What's in a name?

Granted, I’m no name-ologist, but doesn’t it seem just a little unusual that the National Hurricane Center people have apparently run out of human names to assign to hurricanes/tropical storms? For as long as I’ve been alive I’ve always taken some comfort in knowing that if I was going to be killed by a hurricane, at least it would be have a name I was familiar with – not some foreign name (e.g. Yuri, Stavros, or Osama) or a name otherwise associated with an object (e.g. Toaster, Battle of Britain, Ham Sandwich). It always struck me how normal the names sounded - kind of like how the name of a serial killer usually seems really normal until you find out he's killed dozens of people (e.g. Ted, John Wayne, and Jeffrey).

But now we have Hurricane “Flossie” wreaking havoc on Hawaii. And honestly all I can think of every time I see or hear a story about it is this mental picture of a Holstein cow rambling around the Hawaiian countryside pushing over tiki huts and smashing down trees with her massive cloven hooves. In my head, she’s wearing a little straw hat much like that worn by Minnie Pearl on “Hee Haw”. And that’s not because she’s a cow – it’s because her name is “Flossie”.

What does it say about climate change if we’ve had so many named storms that we now have to start using animal names? Will Florida be ravaged by Tropical Storm Spot in 2010? Will Hurricane Mittens bring untold death and destruction to the Carolinas? What happens when we run out of common animal names, too? Will we have to start using the overly long, ridiculously pompus names used in AKC registries for dog shows?

Because I can’t imagine how Fox News would be able to run a graphic covering “Hurricane Ch. Felicity’s Diamond Jim”* and truly capture the horror of the disaster about to befall those in its path…

* I don’t know what’s funnier – that this dog has it’s own Wikipedia entry or that one of the wiki-editors is demanding a citation for the statement that the dog’s gait is indeed “effortless” as described.