This year was notable by a swell of great celebrity baby names, far outweighing the quirky, strange, and downright bad.

What were the very best? According to a Nameberry poll of nearly 700 people, the winners are:

Seraphina Rose Elizabeth, name of the second daughter of Jennifer...

Celebrities and pop culture proved the strongest influence on the baby names of 2009.

While the biggest baby name news of the year was Emma's rise to claim the number one spot for girls' names, the names moving fastest up the popularity ladder were influenced by stars, their babies,...

Unusual baby names are becoming more and more, well, common these days. A mere one percent of babies are named Emma or Jacob, the most popular names, and only about ten percent are given one of the Top Ten names. Compare that to a hundred years ago, when...

Of course young people are happy: They have great bodies, they have lots of sex with other people with great bodies, and -- well, do you really need any other reason?

And old people are happy too, because they raked in lots of money during the boom years and now...

Maybe because my mother fell ill in her 40s and died at 61, or perhaps because growing up I found very few female role models that inspired me, I'm always scanning for older women I can look up to and emulate.

They're not easy to find. The generation of women...

The other day on the nameberry message boards, I heard tell of a little boy named Vandal. And then, the next day, one of the bandmembers of My Chemical Romance named his newborn daughter (yes, daughter) Bandit.

Are these parents masochistic? Gang members? Or do they...

Most parents today work hard to find the perfect name for their baby. But still, it's all too easy to fall into one of the top baby-naming traps. Here, the ten biggest mistakes we encounter talking to the parents who visit nameberry.

1. BYPASSING A NAME YOU LOVE JUST...

There are some names that, even now, after writing so much about the subject, I hear and think, "Wow, that's a great name. I wonder why people don't use that one more often?"

Sometimes, the answer is that a name was just too popular too recently for parents to appreciate...

The nine-months-pregnant M.I.A. may score the ultimate celebrity mommy publicity coup and give birth while performing onstage at the Grammys this Sunday. Yes! Not only the most dramatic event, but at the ideal venue!

Even if we're spared that spectacle, we're confident M.I.A. will come up with an entertaining baby...

The Twitty Milk Hoax has ended! Turns out Erykah Badu and Jay Electronica did not give their newborn daughter that particular crazy celebrity baby name, but another, not-quite-as-wacky one, Mars Merkaba.

Badu, also the mother of son Seven and daughter Puma, is obviously a leader in crazy celebrity...

Finally, the name of the Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck baby has been announced: Seraphina Rose Elizabeth. A gorgeous choice, every bit as lovely as the name of her big sister Violet.

Still we can't help but wonder: Why did it take a more than a week for the celebrity...

You could do the holidays the frost-touched, gilt-edged, Winter Wonderland way. Or you could go totally tacky, and we're not talking 30-foot-tall pulsating plastic Santas. No, we mean something, or 50 somethings, much much worse.

1. Cut out the holiday tips to the cleaning people, the doorman, the nanny. What...

1. Can stop obsessing about whether you might finally be upper class and go back to aspiring to upper middle.

2. Will lose all urge to secretly vote Republican.

3. That novel you always swore you'd write, if only you had the time? You have the time.

4. No...

Everybody loves to make fun of celebrity baby names, and some of them are as laughable as they are outrageous: I'd count Moxie Crimefighter, Peanut Kai, and Sunny Bebop among those that seem to be more publicity stunt than name.

But stars are also responsible for some amazingly creative baby...

For the first time in a lot of years, I'm doing better financially than my friends who work - oops, make that worked -- on Wall Street. They're losing millions, suffering anxiety attacks, panicking that their entire worlds are falling apart, whereas for me, things are pretty much the way...

Everyone is marveling that Madonna is turning 50. Can you believe it?, they say. Madonna, 50. It doesn't seem possible.

Oh yes it does. (Cue old-people-style reminiscence): When I first heard of Madonna, I was a fashion editor at Glamour. This was in the eighties, back when Reagan was president...

I went into The Dark Knight expecting to watch it the way I would any other movie: You know, admire the actors and get caught up in the story, with a few mental detours to check out the clothes and wonder where all my Sno-Caps went.

But watching the new...

Okay, you know that forgetting what you were about to, uh, say or eating dinner at 5:30 makes you old. But what about the other, subtler, yet just as revealing ways of acting old? You may not be aware that what you're doing and saying pegs you as over the...

Try to think like a billionaire for a second. Make that a super-tacky billionaire.

You want a vacation retreat. So you head to the Adirondacks in upstate New York, the largest national park in America. You buy -- no, not just a house, not merely one of the Great Camps...

Okay, the whole world pretty much agrees that sex is just about the best thing there is. Some of the time. But let's face it: it can get better. How? When? Well, here are 17 things that can be better than sex:

1. The anticipation of sex with someone you're...