I will confess I’ve had my own run-ins with self branding, beginning at the early age of six, when I was christened. Why my parents had waited for this rite I never discovered. But wait they did, and I found my six-year-old self, one Sunday, dressed in an uncomfortable dress shirt, coat and tie in the sanctuary of Berkeley, California’s Northbrae Community Church, a child in the midst of a batch of parents with infants, ready to have my name officially sanctioned with a water drip. At home, as my father was tying my necktie, he told me “if you don’t like the name you have, now’s the time to change it.” Up until that time, the thought of changing my name had never occurred to me. Of course I’d thought I was probably adopted, that my real parents were somewhere, waiting to claim me. But the possibility of changing my name hadn’t really occurred. I did have a nickname, dropped on me by my father.