Just a Junior High Dropout? It’s a Matter of Degree

--Life is turning into a Catch-22 for 11-year-old Adragon Eastwood De Mello of Santa Cruz. De Mello is a math whiz who was just graduated with a bachelor’s degree from UC Santa Cruz’s Cowell College. But he now faces a problem that has no immediate solution, even for geniuses. If De Mello, known as “A. D.,” cannot find a graduate school to accept him--and a number have turned him down because of his age--he must--believe it or not--return this fall to junior high school, according to state law. “Our system is not equipped to deal with children like him,” said A. D.’s father, Augustin De Mello, who added that he may move his family to skirt the state education code. “I’d rather stay here,” said A. D., who also has a diploma from Cabrillo College, a two-year school. “But I don’t want to go back to junior high. I already know that stuff. . . . I miss not having friends my own age. But I don’t regret not being in the sixth grade now.”

--The Boston Tee Party of 1988 will never replace the Boston Tea Party of 1773 in history books, but it made a splash nonetheless. Angered over a Golf Digest article in which British writer Peter Dobereiner depicted the Irish as lazy drunkards, about 40 people on Sunday threw 20 copies of the magazine into Boston Harbor. The protest took place about 7 miles from The Country Club, site of the 1988 U.S. Open this week, and Dobereiner’s article described the role of the Irish at The Club. Dobereiner wrote of a fictitious member of the 106-year-old club in the 1880s who said: “It’s getting so you can’t walk around Boston without tripping over a drunken Kerryman. If we are to preserve our way of life we must have somewhere to go on weekends . . . with a high fence to keep the Irish out.” The furor then intensified after the Boston Sunday Globe ran the story as an advertising supplement. The paper apologized but said that it was too late to withdraw the special inserts.

--It has been reported that domestic matters may be distracting heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson from the business at hand: his title defense on June 27 against Michael Spinks in Atlantic City. Well, here’s one more little distraction for the champ. Tyson, 22, and his wife, actress Robin Givens, 23, are expecting their first child. In an interview with Life magazine, Tyson said: “I can’t wait to have a little baby so I can strap her into one of those pouches and walk her around. . . . It will be good to see my kids have some things I never had and see how they respond to it. . . . That’s why I take the punches, so they’ll never have to.”