Do you ever wonder if people are driven a certain way by forces outside their control? Have our parents imposed upon us our personailities and our defects from the moment of birth?

Coming home from an interstate roadtrip I pulled into a servo to top up my fuel. The attendant was serving someone, so I lingered around the magazines and checked out the covers of the men’s mags. The other customer left so I turned to walk to the register when the attendant calls out, “You looking at the men’s mags?”

“Uh, yeah”, I say a little unsure of where this conversation about to go.

“You should grab a copy of Nuts! It’s this Pommy mag, which is kinda like a mix of Zoo and Picture.”

“Nuts?”

“Yeah, that’s it with the yellow cover”.

“Heh,” I snicker to myself. I’m nothing if not juvenile of mind, so a foreign magazine called ‘Nuts’? I’m sold for the name alone.

I grab a copy and head up to pay.

“Just this and the fuel thanks mate”.

The attendant’s eyes drift down to the magazine thrown lazily on the counter. I giggled to myself thinking I’d caught him having a sneaky glance, but his eyes didn’t leave the glossy cover during the whole transaction. If he’d been any more intent on it he’d have been drooling.

I’m not overly convinced he wasn’t.

It was then however, that I truly took a look at him. He had pervert written all over his face. Not in texta of course, it’s a figure of speech – I’m suggesting the man looked like the sort of person who owned a pair of large binoculars but had no interest in bird watching. Not the feathered variety anyway. This time I’m referring to him watching women.

Okay I’m getting off topic. There was just something about his learing eyes, greasy brow, and sickly smile that screamed deviant… again, not literally. Not while I was there anyway, it tends to scare customers when you yell things at them.

Sorry, I’ll stop.

Any way he looked like a pervert, and here he was, unable to wrench his gaze away from the front cover of a magazine sporting a scantily-clad blonde in a bikini, long enough to even check my credit card signature.

As he finished the transaction quickly, so he could go out the back, throw his hand on the floor and make love to it like he knows it’s always wanted; I started to wonder – Did he look like a perve because he was perverse? Or was he a perverse because he looked like a perve?

Either his body has physically warped itself around his personaility, or the poor bastard has become a potential sex-criminal because of the unfortunate fact his unknowing parent’s genes combined to give him a bug eyed paedophile-stare.

No one would have suspected when he was a child of course. So innocent and sweet, but as puberty set in and his face took on that leer of a degenerate. He probably fought it at first, but there’s only so many times he could have seen that face in the mirror, looked into those cold dead eyes before it ate into his soul and gave him calloused hands.

How often do you see people convicted of hidden-camera type offenses on the news and think yep he looks like a perve? It can’t be a coincidence. This guy will probably die a virgin, in a sea of pornography, just because his parent’s DNA strands produced that face. That unfortunate face.

So if we accept the fact for a second that a face can change a person outside their control, what about a name? Take Conrad Black as a prime example.

He was arrested for stealing money, or being a bastard, or evil wizardry or something. The details aren’t important, the point is if you name your kid Conrad Black you’re basically saying “I want my son to grow up and try to take over the world via some dark scheme”. Not in some heroic ‘become Prime Minister of the UN’ sort’ve way, no we’re taken black magiks here.

So, are his parents actually the ones to blame in all this? Unlike our poor service station attendant, this situation was avoidable. They actively chose to name him Conrad Black. Sure they tried to soften the blow slightly by granting him the middle name Moffat, but no pansy addition to his birth certificate could fight off the combined power of the other two: Conrad – meaning awesome con, or criminal; and Black – meaning black.

In fact, I think our poor Baron Black of Crossharbour – a real title, which unfortunately didn’t help with his inherant levels of dark-dweomer – has been hard done by. If innocence by mental-defect exists, so should innocence by parental-naming-abuse.

I’m starting a letter writing campaign, and I urge you all to join me. We will fight this trial, and get our Conrad home from Azkaban!