In fourteen hundred ninety two,
Columbus sailed the ocean blue
not because he was so lazy,
because judges in Genoa are freakin' crazy.
Five months after a Genovese family named their son Friday, after the day he was born, a papershuffling clerk spotted the name, got worried that it would hurt his future chances for "serene interpersonal relationships," and notified a naming tribunal.
The tribunal said Friday "recalled the servile savage in Daniel Defoe's novel Robinson Crusoe," and ordered the family to change it. They refused, and the court declared the kid's name will be Wilson, after the volley ball in Cast Away. Haha, kidding! How arbitrary would that be? No, the court changed his name to Gregory, because that's the saint whose feast day he was born on, duh. Besides, everyone knows Fridays are unlucky spirit days.
What to name a child? In Italy, a court can decide [reuters/yahoo via dt reader sara]
