Cranky Baby a Tough Little Guy

--What would you name a cranky baby boy who is described by his father as “compact and muscular”? Some neighbors in Provincetown, Mass., suggested Rambo. Others favored Rupert, Ziggy, Jericho, Gore, Brillo and Lynke. “It sort of got to be a town joke,” the father, Kim Rilleau, said. When the infant was born in January, Rilleau and his wife, Lynne, were in no rush to name him. They had waited six weeks to name their daughter, Elena, now 2 years old, and Rilleau’s parents had waited seven weeks to name him. “I think it’s real important to give a kid a name that fits his personality,” Rilleau said. So, for six months the boy grew anonymously older. “We got away calling him ‘he’ a lot of the time,” Rilleau said. The couple ran a name-the-baby contest in the local newspaper, but even that failed. It was a group of tourists who finally offered the acceptable name--Guy. “It’s pronounced Guy as in geese. It’s French,” Rilleau explained. And the parents were so excited that they hired a plane to skywrite the news over the town. But Guy is as cranky as ever, Rilleau said. “I thought maybe his stubbornness was his way of telling us he wanted a handle--but, no.”

--Using such words as vug, probang and qintar, Ronald Tiekert, who works for a publisher, won the North American Scrabble Open in Boston. “I feel in this tournament I played almost no unusual words, at least not unusual for Scrabble players, nothing spectacular,” he said. Tiekert received $10,000 and a trip for two to Hawaii by winning 20 games in the 22-round, four-day tournament. Second place and $5,000 went to Joseph Edley of San Francisco, who defeated Tiekert in the final game and had an 18-4 record. Edley publishes a word puzzles magazine. To qualify for the tournament, the finalists had to win two rounds of competition held last spring in more than 100 cities.

--It took Syaiful Bachri 28 days, but he managed to walk backward for 492 miles across Java, the Jakarta Post reported. The 20-year-old student relied on a pair of mirrors strapped to his head to see where he was going. “I did it because I wanted to outdo an Australian backwalker,” Bachri told the newspaper. “Many people along the way thought I was crazy,” he said. “But I’m the first person to do this in Indonesia.” The Guinness Book of World Records lists the greatest feat of backward travel as an 8,000-mile walk by Plennie L. Wingo, of Abilene, Tex., who departed on April 15, 1931, from Santa Monica, Calif., and arrived on Oct. 24, 1932, in Istanbul, Turkey. He, like Bachri, knew where he was coming from.