Oliver Norvell . . . ah . . Hardy

Browsing around on MySpace in preparation for a lecture I’m going to give on social networking sites, I made the discovery that Oliver hardy (of Laurel and Hardy fame) was born Norvell Hardy, and later changed his name to Oliver in honor of his father (at least according to Wikipedia). I saw a tag for “Oliver Norvell Hardy” on someone’s MySpace profile. My son’s name, of course, is João Oliver Martins Norvell.