Talula Doesn't Do The Hula Anymore

A while back, the Zany Zany World brought you the story of a New Zealand couple attempting to name their child "4Real". Well, there's been a development in the story.

This comes from the associated press.

WELLINGTON, New Zealand - A family court judge in New Zealand has had enough with parents giving their children bizarre names and did something about it.

Just ask Talula Does The Hula From Hawaii.

He had her renamed.



In a ruling made public Thursday, judge Rob Murfitt made the 9-year-old girl a ward of the court so that her name could be changed.

He said the girl was involved in a custody battle.

"The court is profoundly concerned about the very poor judgment which this child's parents have shown in choosing this name," he wrote. "It makes a fool of the child and sets her up with a social disability and handicap, unnecessarily."

The girl had been so embarrassed at the name that she had never told her closest friends what it was. She told people to call her "K" instead, the girl's lawyer, Colleen MacLeod, told the court.

In his ruling, Murfitt cited a list of other unfortunate names.

Registration officials blocked some names, including Fish and Chips, Yeah Detroit, Keenan Got Lucy and Sex Fruit, he said. But others were allowed, including Number 16 Bus Shelter "and tragically, Violence," he said.

New Zealand law does not allow names that would cause offense to a reasonable person, among other conditions, said Brian Clarke, the registrar general of Births, Deaths and Marriages.

Clarke said officials usually talked to parents who proposed unusual names to convince them about the potential for embarrassment.

In the previous story, ZZW editorialist Lubomir Loebnovsky gave us his two cents. We feel it's only appropriate that he respond to the case of Talula Does The Hula as well.

Here's what he has to say on the matter:

The late Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s masterpiece, The Gulag Archipelago, describes so many types of torture it is baffling to even well versed fans of the prison literature genre. But in the rich tapestry of Soviet interrogation techniques there is as permanently cruel as naming a child “Tulula does the Hula”. Nothing in all the decades of expertly administered human degradation that Stalinist’s applied was designated for newborns and crafted to last for all eternity.

Even the American-imperialist, torture-machine in Guantanamo Bay allows their oft degraded guests to keep dignified names during corrupt trials. So what’s happening in New Zealand? Apparently the desire to humiliate a child has been the public prerogative of a two loose screws with no respect for the sacred innocence of new life, an act that would make Stalin and Bush curly up into a ball and cry for their mommies.



Being born with a name that stigmatizes like Tulula’s is no strange reality: after all, this writer was born and christened Lubmoir Lyova Loebnovsky. Being saved from that stigma is a great act of compassion which all reasonable people should stand behind as if it were the liberation of Auschwitz.

All too frequently people are born into desperation, into a life that denies them opportunities and hope, into slavery. Usually it is because of geopolitical conflict, macro-economic conditions, or natural disaster. For one little girl from New Zealand, a sentence of despair was a deliberate act of her own progenitors.

In most cases, children suffer because they have no friends or because they realize they’re stupid. In other cases, child abuse goes unnoticed and the world indifferently spins around the sufferers. In this case, a couple from New Zealand simply couldn’t wait to abuse their child the old fashioned way, they were too anxious, so they left a distinction of stupidity on their daughter’s birth certificate so that she would be haunted by the specter of her parent’s cruelty with permanence.

Congratulations to the authority in New Zealand which put an end to a prescribed form of abuse which no child should endure. Best wishes to the young lady who’s been given a second chance by a compassionate judge.



This is a global story and the parallels run deep. Incidentally “the reasonable person” test articulated in New Zealand’s naming policy is very similar to Canada’s Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act. The same wording of the expectations of a reasonable person is used to determine whether or not a surveillance practice is legally permissible in the true north strong and free.

From pole to pole, from hemisphere to hemisphere, and all across the commonwealth reasonable people are winning. Assholes who hate children are on the way out.