> Personally, I've always found middle names a
> little weird. Is it a cultural thing? How
> many people on this planet have three names?
> How many have two? Just one? More than three?

I've several Chinese and Korean friends with no middle name... although some of them have a two-part, hyphenated first name, that counts as a unit rather than as two separate names.

And as Howard mentioned, in Indonesia it's reasonably common to have only one name. ("Suharto", for instance.) I also remember having seen mention of a single-named person from somewhere around India.

Incidentally, I read somewhere that the magician Teller (y'know, Penn's partner?) uses that as his official, legal name. Yep. That's right. Just "Teller". Getting his ID checked is often quite a task...

> And while I'm at it, what's the deal with the
> repeated name that seems fairly common in
> Arabic nations? For instance, the guy who shot
> Robert Kennedy was named Sirhan Sirhan. And
> the Foriegn Minister for the Northern Alliance
> in Afghanistan is Abdullah Abdullah.

"Abdullah Abdullah" struck me as a rather interesting name when I first heard it as well. And on the same subject, there's also the classic example Boutros Boutros Ghali...

-- codeman"codeman"38