Textile-Optional Tennis (which means some of the people playing tennis are naked)

I spoke with my sweet Aunt Cristelle earlier this evening. I mainly called to ask how things are going with her newly adopted infant, who is named Greenwich Marzipan Coriolis, if anyone is keeping track. The name is vaguely of interest to me at the moment, as it relates to a response to Jono that I very recently wrote.  In my response, I wrote of the slippery slope that is embarked upon when a government becomes in any way involved in the process of granting permission to procreate. A person can apparently be so deficient in cognition as to lack the ability to differentiate between his or her own rectum and a sidewalk sewer access hole and yet still possess the ability to impregnate or to be impregnated.  The act of sex, it would seem, does not rank tremendously high on Bloom's Taxonomy of Critical Thinking Skills.

Like begets like.  Morons typically produce other morons.  This process could possibly be stopped, or at least slowed, by the government involving itself in the right to procreate. Most of us agree, however, that governmental involvement in anything seldom improves a situation.  Jono and I were lamenting all of this, or at least part of it, in relation to the asinine names that truly stupid parents bestow upon their children.

I proposed a solution that establishment of evidence of minimum competency be required before a parent is allowed to name a kid.  If the parent is too damned stupid to pass whatever test we agree upon to establish said minimum competency, the hospital registrar would get the privilege of naming the child. If the parent, in addition to being too stupid to establish minimum competency, is also too stupid to go to a hospital to give birth, the county birth certificate registrar would get the privilege. What, some might ask, would guarantee that a hospital or county registrar would also possess standards of minimum competency? There's no iron-clad guarantee, I concede, but odds are in favor of the employee being smarter than the parents who are giving their children names like La-a (pronounced La-DASH-a, of course, because a dash isn't silent).

We'll ignore for the present the obvious discrepancy of - within a word or name technically being a hyphen and not a dash, because who among us has ever heard of anyone named La HYPHEN-a?

It occurs to me that many people would look at the names my Aunt Cristelle and Uncle Mendel have given their children and would assume they must be among the parents who fail to meet minimum competency standards. Yet my Aunt Cristelle is a licensed pharmacist and my Uncle Mendel has a PhD in philosophy and a Master of Science degree in geology. I wholeheartedly agree that the names they have given their children are fucking stupid. In their defense, I will say, however, that their children's names are all spelled correctly.

Anyway, in the course of my conversation with Cristelle, she told me of a vacation she took with her husband and children to Finland right before their new baby was born [to another mother and given to them]. At their resort there was, among other things, a textile-optional family tennis facility.(Textile-optional  means clothing is not required.) Cristelle and Mendel and their two children, I am pleased to report, kept their clothing on while they played tennis. At least that is what my aunt told me, and I choose to believe her because visualizing any other possibility is too repulsive a prospect even to consider.

Seriously, textile-optional tennis? With the possible exception of gymnastics, I cannot come up with many activities I would rather not engage in or observe others as they engage in  sans clothing than tennis. What person on the face of the Earth who has attained sufficient stature life to have accrued the necessary financial wherewithal to build or to buy a resort would then decide to designate tennis at the facility to be textile-optional?  The world is going to Hell even faster than we think.