Vote for Rico

How much you wanna make a bet I can throw a football over them mountains?

War is out. Rico is in, and it only took us a month to work that one out. We may do something silly with the spelling, but for now it's Rico as in Puerto Rico, as opposed to Ricoh like the copier, or Reiko like an anime character. It meets our basic cat name requirements. It doesn't have anything to do directly with his coloration, and it makes us smile whenever we call out for him (not that he cares yet.) I was hoping for more of a Japanese sounding name and ended up with a thoroughly Mexican one. Chris calls him Uncle Rico, I think Rico is humorous on it's own because he has really short legs and definitely rides lower than our other cats. (If you think I'm poking at a Mexican stereotype, you're missing the WAR reference... Get it?!?!1?)

So why is it so hard to just name a flippin' cat? Well, the way I see it, there were three things working against us, and bear with me, I've been meaning to bring this up for a while...

First, we can't use the same name as anyone else's pet we've ever known. This is my way of saying, you people with clever pet names have made things extremely inconvenient for us. Jeeves, Noko, Red, yeah, I'm talking to you. And that leads me to my next point...

I read somewhere (maybe Freakonomics?) about how my generation defines itself by it's individuality, not necessarily by traditional rights of passage. So for example, if you take a modern day wedding, there's generally more emphasis on how you're going to make it unique and memorable than how you're going to accommodate a rich history of marriage traditions. I believe the same is true for even fairly mundane things, like naming a pet. Giving an animal a traditional name implies that we weren't up to the challenge, even though Felix would have been a perfectly acceptable name for a black and white cat.

Lastly, names based on what an animal looks like are completely unacceptable. I call this the Obvious Rule. I know I'm going to offend somebody here, but really, Boots, Socks, Shadow, Marshmallow, etc, etc, blah blah blah are just insulting. What if you went to the zoo and all the zookeeper said, "Please don't feed Stripes the Tiger..." That really inspires the imagination, doesn't it? Don't you want to know more about this Tiger? The only time it's ok to give a pet a name a four year old could have thought of, is well, if you let your four year old name it. I met a cat named 'Moo' once, who was named by the resident two year old, and I'm fine with that. Ok, ok, there's ONE exception to the rule, and that's irony. If you want to call your fat dog 'slimjim,' or your black cat 'cue ball' you go right ahead. That's comedy gold. But otherwise, please have at least one degree of separation between an animals looks and it's name. If you want to name your golden retriever 'Brittany' because they're both blonds, that's minimally acceptable. 'Golden Grams,' however, is not. There is an Irish Setter clause though... you can name them pretty much any name from Guiness to Bono and it's cool. Thus sayeth the Lee.


As an addendum though, nicknames for pets are exempt from the Obvious Rule. We've occasionally called Rico ShortRound, which is technically is an 80's reference, but it's also extremely obvious. Murray is often referred to as Chucky or Ralph when he throws up. MooseCat or Sheds is always Sibbie. Oh, like you've never done it...