There must be something in the water on the Atlantic side of the U.S. because people over here are making headlines for all the wrong reasons.
Last week, a Tennessee man reportedly changed his newborn daughter's name without telling his wife.
As if going behind his wife's back to change the baby's name wasn't enough, Mark Ciptak "took one for the cause" and renamed the girl Sarah McCain Palin. The couple had agreed to name her Ava Grace - apparently that didn't get his point across. Poor kid.
What if the McCain-Palin ticket loses the election? Then your youngest daughter is cursed with a name that oozes mediocrity.
We can only hope this hasn't happened before because the thought of someone named Adlai Jennings Bryan Stevenson or Bob Ford Dole is awful.
As far as we can tell, a 19-year-old North Carolina woman has eaten the same Guatemalan insanity pepper as Ciptak. The woman formerly known as Jennifer Thornburg said she was so disgusted by the practice of dissecting animals for research that she decided to change her name to CutoutDissection.com, which is the URL for the anti-dissection page of the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals' Web site.
Sarah McCain Palin is starting to look like a viable option to us right now.
Maybe it's the economy. Maybe it's election fever. Maybe it was the traumatic decapitation of her favorite Beanie Baby that prevented her from looking at sausage the same way ever again.
We can't be sure of the exact cause, but we are positive that something's afoot on the East Coast.
