Re: how much say do you have in pronouncing your name or town?
Things involving peoples' names are amongst my biggest pet peeves:
1) When a person has a foreign-sounding or otherwise odd name and someone who is reading the name out loud makes a big production of how he/she "has no idea how to pronounce this <hahahaha>" -- basically treating the person who has the different name like he/she's a freak. It's much more polite to make an honest effort at pronouncing the name, and then asking "Is that how it's pronounced?" without acting like their name is the weirdest thing you've ever seen.
2) People who have a weird name and then get upset when someone mispronounces it. It's fine to correct them, but don't act like they're ignorant for not knowing how to pronounce a name they've never sene before -- unless they act like the people described in #1 above while doing so.
3) Parents who give their kids weird names, so that their kids will have to spend the rest of their lives dealing with #1 and #2.
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