GoldenPalace.com is in fact a person
Nein. It was not a mistake when I created this node as a "person." GoldenPalace.com is a real name of a real person.
"Please explain this monkey business!" you demand. All right, I will...
eBay has been quite an interesting place for selling very interesting things in the past decade or so. People have auctioned off (or attempted to auction off) body parts, entire towns, their head (to have a tattoo advertising a company), their soul, boxes with ghosts in them, and a grilled cheese sandwich with an image of the Virgin Mary on it.
That sandwich was purchased by the company/website Goldenpalace.com for $28,000. They also paid $65,000 for a ghost cane, $16,766 for a silicone breast implant belonging to a Playboy cover girl, and they ponied up $10,600 for a pretzel shaped in the image of the Madonna and child. Terri Ilagan, 33-year-old mother of five from Knoxville, Tennessee, probably thought "if they can do it, why can't I?"
RIGHTS TO NAME ME! LEGALLY CHANGE MY FULL NAME FOREVER! RARE, LIFETIME ADVERTISING IDEA 4 YOUR COMPANY/WEBSITE!
...was what appeared on Ilagan's Ebay auction page in March of 2005. She decided to change her name to the highest bidder's company name for life, in essence she'd be advertising that company for life. Unsurprising to most, and I suspect even to her, Goldenpalace.com, the online casino company, won the auction. They paid her $15,199 to legally change her name to GoldenPalace.com.
"I was driving one day and I told my husband, I don't think anyone's tried to sell their name on eBay yet," said GoldenPalace.com. "So I put it up for auction and I got all kind of responses within 24 hours of it being listed."
When she found out how much it would cost one of her children - ages four to ten - to a golf school that Tiger Woods had attended, that's when she got the idea to go out and rustle up some dough. So she put her name up for auction and the rest is history.
"To my kids and to my husband, I will always be Terri. My husband is real supportive," she told WATE-TV in Knoxville. "He thinks it's funny. As long as they get to call me mom, they don't care. They are already starting to tease me and call me Goldie."
GoldenPalace.com will probably face endless scrutinizing and ridicule when she shows her ID at airports, banks, stores, mental institutions, or anywhere else that might require her to do so. But that doesn't faze her. The money was worth it and will go a long way to help rear her kids... and send them to that golf school.
"This is a new step in edgy marketing," said GoldenPalace.com (the website, not the lady) CEO Richard Rowe. "We know that this will receive widespread media attention. We also hope that the money spent will go a long way in helping GoldenPalace.com's family. Anyone that has kids knows the enormous expense that it requires to provide for them. We are happy to help GoldenPalace.com make ends meet."
Could this now be a trend? In late-July 2003 a young girl changed her name to GoVeg.com - only that time it wasn't about money, it was about animal rights. A few decades from now could there possibly be thousands of people out there with website names? Will people actually start naming their kids Google.com at birth and avoid the whole legal mess of them changing it later? Will there be men and women someday named Yahoo.com, TheOnion.com, or eBay.com?
Or Idiot.com?
Sources:
http://www.globetechnology.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20050331.gthaymar31/BNStory/Technology/
http://www.send2press.com/newswire/2005-03-0330-003.shtml