the editorial stage. Names like Venal, Troubled, Tasteless, or Piano Robber (PR, for short).
One imagines, too, that Hill will be given more than a sneak peek at the shortlist, just to ensure that it doesn't contain something entirely painful. Like Kim or Lindsay.
But Hill, an art teacher, told NBC San Diego that even if she doesn't like the name, "there's always a nickname."
So Venal, Troubled, and the rest still stand a chance to be nicknames.
Though she admits that her boyfriend isn't quite so keen on the prospect of this crowdsourcing, she entered the competition because she wants to pay off credit card debt and to start a college fund for her putative Watermelon.
She does, though, offer a certain wisdom about the whole amusement.
She told NBC San Diego: "I think whatever name is chosen my child is going to be grateful that it didn't come from me."