The first color ones are to be released from the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, site of the thumping USC administered to my Wolverines last Thursday.

I am coming to terms with it, slowly. The loss, that is, not the Mars landing. The Europeans bounced a science package off the surface last week and something went wrong. All that science and all that effort. Perhaps it went down a hole, or the heat shield failed. But that is old news now. The victory of LSU over Oklahoma is still new news. It means that Nick Saban is going to be the highest paid coach in college football, and that the pros will be looking at him with new That means a split national championship, like the one Michigan shared with Nebraska back in 1998. Before the madness of the Bowl Championship Series began, and which we will have to suffer next year as well, since the contract doesn’t run out until 2005.

It is enough that it is over now for the college game, and we can relax and watch the pros march toward the Super Bowl circus.

But there is madness and there is madness, of which we seem to have a limitless reservoir. It is all better than being a civet cat in south China. The New York Times reports this morning that officials in Guangdong Province have determined that a man with a dry rasping cough has Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome- SARS.

It’s back.

The first known SARS case emerged in southern China in November and began spreading to several other countries from March, infecting over 8,000 people, and killing nearly 700.

They do not have proof of how he got it. There has been a theory that the SARS virus jumped from a wild species to humans. Speculation focused on the civet cat, and the mechanism of transmittal was thought to be either ingestion or airborne dispersal of fecal material, similar to that of the Hanta virus in the American southwest. We do not have the tradition of eating exotic animals here, and I will except the Explorers Club in New York. Thankfully their annual exotic dinner has gone the way of the buffalo.

It is not the case in Guandong Province. Based on the panic and potential association with SARS, the sale of forty species was halted last Spring. Thirty-nine exotic species went back on the menu in July, when the crisis was thought to be over.

One of them was the civet cat.

The civet is not what you might think. It is not a house cat. It is a black furry little mammal related to the mongoose with a panda-like face and a charming demeanor. Why they are a delicacy is beyond me, but if you have ever had a traditional Asian breakfast, you will agree that there are some cultural things about which it is better to not contemplate.

They eat other things in south China, but the government did not permit them to go back to eating black bears or

endangered snakes and turtles, but such practices have come under increasing scrutiny because close contact between animals and wild game may help animal viruses jump the species barrier to humans.

THE ban on the trade of

Chinese officials have ordered the immediate killing of every civet cat in captivity, a draconian but logical approach to containment of the potential reservoir. Public health officials are optimistic that the operation will be carried out in just a few days. By some estimates that is around 10,000 animals. There may be an accompanying effort to trap and kill civet cats in the wild, but that is a next step

Health officials in the Philippines report that a woman may have been exposed to SARS while working in Hong Kong. She and her husband have been sequestered.

With early warning, it may be possible to limit the spread of the disease. Aggressive quarantine worked last time, and the authorities even thought they had stomped out the disease. But it looks like there is a vast reservoir of the virus in the wild, always waiting to leap from animal to human, and will periodically infect people again.

So as we sail into this first working day of the new year, I will be keeping that in mind. And the new fingerprint requirements for entry into the United States. And the new profile of international terror, which based on the latest assessment of the threat could be educated female business travelers. There is another tape from Bin Laden. Condition Orange is going to go on for a while, they say, until they figure out the method of transmission.

Sometimes I think I ought to sequester myself until they sort it all out. But it seems there is a limitless number of things in the reservoir. Time to get on with it.

Time to get back to work.