When the world is falling apart, it's time for a little escapism. And so we bring you the trashiest, lowest-brow trifle we could come up with: a list of the very worst celebrity baby names.

1. Tu Morrow (Rob Morrow)

You just know that this name came up during a drunken pre-conception conversation. The tragedy is, they never thought of a better one. We just hope the kid likes that song from Annie, because people will be serenading her with it forever.

Check out this very thoughtful summary of the current vaccination debate. Here's her conclusion:

Not vaccinating your kids is sort of like not voting: it might not make much of a difference, but you're betting on most everyone else making a different choice, and the outcome is one everyone has to live with. So it's not surprising that some refer to non-vaccinating families as freeloaders (or, in Amanda Peet's more incendiary language, "parasites"). But unlike those who fail to vote, parents who opt out of vaccinating their children are doing so for the very best reasons: they love their children and want the best for them. The question is, how fair is it to "protect" your children from vaccines if it puts other kids at risk?

Read the whole article here, then voice your thoughts in comments.

In the Babble article "Clothing Optional: I let my toddler run around naked," Ellen Friedrichs explains why she thinks it's healthy for her young daughter to be naked in public, and expresses shock that her daughter's nudity in seemingly appropriate places (in the park sprinklers, for example) has been met with such strong emotions.

In the new article "No Holding Back: Why I didn't 'redshirt' my kindergarten-age son," Holly Korbey writes about how when she moved to Texas she was pressured to hold her perfectly normal four-year-old back from starting school. Everyone's doing it, parents on the playground told her.

There's been talk about how video games aren't so bad for kids after all, and now here's a case in point: MyWebTimes (via GayGamer) reports that eleven-year-old Audrey Plique saved her family from a car crash because of what she'd learned from Grand Theft Auto:

Karen Norris, of Streator, will say no such thing. Not after her quick-witted 11-year-old daughter, Audrey Plique, sprung to the rescue of their family because a popular video game showed a potential danger of a vehicle rollover.

Meet Bristol Palin's baby daddy, Levi Johnston. Everyone's going gaga for him in his hockey uniform. New York magazine has gone so far as to call him "sex on skates."

The New York Daily News got even more erotic in its description: "A closeup shot shows the handsome teen with a light dusting of whiskers on his chin - his dark brown hair curly and wet."

Ew.

It's important to speak the truth about the dead, but maybe not the whole truth, and especially not in an obituary. Strollerderby has the full text of a scathing obit that ran recently in the Napa/Sonoma Times-Herald.

An excerpt: Dolores had no hobbies, made no contribution to society and rarely shared a kind word or deed in her life. I speak for the majority of her family when I say her presence will not be missed by many, very few tears will be shed and there will be no lamenting over her passing.

Remember Fake Steve Jobs? We've always thought there should be more fake blogs like that. And now there's another good one: "I'm More Than a Bonus Jonas, Dad," a satirical blog by a fake Frankie Jonas, baby brother to Disney boy band the Jonas Brothers. Here's a sample:

This is the new album the Other Brothers released today called A Little Bit Longer (I'm only 7, but that doesn't sound right). Here's a tracklisting, with what the songs are about in parentheses:

In our entire preschool and elementary education, we never had a male teacher, except for gym. So it was surprising to learn that, twenty years later, there are even less male teachers now. In fact, there are less male teachers in America now than there have been at any time in the past forty years.

Men are leaving the teaching profession in droves, and this great article on Babble called "Herland" (part of the Sex and Gender Issue) explains the shameful reasons why, and what an absence of male role models is doing to our kids.

Babble's Sex & Gender Special Issue has been getting record traffic, and a lot of that is thanks to Brett Berk's eye-opening essay, The Gender Spectrum.

Berk argues that gender is on a continuum, with most kids (even kids who do not live on the coasts!) falling somewhere in between Boy-ish and Girl-ish. (Take Berk's quiz to find out where your kid falls on the boyish-girlish spectrum.)

He writes:

Twenty years ago, Martin Daly and Margo Wilson published their now-classic book Homicide. This book overturned a whole generation of liberal scholarship. It is still a welcome antidote to the kind of nonsense that some liberals, unacquainted with the data, continue to spout today.

For instance, it is not unsual to hear that "with the exception of the police and the military, the family is perhaps the most violent social group, and the home is the most violent social setting in our society. A person is more likely to be hit or killed in his or her home by another family member than anywhere else or by anyone else."

Once this was the conventional academic wisdom. Indeed Daly and Wilson encountered precisely this quotation in a textbook by two leading criminologists in the 1970s. One can see the political purpose to which such conclusions are put. Then, as now, they are used by feminists, homosexual activists and others to justify legal assaults on the nuclear family and to provide justifications for divorce, gay marriage, and other "alternative" family arrangements.

Daly and Wilson are scholars of evolution, and to them this idea that genetically related people pose the greatest social danger to each other's lives made absolutely no sense. So they began to review the data. Indeed they went way beyond what anyone had studied previously, dissecting not only the facts from the United States and other Western countries, but also performing cross-cultural comparisons in some cases going back to ancient times.

Daly and Wilson found that the liberal scholars were simply wrong. In some cases the errors were statistical. For instance, consider the statement that "more people in America are murdered each night in their beds than on the street." This is probably true, and it's because vastly more people are in their beds than on the streets. The statistic in no way shows that the bedroom is a more dangerous venue than the street! When intelligent people make such simple errors the usual reason is that their ideological prejudices are guiding the way they read the data.

But Daly and Wilson made a more startling, and significant, finding. They discovered that the data on homicide typically did not distinguish between blood-related individuals and non-blood-related individuals. For instance, when you separate murders of children committed by their fathers from murders of children by mothers' boyfriends and step-fathers and other unrelated persons, you discover that the latter group poses a far greater danger to children than the former group. Specifically, Daly and Wilson found that infants are 20 to 100 times more likely to be killed by a step-parent than by a natural parent.

Since Daly and Wilson's book there has been a wealth of data extending their conclusions. The data on child sex abuse, for example, follows the same pattern. Biological parents are much less likely to sexually abuse their children than mothers' boyfriends or step-parents. Here the natural genetic aversion to incest is an obvious explanation, but so is the fact that biological parents tend to be more closely attuned to the welfare of their offspring.

Until Daly and Wilson's book, genetic relatednedss was not considered a relevant factor in measuring infanticide and child abuse. But Daly and Wilson showed that it is the single most important predictive factor. And their pioneering work is now supported by a whole ream of data. The point of course is not that most step-parents pose a danger to children but that children face a greater risk of violence from step-parents than they do from natural parents.

These facts of course fit perfectly with common sense. And even though the cultural left will continue to make excuses, the facts also makes biological sense.No wonder that increasing divorce rates in society have produced a dramatic increase in violence against children. And if these biological and historical patterns hold, a further increase in the legitimation of "alternative lifestyles" can only be expected to produce more victims.

According to the Canadian Press, a British Columbia woman, age 44, just gave birth to her 18th child, a girl who weighed almost eight pounds. Her oldest is twenty-three.

Her husband, Alexandru Ionce, said he wouldn't say no to more children: "We never planned how many children to have. We just let God guide our lives, you know, because we strongly believe life comes from God and that's the reason we did not stop the life. We let life come."

The large family is out of fashion these days, but maybe it's making a comeback.

Mother of four Katie Allison Granju writes on Babble.com about wanting six kids, and about how she doesn't feel her choice is widely respected:

Have you seen this (insane? brilliant?) reality show "The Baby Borrowers"? In order to give teenagers a simulation of life as a young parent, they are set up in a house with jobs and a real, live baby, borrowed from another family, for three days. Then they get children of progressively older ages for three days each too. The real parents watch from across the street on monitors and only intervene if they get really, really mad, as when the teen "dad" suggests letting the six-month old cry it out.

Reborn baby dolls have been in the news a lot this week. Police broke into a car in Australia to get to one they thought was a passed out real baby in the backseat.

Then, presumably to redeem their reputation as police-time-wasters, all this comes out about them being used for "cuddle therapy" for parents who have lost a child and for Alzheimer's patients.

We just saw on Strollerderby that John McCain, an adoptive father himself, recently said the following, as quoted in the New York Times, "I think that we've proven that both parents are important in the success of a family so, no, I don't believe in gay adoption."

Strollerderby goes into all the reasons why this is ludicrous, and how gay adoption has been shown again and again to produce kids just as happy and healthy as those in straight adoptive homes. If you want to humanize this topic, just check out this amazingly great blog by two men who are foster parents to a toddler.

But it reminded us of something John Edwards (remember him?) said back in the day.