Eat My Words - The Kitchen Sink

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OpenTable Dishes Up Appetizing Conference Room Names

Kudos to restaurant reservation company OpenTable (my favorite free service) for having a contest to name their conference rooms.

Out of 51 entries, the winning theme was "fictitious restaurants or cafes from TV shows." Congrats to Julie Hall, the clever employee whose prize is a slick new TV. (How fitting!) Now people can say, "Let's meet in...

Central Perk (Friends)
Cafe Nervosa (Frasier)
The Peach Pit  (90210)
Cheers (Cheers)
Arnold's Drive-In (Happy Days)
Monk's Café  (Seinfeld)
The Regal Beagle (Three's Company)
Phil's (Murphy Brown)
Riff's (Mad About You)
McClaren's (How I Met Your Mother)
Moe's  (The Simpsons)

A foodie friend of mine works at OpenTable and was kind enough to let me collaborate with him on some names. These were our submissions:

BREAKFAST CEREAL CONFERENCE ROOMS
Cap'n Crunch
Count Chocula
Franken Berry
Shredded Wheat
Special K
Wheat Chex
Boo Berry
Malt-O-Meal
Froot Loops

KITCHENWARE CONFERENCE ROOMS
Spatula
Wooden Spoon
Cutting Board (great name for a board room!)
Pressure Cooker (another killer name!)
Corkscrew
Rolling Pin
Egg Beater
Garlic Press
Waffle Iron

We wish more companies would get creative with their conference room names - it's a fun way to add personality to any business.

Name the baby gorilla - his father will pick the winner.

The San Francisco Zoo is having a contest to name their new baby gorilla. Get this - the father of the infant, Oscar Jonesy, a dominant silverback gorilla, will choose the winner by selecting one of five colored bamboo sticks. I am not making this up. From the website. "A panel of judges appointed by the Zoo will choose five finalist names. Each name will be connected individually to five colored bamboo sticks and placed out in the Jones Family Gorilla Preserve exhibit for Oscar Jonesy. The first colored bamboo stick he chooses will be the winning name."

They are looking for "a distinguished name of African origin," so don't try to be cute. For the record, I will be submitting the name "Jambo," which means "Hello" in Swahili. (Swahili is the only language I have ever picked up in my world travels.)

 Go here for full contest details.

Wired Wants You to (Re)name NASA's Next Martian Rover

Here's a recent naming contest we read about on the Wired Blog Network - go for it!

(Re)name NASA's Next Martian Rover

By Alexis Madrigal 

January 20, 2009 

With the recent detection of seasonal Martian methane emissions — which microbes could be generating or eating, NASA's next robotic mission to the planet could become the most exciting unmanned mission in the history of the agency, especially if it discovers definitive evidence of extraterrestrial life.

NASA claims the rover, which currently goes by the painfully dull name Mars Science Laboratory, will be the most capable rover ever, with a larger payload of more sophisticated instruments. Originally scheduled to launch in October 2009, "testing and hardware challenges" have pushed the date to the next window when Mars and Earth are favorably aligned in fall 2011. The rover's main task is to answer the burning question of whether the red planet ever was, or still is, habitable for microbial life.   

We think a rover with such a cool mission mission needs a better name. Even NASA honchos know: They are holding a kid-centric naming contest sponsored by Wall-E to replace the current dry moniker.

Call us homers, but we have more faith in Wired Science readers than we do in your little cousins to come up with the type of awe-inducing name that will fit the next-gen rover. After all, you did an inspiring job with the Mars Phoenix Twitter epitaph contest. So, we're introducing another Reddit widget below for you to go wild with. You can submit your own name and vote on others through Jan. 26.

We can't promise that NASA will have anything to do with our official nickname, but we will link it from our future stories on the rover.

To Submit a Rover Name to Wired, click on the original blog post and scroll to the bottom of the page.

Vote For the Worst Brand Name of 2008

All year long we compile the biggest brand name  "Head Scratchers" in our blog. Now you can vote for the worst one and help induct it into the Eat My Words Name Shame Hall of Fame. Based on criteria from the Eat My Words SMILE & SCRATCH name evaluation test, here are what we consider to be the top ten offenders that we've discovered this year:

Airphoria -  a new "airline experience"

Authonomy - post your manuscript online

Chumby - a newfangled Linux-based gadget 

Cuil - a not so cool search engine name

Cranergy - Ocean Spray's latest trainwreck

Naymz - a professional "reputation network"

Salesify - the new name for SalesBuild

Shryk - online banking platform

Traackr - social networking popularity site

VivaKy - integrated digital media universe

Please vote for the worst here. (Write in candidates welcome.) We'll announce the winner in our blog in late-January. The company behind the winning name will receive a big pink trophy, courtesy of Eat My Words. (We're still waiting for our thank you note from last year's winner, Xobni.) NOTE: Feel free to post this in your blog and spread the word around.