A Quick Study, Student Tests His Luck and Scores Big

--Some people are merely a perfect 10. Columbia, Mo., high school student James West, 17, is a perfect 1,600. James, who attends Columbia’s Rock Bridge High School, scored a perfect 1,600 on the Scholastic Aptitude Test, one of only nine students among the 1.7 million who took the SAT test this year to do so. James, whose hobbies include playing war games and reading science fiction, political science and philosophy, attributed his 100% score to luck. “I think the only way to do that sort of thing on the SAT is not to take it seriously,” he said. “If you take it seriously, you get flustered and you start making mistakes.” He said he never studies and that the night before the test he watched movies with friends and did not get home until an hour or two before the test began.

--Looking for a stocking stuffer for Christmas? How about a finback whale? For a mere $25--or $50 for a mother and her calf--you can “adopt” Lunch or Nick or Scarlip O’Hara, just a few of the 80-foot-long finbacks that have been catalogued by the College of the Atlantic’s Allied Whale research organization. You can’t take your whale home with you, but you will get a color photograph, a brief history of the animal and the satisfaction of contributing toward much-needed research, according to Adopt a Finback Whale organizer Bob Bowman. “It’s a little like adopting a Cabbage Patch doll, but it’s all a true story,” Bowman said. One taker is Lisa Baraff, who adopted whales for her 6- and 9-year-old nephews. “I like to send them something more than just a toy,” said Baraff, a research associate at the Bar Harbor, Me., college who has worked with whales for five years.

--Government bureaucracy being what it is, true believers will no doubt be relieved to learn that Santa Claus has been given a federal certificate for air travel throughout the United States. In order No. 86-12-600 signed by Assistant Transportation Secretary Matthew Scocozza, Kris Kringle, d.b.a. Santa Claus, “generally asserts that he performs a vital and specialized transportation service.” His vehicle, a reindeer-powered sleigh, while not specifically cleared by the Federal Aviation Administration, “has operated for centuries without any incident and obviously must be airworthy.” The order is set to expire Dec. 26 “or at such time as the applicant has navigated over the United States on Christmas, 1986, and delivered good cheer to all of its citizens.”