This just in — Brad Paisley and Kimberly Williams-Paisley, whose son was born on February 22 in Nashville, have announced the name of their newborn: William Huckleberry Paisley, according to Net Music Countdown.

For the record, Paisley grew up in a sort of Huck Finn timewarp on the banks of the Ohio River, in the tiny hamlet of Glen Dale, West Virginia. (I can almost hear Tom and Becky calling, as I write this). The country boy started playing guitar at his grandfather’s knee, and got his first break, at age 12, appearing on the well-known Jamboree USA radio show on WWVA, the big country music station out of Wheeling, West Virginia.

So I guess Huckleberry is a natural as far as Brad is concerned.

Now about that first name, William. In case you didn’t know, Kimberly Williams was not born in West Virginia. She’s from Rye, New York. If you don’t know Rye, think Stepford Wives with a New York City accent. I’d bet good money there isn’t a single person in Rye, New York, named Huckleberry.

Now I understand why the name annoucement was so long in coming. It took Mom a few days to knock some sense into Paisley.

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Posted on February 28th 2007 and posted to CELEBRITY BABIES, Brad Paisley, Kimberly Williams, CELEBRITY BABY NAMES | Comments(23)

Few celebrity baby names have generated as much commentary in recent years as that of Bono’s first son, Elijah Patricius Bob Guggi Q.

EPBGQ, as I like to call him, was born August 18, 1999, to Bono, and his wife Alison Stewart. Many people have commented on the name, usually with disbelief and derision, but really, it’s very easy to decode if you take a few moments.

The first three names, Elijah, Patricius (Latin for Patrick) and Bob, are hardly earthshaking. Elijah is simply Elijah, a very popular boy’s name these days. Patricius — well, it doesn’t get more Irish than Patrick. The fact that it is Latinized should not be surprising — the name “Bono” itself has Latin connections, in that Bono’s originial nickname was Bono Vox, which is both a brand of hearing aid, and Latin for “good voice.” And Bob, presumably, is in honor of Bono’s father, Brendan “Bob” Hewson.

Guggi is no mystery either. This U2 FAQ site answers the question “who is Guggi”? He is a friend from Bono’s early days in Dublin, who used to rehearse with U2 on occasion. Today, Guggi is a well-known painter.

So that leaves us with Q. Who is Q? I don’t actually know. I’m hoping Bono reads this blog and will leave a comment. My guess is that EPBGQ gets his Q from James Bond novels and films, where Q is the long-suffering head of research and development who comes up with all of Bond’s cool gadgets, which Bond always manages to destroy in using them.

Or not.

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Posted on February 27th 2007 and posted to Bono, CELEBRITY BABY NAMES | Comments(2)

No new celebrity babies seem to have popped out in the last 24 hours, so it’s time to ask: what will Naomi Watts (King Kong) name her upcoming baby?

You didn’t know that the English/Australian actress was expecting? Oh yes.

And while the New York Post dished about it last week, there was no official confirmation, until a rep for Escada, who is now presumably looking for a new job, let the cat out of the bag (or the bun out of the oven) in a press release.

I haven’t seen the release, but People reports that the rep, who was touting the Escada gown worn by Watts at last night’s Oscars, wrote:

“The ESCADA gown set off her most precious new asset – the baby she is expecting with longtime boyfriend Liev Schreiber.”

Well, it doesn’t get much more official than that. I wonder if Escada is starting a new line of maternity gowns?

So, back to my original question — What will Naomi Watts name her new baby? I hope to have some sort of poll widget soon, to make name guessing a regular feature, but in the meantime, just use the comments button.

Trivia: Did you know? Naomi Watts’s father, who died when she was a young child, was a sound engineer with Pink Floyd. His manic laugh can be heard on the classic Dark Side of the Moon.

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When I heard, via Page Six, that actress Amanda Peet (Studio 60; Syriana) had given birth to a baby girl, it looked like another one for the celebrity baby “No-Name” club. The terse annoucement in the New York Post about the February 20 arrival of a daughter for Peet, and her husband, screenwriter David Benioff, (Troy) listed no name for the newborn.  

My spirits sank.

But it was only a short time before People came to the rescue, informing all who cared that Peet’s new baby is named Frances Pen.

I almost wished Peet and Benioff had opted for the “No-Name” club.

Pen, I learned, is short for Penny, Amanda Peet’s mother. Not to state the obvious here, but why not stick with the original and call her Penny? Perfectly nice name, if a little diminutive. But Pen? What’s the point of that?

As if to emphasize their tin ear for good baby names, Peet and Benioff bestowed on their little bundle of joy the first name Frances.

If you go to the Social Security Administration’s popular baby name page, and plug the name Frances into their whizzbang little data base, you’ll see that Frances has been on an almost perfect downward vector for the last one hundred years. It reached the height of its popularity during World War 1, when it ranked as the # 9 most popular girl’s name in the U.S. But it has been heading downhill ever since. By 2005, Frances ranked # 761 in U.S. popularity, and seems to be on its way out of the top 1000.

I wonder why.

Some old-fashioned names, like Emily, have become very popular again. And some, like Gertrude, Edna, and Frances, have not. Figuring out which is which is the job of all prospective parents, celebrity or not.

So Amanda Peet’s baby girl is not going to join the celebrity baby “No-Name” club. But maybe it would have been better if she had.

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Posted on February 24th 2007 and posted to CELEBRITY BABIES, CELEBRITY BABY NAMES | Comments(1)

What started as an aberration over a year ago when Holly Hunter refused to release the names of her twins, despite the fact that I publicly offered a subscription to People Magazine, which H.H. could have snagged for herself, has now become a new celebrity trend — not releasing the name of your baby. Ever, apparently. 

Country music star Brad Paisley, winner of five Country Music Association Awards, and his wife Kimberly Williams-Paisley, (Pete Sampras’s ex, and star of ABC T.V.’s According to Jim), welcomed a son in Nashville on February 22, according to E Online.

But they haven’t released a name. So what is there to write about? A celebrity baby without a celebrity baby name is not really a celebrity baby. All the fun begins with the name. Just ask Suri, or Apple, or Pilot Inspektor.

B.P. and K.P-W. join the club started by H.H., which also includes the recent holdouts A.B. (Anna Belknap) and B.D.H. (Bryce Dallas Howard). Just to get even, from now on I’m only going to refer to celebrities who won’t release their baby’s names by their initials. Now let’s see how long they hold out.

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“Ocean”

I think very highly of Forest Whitaker. He has already won a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors’ Guild Award, not to mention an Oscar nod, for his role as Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland. He has turned in consistently excellent performances over an illustrious career to date.

So what’s with the weird baby names? He named his first son Ocean, as in the water. I get that Whitaker’s first name is Forest, as in trees. But is there any real need to continue the “back-to-nature” tradition from one generation to the next?

But Forest didn’t stop at Ocean. He went on to name his daughters Sonnet and True (with his wife, actress Keisha Nash). And Keisha Nash brought her own bit of nature to the party in the Whitaker-Nash house, as her daughter from a previous relationship is named Autumn.

So let me see. We’ve got Ocean, Autumn, Sonnet, and True. That’s not your average brood by any stretch. In fact, it’s very 1970s California, in my opinion. But I’ll say this for Mr. Whitaker and his baby naming strategy. At least he’s consistent. Which is more than you can say for Apple and Moses.

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The twins are here. The much-anticipated births took place on February 20 in Los Angeles, as actress Marcia Cross, star of the hit T.V. show Desperate Housewives, and husband Tom Mahoney, welcomed their new daughters, according to People.

Cross, who has been twice nominated for an Emmy for her portrayal of Bree Van De Kamp on Desperate Housewives, has been on bedrest for over a month prior to the birth.

The girls are named Eden and Savannah.

The name Eden is well-documented, and means “place of pleasure” in Hebrew.

“Savannah,” well-known as a famous city in Georgia, has less clear roots.  One website believes the word, which means “grassy plain,” comes from the Native American word zabana. Another site claims “Savannah” is of Spanish origin.

Roots aside, I give Cross and Mahoney a “thumbs up” for the pair of names. It’s twice as hard coming up with names for twins, and Eden and Savannah has a nice, original ring to it.

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Now we know where all the weird celebrity baby names have been coming from.

A press release appeared today from a shop called The Elegant Child of Beverly Hills, telling the world that Elegant Child has “teamed up with Joanne Justis, a spiritual intuitive and Chaldean Master Numerologist, to offer a special non-traditional baby naming tool for soon-to-be parents.”

The cost? A mere $425 for the basic package. 

And what, precisely, do the doting celebrity parents-to-be get from this little addition to the traditional layette?

According to the webpage describing the baby naming chart, the parents can:

“select baby’s traits/characteristics.”

Yep, you can now select what kind of person your baby is going to be. You’re able to do this because a “spiritual master plan is woven into every name,” and through a combination of numerology, computer programming, and $425, every parent can now achieve the age-old dream of molding their kids even before they’re born.

If the parents-to-be pick a name that doesn’t deliver the desired personality package, they simply keep tweaking until they hit the right combination. At least I think that’s what the program does — I read it twice, but I have to admit I kept stumbling over paragraphs like this one:

“Simply put, Numbers R U have reverse engineered converting a name into a partial, personalized blueprint using Numerology to decipher the code or master plan that lies hidden within a name or name and birthdate when calculated together, once the baby has been born. Parents actually assign part of their baby’s DNA code by the name they “legally” assign.”

Simply put? I shudder to think what they might have written, if they hadn’t been so kind as to dumb it down for idiots like me.

So if you want to join what is likely to be throngs of celebrities looking for those perfectly prepackaged children, check out Baby Naming Charts With A Twist.

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Posted on February 21st 2007 and posted to CELEBRITY BABIES | Comments(1)

As anyone who can find Wikipedia now knows, Bryce Dallas Howard, (Lady in the Water), daughter of actor/director Ron Howard, was conceived in Dallas, Texas. Apparently the movie database site IMDB got this wrong for a whole year, and was tartly reprimanded for this sloppy oversight by the anonymous writer of the Bryce Dallas Howard Wiki entry.

Be that as it may.

There’s good reason to believe the Howard family makes a habit of flagging the place of a child’s conception via their middle name. Fast forward to last week sometime, and “Dallas” and her husband, actor Seth Gabel, welcomed a baby boy.

Unfortunately, his name has not been released, which can only lead to one conclusion — Mom and Dad can’t agree on where he was conceived. I can think of no other reason, unless your name is Holly Hunter or Anna Belknap, for not releasing the name of your new baby.

I’m sure as soon as things settle down for the new parents, and they have a chance to look back at where they were in May, 2006, we’ll be getting the announcement.

Gosh, I hope they weren’t overnighting in Climax, Colorado.

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Kristy Swanson and Lloyd Eisler, champions of the Fox T.V. reality show Skating With Celebrities, welcomed a baby boy on February 16 in Los Angeles, according to People.

The ice-dancing duo are naming their son Magnus Hart.

Swanson is perhaps best-known for playing Buffy in the 1992 movie Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which was the inspiration for the hugely-successful T.V. series of the same name. Eisler, meanwhile, enjoyed an outstanding career in ice-skating, winning Olympic medals on several occasions, along with top honors in the 1993 World Figure Skating Championships.

So why Magnus? I guess if you win that many sports medals, you’re a driven person, and you probably want your child to follow in your footsteps. Magnus, derived from Latin roots, means great.

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