You want your child to have all the educational advantages and all the best connections, but alas, he or she often winds up a glassy-eyed C student covered in tattoos whose main interest and only legitimate skill, despite all those years of viola lessons, is riding a skateboard down a steel banister.

So do what you can early on, and give your baby a name like one I ran across in my Vital Speeches reading last week: Princeton N. Lyman.

With a name like that, the youngster will become the first glue-sniffing skateboard punk on the Council on Foreign Relations.