Boing Boing reports that “the Reykjavík City Council has approved a citizen-led effort to rename a street Svarthöfði, translated as Blackhead, which is the Icelandic name for Darth Vader.”

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For the past four years, residents of California have been battling one of the most severe droughts in the state’s history. As a result, California is currently witnessing one of the worst fire seasons ever.

From July into August, firefighters found themselves battling a fire system named the “Rocky Fire” which burned almost 70 thousand acres of land. In general, fires are named after the area where they are believed to have started.

Other infamous California fires that have earned official names include:

• the 2012 Rush Fire
• the Cedar Fire of 2003

One of the worst wildfires in California history, the Cedar Fire is also known by two names that express its devastating size: Fire Siege of 2003 and 2003 Firestorm.

In Japan, last year was the “Year of the Horse”. As a result, many of the most popular boys’ names for 2014 included the kanji character for horse, for example,駿, 悠馬 .

Topping the list of most popular kanji characters used for boys’ names in 2014 was 蓮 or “ren” which means “sacred lotus”. Amongst the girls’ names, one of the most commonly appearing characters was 凛, which according to Japan Today means “dignified” and “gallant”.

See this article and this article for more information.

Digg and Atlas Obscura are crowd-sourcing a map of best and worst business pun names… Submit your nominations here! Nominations close September 7th.

Facebook recently deleted the pages of Balizar Orion Avatar and his wife Audry Avatar because their last name is a word Facebook has flagged as being a likely suspicious or fake account. See this article for more on this modern onomastic controversy.