Alarming

Last year, the threat facing Maryland's diamondback terrapin was as plain as the little noses on their faces. Demand for them as food or pets had skyrocketed. And a leading terrapin researcher presented compelling evidence that their harvest has been greatly underreported. Considering that Virginia prohibits the harvest of diamondbacks, it looked like a pretty easy call for state lawmakers and the Department of Natural Resources to follow suit. But what happened next made matters worse.

ROSS PEROT'S extravaganza was the Jerry Lewis Telethon of politics: an interminable rally at which thousands of decent citizens trying to do good had to indulge the high-pitched ravings of an egomaniacal clown.William Bennett was right, if unsuccessful, when he advised his party's would-be presidents "not to pander to Mr. Perot" by showing up in Dallas, on the grounds that he is "nothing but trouble."But however depressing the spectacle of Republicans and Democrats alike brown-nosing Perot, his pander-thon was not the most disturbing flexing of political muscle by a would-be demagogue we will see this year.

PROBABLY the best thing about American newspapers, other than their superior absorbency, is the diligent way they keep us informed about the latest Alarming New Study.America may have some work to do in such areas as education, crime, health care, drug abuse, energy conservation, political corruption, homelessness, pollution and child abuse, but in the all-important area of Disturbing Research Findings, we're unquestionably at the top of the heap.Perhaps the reason Americans cannot devote more energy to these other problems is that reading Alarming New Studies tends to put us in such a frightened, depressed frame of mind that all we feel like doing is slumping in front of the TV and stuffing our face with cheese doodles.

As everyone knows, two things in life are certain: taxes and death. Since not even politicians can do much about death, they are constantly playing games with taxes. Up they go -- only to come down before elections.But wait, this is not a municipal election year in Baltimore City. So why has the City Council cornered Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke into proposing a cosmetic 5-cent property tax cut?This is an interesting -- and alarming -- question. It again underscores how superficially the City Council understands tax matters.

FROM THE Chesapeake Bay comes some good news, som bad news -- and the sound of an alarm. John Page Williams, director of special field programs for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, reported recently in the Chesapeake Bay Magazine that 1992 produced "the best run of spot and summer flounder that anyone could remember. The fish were fat and beautiful, and they ranged up the main stem of the bay all the way to Baltimore, as well as deep into the tributaries."It was not a good year for shellfish, however.

Today, for a little "lite" relief, how about a tour of your refrigerator?Ah. There on the top shelf, there's a half-gallon of 1 percent milk. And what's that next to it? A jar of fat-free mayonnaise. And what can this be? Three chicken breasts, broiled in polyunsaturated fat, for chicken salad. And here's the tuna for tonight, canned in water.And this is . . . Hey. Wait a minute, back up a minute. Behind the pineapple. Can it be?Can it truly be -- liverwurst? Processed meat? And -- are we really seeing this?

A 14-year-old student was arrested yesterday on charges of raping a 12-year-old classmate just outside Robert Poole Middle School in Hampden, Baltimore police said.The boy had asked the girl to "go with" him -- or be his steady girlfriend -- and when she refused, pulled her out of the school, threw her to the ground and raped her about 10 a.m., police said.No one witnessed the scuffle or the rape just outside the school at 1300 W. 36th St.The girl went back into the school, told a friend what had happened, and the two of them then went to the principal and the vice principal.

Recently I read an alarming fashion article in the New York Times.I should note that I have never been on the cutting edge of fashion. I'm more on the trailing edge of fashion, or even the discarded cardboard box of fashion that the blade of fashion was originally packaged in.For example, it wasn't until this year that I went out in public with my shirt buttoned all the way to the top, and no tie. Before that I always followed the Official 1961 Guy Fashion...

AT THE AGE of 39, a time when a man should be coming to terms with himself, I've made an alarming personal discovery.The alarming discovery is this: I have started talking to myself.In fact, I talk to myself all the time. The conversations, by and large, are not that interesting, even dreary, really. Most originate out of frustration, such as when I'm tailing some idiot who's doing 45 mph in the fast lane, or I misplace my wallet, or some thug in my own household makes off with my tomatoes, as we will see shortly.

THE LIST of things that can kill you grows longer every day, to the point where it's a wonder any of us eat or drink anything without dropping dead right there on the linoleum.Smoking was the first thing I heard about that could kill you. God, I loved to smoke! In fact, I loved it so much that I would have smoked four or five cigarettes at once, if there was any way to get them all in my mouth.But the surgeon general warnings on the cigarette packs became more and more alarming -- now I think it says: "If you smoke this, you will keel over and die the most horrible lingering death, clutching at your throat and gasping for air. Just don't come complaining to us."

I was sitting on an examining table, waiting to meet the new doctor my insurance company had assigned me to, when she blew in the door, offered her hand and shook mine energetically. Then the new doc sat down on a chair in the corner of the room, put her feet up on the seat of another chair and clasped her hands behind her head like somebody who planned to be there for a while. "Tell me about your life," she said, and suddenly a routine physical became a cross between a job interview and a high school reunion.

Billions od commercially employed honeybees - vital to the production of nearly 100 food crops across North America -- have buzz off. Beekeepers say their industrious workers have been vanishing mysteriously from stores, their developing offspring and a forlorn queen and her attendants. There have been other such "colony collapses," or "dwindles," in past decades, experts say. But this one appears to be the most serious - in the number of abandoned hives, their coast-to-coast geography and their duration.

Last year, the threat facing Maryland's diamondback terrapin was as plain as the little noses on their faces. Demand for them as food or pets had skyrocketed. And a leading terrapin researcher presented compelling evidence that their harvest has been greatly underreported. Considering that Virginia prohibits the harvest of diamondbacks, it looked like a pretty easy call for state lawmakers and the Department of Natural Resources to follow suit. But what happened next made matters worse.

Baltimore's Bureau of Water and Wastewater took out a half-page ad in this newspaper last week to present its annual water quality report, and it was positively eye-popping, not because the information in it was especially alarming - to the contrary, if you do a little (figurative) digging, it turns out the water coming out of the tap is as hunky-dory as ever - but because the ad helpfully lists such crucial statistics as the MCLG and MCL and HLD of the Total THMs and HAA (5). Also, it was in really teeny type.

THE BLACK COACHES Association, in a statement Tuesday afternoon about the latest travesty of sports and social justice, said the firing of Tyrone Willingham by Notre Dame "sends an alarming message to African-Americans dreaming of pursuing a career in coaching football on the collegiate level." If the BCA is true to its statement and to its ideals, it needs to send an "an alarming message" of its own, to those who turned the clock on hiring back to the Jim Crow era, to the Notre Dames of the world and to the people and institutions who make them possible.

Platform, by Michel Houellebecq. Translated from the French by Frank Wynne. Knopf. 272 pages. $25. Toward the end of this mordant misadventure in international sex tourism, the narrator of Platform begins emerging from catatonic emotional detachment to consider alternative ways of being. Imagine: Love. Heavens: A wife? Mon Dieu: children. Not to worry about these horrors. No way such reassurance winds up in a book by French novelist Michel Houellebecq, at least not at this point in the writer's career.

House and Senate leaders are nearing agreement on new limits to Maryland's historic tax credit program, the first effort to curb a tool described as crucial for the redevelopment of Baltimore's older neighborhoods. The two chambers still differ on whether to place an overall limit on the program. The Senate believes it can change the rules enough to the keep costs under $50 million, but the House leadership wants a firm $50 million cap - a provision included in a bill passed by the House last week.

I demand to know how much longer the so-called "authorities" intend to continue ignoring the international spate of alarming incidents involving bosoms. At this point you're thinking: "What international spate of alarming incidents involving bosoms?" Unless of course you're a man, in which case you're thinking only: "Bosoms!" The male brain has an entire lobe devoted to this topic. Anyway, the first incident, which occurred in 1999, is summed up by a headline, which I swear I am not making up, from the Calgary (Canada)

MANY CRIMINALS may be stupid, but they're not blind. They can see that Baltimore's crackdown on homicides has dangerously depleted routine patrols in many districts. The result is that while killings and assaults have dipped, business-related armed and unarmed robberies have soared in five of the nine police districts. The worst increase is in the Northeastern District, where such robberies are up 75 percent over the first quarter of last year. Southeastern reported a 56 percent increase, Northern 47 percent, Northwestern 21 percent and Southern 15 percent.

HERE'S A SHOCKER: A comprehensive study of the federal death penalty has exposed problems quite similar to those you'd find in many states. Minorities are targeted more than whites. Some U.S. attorneys seek death whenever they can; others don't seek it at all. It makes for a bizarre, hodgepodge application of what's supposed to be federal law -- and too often, the poor, the black and the disadvantaged suffer because of it. Of course, there hasn't been a federal execution for nearly 37 years, so much of this disparity is academic.