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W AYNE XXXXXX: sex assault
             J ERRY W AYNE XXXXXX: attempted homicide
             T ONY W AYNE XXXXXX: aggravated assault of grandmother in front of her grandchildren, robbery
             L ARRY W AYNE XXXXXX: home invasion
             R ICHARD W AYNE XXXXXX: police standoff
             C HARLES W AYNE XXXXXX: homicide
    Maybe you could assemble a list this impressive for some other middle name, but I doubt it. And of course anyone with the middle nameof Wayne has a scary role model in the notorious Chicago serial killer John Wayne Gacy Jr .
    Ms. Stewart also collects clippings with middle names that rhyme with Wayne: there were four DeWaynes, four Duanes, and two Dwaynes.
    After going through the package, I pulled my two oldest daughters aside (they are six) and told them they were not allowed to ever have a boyfriend with the middle name Wayne. Olivia, who is obsessed with a boy named Thomas in her class, is going to check on his middle name tomorrow.
Yourhighness Morgan
(SJD)
    Thanks to our Freakonomics section about unusual first names—like Temptress, Shithead (pronounced shuh-TEED), and Lemonjello and Orangejello—we regularly get e-mails from readers with similar examples.
    I don’t think there’s been a better submission than this one, courtesy of David Tinker of Pittsburgh. He sent an Orlando Sentinel article about a sixteen-year-old student athlete in Bushnell, Florida, named Yourhighness Morgan. He has a younger brother named Handsome, and cousins named Prince and Gorgeous. (FWIW, I grew up as a farm kid and we had a pig named Handsome.)
    Yourhighness often goes by YH for short, and also sometimes Hiney—which, to the friends and family who call him this, apparently doesn’t mean “tush” or “derriere,” which it did in my house.
    I like Yourhighness so much that I am going to try to get my kids to call me that for a while.
    In other strange-name news, there’s a sad San Diego Tribune article (sent to us by one James Werner of Charlottesville, Virginia) about a gang murder. The victim’s name was Dom Perignon Champagne; his mother’s name is Perfect Engelberger.
What a Heavenly Name
(SJD)
    What child hasn’t played around with the spelling of his or her name—wondering, for instance, how it would sound if it were spelled backward? (I admit that I signed some school papers “Evets Renbud” when I was a kid.) Well, now it seems that at least 4,457 parents last year did the work for their children, giving them the name “Nevaeh,” which is “Heaven” spelled backward. Jennifer 8. Lee (who is herself nomenclaturally blessed) has the story in The New York Times, showing an absolutely remarkable spike in popularity in a new name—from 8 instances in 1999 to 4,457 in 2005.
    “Of the last couple of generations, Nevaeh is certainly the most remarkable phenomenon in baby names,” said Cleveland Kent Evans, president of the American Name Society and a professor of psychology at Bellevue University in Nebraska. . . . The surge of Nevaeh can be traced to a single event: the appearance of a Christian rock star, Sonny Sandoval of P.O.D., on MTV in 2000 with his baby daughter, Nevaeh. “Heaven spelled backwards,” he said.
    The only squirrelly point in Lee’s article is the assertion that “Nevaeh,” the seventieth ranked name for U.S. baby girls , is now more popular than “Sara”—which is true, but a little misleading: the more common spelling of “Sarah” is still ranked No. 15.
The Unpredictability of Baby Names
(SJD)
    Is it possible to predict which names will become more popular over time, and which will fall? We did make a run at predicting some of the boy and girl names that might become popular in ten years’ time, based on the observation that the masses tend to choose names that first become popular among high-education, high-income parents. But trends, including naming trends, tend to march to a drummer that isn’t always audible.
    But if