30 December 2002

Dave Barry Couldn't Make This Up

The Moon and Venus are dancing in the eastern sky this morning. They have risen together and grown closer, changing places. Venus is now ascendant. Earlier it had clung below the sliver moon. They seem to have something going. The light is rising too, a glorious sunrise with the horizon on fire with tendrils of mauve and salmon spreading on the clouds below the last star and the only moon. The Sunday Post lies on my ottoman, still neatly folded. I didn't get to it yesterday, what with the Auto Show in town, and I doubt if I will get to it today. In the Sunday magazine supplement Dave Barry has his list of the idiocy of the past year, carefully documented. I will read that, in time.

With everything else going on, it was a relief to take the Metro down to the Convention Center and ooh and ahh over the sleek vehicles and admire the sleek models in leather pants and imagine what it would be like to take one of the new cars for a test spin. I liked the Mini Cooper S, my son liked the Cadillac Escalade. We both liked almost all the trucks, massive things that made it seem like there was no fuel crisis at all.

While we were admiring the shiny metal and brilliant paint, two fighters launched on alert from Andrews AFB to intercept a small plane that flew into restricted airspace near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. The intercept happened over suburban Arlington, VA. I presume it was near my apartment building, since the traffic pattern takes the aircraft very close to there. It is only a little jerk on the stick to take you from National to the White House. The pilot was directed to recover at Port Royal, out by the mountains, and detained. Authorities say it appeared he had strayed into the restricted area and meant no harm.

I'm glad the Authorities are taking things seriously. But there was other news from the "we mean no harm to your planet" department. Clonaid, company that claims to have created the world's first cloned human, says Baby Eve is coming home to the United States today. Baby Eve is a healthy 7-pound girl, delivered by Caesarean section, who is an exact genetic copy of her mother. Clonaid offered no scientific proof, no photographs and no child. Although the 31-year-old mother is reported to have an infertile husband, at least one of the other four cloned babies is reported to be borne by a same-sex couple. The announcement was met with doubt and confusion by scientists and ethicists. A former ABC News science editor has volunteered to find impartial experts to draw DNA from the mother and child and test them for a match, so this story promises to have legs for another week or more.

Clonaid was founded by Claude Vorilhon, a former journalist and leader of a sect called the Raelians. Vorilhon, a known Frenchman, claims a space alien visited him in 1973 and revealed the Secret of Life. If this whole thing works out, it could mean that women can aspire to a world in which the toilet seat is always down. And we will all be 31-year old American woman. Things should be a lot more like the comic strip Kathy, which is always about shoes and donuts. In preparation, I'm going to invest in the Krispi Kream Corporation and the Shopper's Shoe Warehouse. The Clonaid spokeswoman would not say where in the United States the mother is from or what U.S. city they would be arriving in. Presumably it will not be a in a small plane at Reagan National.

Elsewhere in town, in Fairfax, they are going to have a procedural hearing on John Lee Malvo, the accused sniper. The legal shenanigans are going to go on far longer than the sniper rampage. I hope they fry him.

I turned on the radio at five, as usual, but dozed through Vicky Barker and the BBC World Service. I was relieved that the succession in Kenya went smoothly. President-elect Mwai Kibaki was greeted by an enormous crowd of his countrymen as he took power from 27-year President Daniel Arap Moi. He promised to lighten the government's authoritarian style and end corruption. Moi conceded defeat in the face of a 63-to-30 percent defeat of his hand-picked lapdog, the result being a landslide of dissatisfaction. Hundreds of pickup trucks cruised down Nairobi's Moi Avenue, named for the former president, chanting ''Kibaki!'' and waving green branches as a celebration of a new beginning. Kibaki is 71, and an economist. He'll need help to change the life of ordinary Kenyans. Moi is returning to his estate in the Rift Valley, where he said he intends to act as a Senior Spokesman, a corrupt version of Nelson Mandella. At least Moi left Kenya unified and at peace, which is pretty much th! e way things are here until after the Holidays.

Secretary of State Colin Powell was on the talk show circuit yesterday ''looking for ways to communicate with the North Koreans.'' If Pyongyang was watching Meet The Press he made a great start. Powell signaled a subtle change in the Administration's position at the end of the show. Tim Russart looked startled as the former General said: ''We cannot suddenly say, 'Gee we're so scared. Let's have a negotiation because we want to appease your misbehavior.' This kind of action cannot be rewarded. We are looking for ways to communicate with the North Koreans so some sense can prevail.'' Powell seemed to be holding out the prospect for talks and stressed that military action was not being contemplated. At least, I suspect, we contemplated it and realized we were sort of busy this week.

But there is bad stuff happening to the northwest of Kenya. Another American solider was shot on the Paki-Afghan border and in Yemen a suspected Muslim extremist shot and killed three American doctors. He also seriously wounded a pharmacist the Southern Baptist missionary hospital in Jipla, about seventy clicks south of the capital of Sa'ana. They arrested the attacker who had concealed a Kalishnikov assault rifle disguised as a swaddled child. The ironic thing is that the Baptists were reportedly just about ready to turn the hospital over to the Yemenis and bring the Americans home.

With the year-end, it is time for the meaningless polls that mark our passage through the seasons. A Gallup poll of the "Most Admired Americans" was released in time to make the news cycle Monday. In the male category, President Bush rang in with 28 percent, well ahead of the runner-up, Nobel Laureate and Peanut Hall-of-Famer Jimmy Carter. He was only in the single digits. For women, Hillary Clinton, who now holds Daniel Patrick Moyahan's Senate seat after he misplaced it after a long lunch, was in a statistical dead heat with her successor in the White House, Laura Bush, and talk show host Oprah Winfrey. Hillary had a razor-thin one point margin over her competition. Clinton was favored by 7 percent of those surveyed. Bush and Winfrey had 6 percent each. The other 71 percent voted for Britney, J. Lo, the Bush Twins and Baby Eve.

The results demonstrate that even if the American people start cloning themselves, we are still going have an astonishing range of diversity in this country. Dave Barry and H.L. Menken were right.