THE INITIALS OF FATE

Have you ever hated your name? Apparently some people have. A recently published study by researchers at the University of California in San Diego has suggested that people with "cooler" initials--such as ACE, JOY, WOW or GOD--might actually live longer than people with more negative ones, like BUM, UGH, ILL, PIG, ASS or DED. The study looked at five million California death certificates and singled out 3,487 men (whose names are less likely to change over a lifetime). The study included 2,287 men with decidedly negative monograms and 1,200 WINners and VIP-types.

On average, those who were ILL or DED died 2.8 years earlier than a control group, while the GODly lived an average of 4.48 years longer. Of the JOYful, 0.5 percent died in suicides and 2.5 percent in accidents, while 3.5 percent of the BUMlike took their own lives and 6 percent died in accidents.

According to Nicholas Christenfeld, one of the researchers quoted in a story by The Associated Press, there may be "some psychological factor that can exert its impact cumulatively over the years...At every stage it's a little tiny depressant to be called PIG, or a little tiny boost to your esteem to be called ACE or WOW."

We at Dartboard are fascinated and have been flipping through facebooks searching for our blockmates' middle initials ever since we heard the news. And we wonder: How does this bode for Dean of Students Archie C. Epps III, or for Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles? Then again, everything's a little bit weirder in California.