Irresistible

Will someone explain to me why tourists love Baltimore so much?Just look at the visual evidence. Tour buses line the parking lots off Central Avenue. There are queues in front of the National Aquarium and other Inner Harbor attractions. Some days Harborplace looks as if the glass walls are going to explode from the crush of tourists.Listen to the verbal evidence, which is often more convincing than the numbers of tourists who visit here. Tourists go out of their way to say how much they enjoy Baltimore.

NELSON MANDELA has recently announced that he is not a socialist. This is enormous progress for a man of the radical left who, during his long incarceration, was cruelly deprived of exposure to the swirling currents of intellectual change in the world outside.It is also remarkable when one considers that for most of his life his only substantial white allies, apart from a few churchmen and a handful of liberal intelligentsia, were members of the South African Communist Party. Even today communist members make up a significant part of the executive of Mr. Mandela's African National Congress.

Although Henry Kisor's irresistible account of transcontinental travel aboard the California Zephyr has no lack of train lore, it is fundamentally a story in which 500 wildly assorted passengers spend 51 hours in proximity to one another."

The massive, omnipresent object hanging at a diagonal across the stage in the Washington National Opera's appealing new production of Puccini's Manon Lescaut puts everything into sharp perspective. It's the flat, well-worn blade of a guillotine, a reminder of what's in store for all the preening Parisian aristocrats and their retinues -- the obscenely rich, indulgent class that Manon finds so irresistible -- come the revolution. Puccini probably never considered this 1893 opera, his first international success, to be a morality lesson about French history; he preferred to boil a story down to plain old romance and tragedy, centered around a sympathetic, if flawed, woman.

Pete O'Neal had spent more than a decade chronicling the world's darker side, as a crime photographer for WMAR, Channel 2, when he became one of the people on the other side of the camera.Four years ago, in March 1993, his 74-year-old mother, Jeromia, was beaten to death by a boarder she had taken in. O'Neal, who discovered his mother's body lying on her dining room floor after he tried to phone her all day, was shattered."To say that we were close would be an understatement," he says. "I would almost say that we were one. I was an only child, and my father came and went.

WASHINGTON -- August, when time's winged chariot usually slows perceptibly, is occasionally eventful (1914, 1939), and this year is enlivened by President Clinton's nomination of William Weld as ambassador to Mexico, by Sen. Jesse Helms' opposition, and by Governor Weld's feistiness.Normally it would require surgery to implant in the public an interest in an ambassadorial nomination, but this little pebble rolling downhill is producing an avalanche of fascinating facets.Because two Republicans are at daggers drawn, many journalists who normally consider the Republican Party too primitive an organism to have a soul are calling this "a fight for the soul of the party."

Another look at Geraldo's Diary:Jan. 3 -- Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fairest of . . . aw, hell. We all know the answer to that one. Geraldo's nose is looking especially good today, amigos. Finely chiseled yet manly. Prominent yet not overwhelming. Then again, for what I paid, it should open garage doors and double as a reading lamp.Jan. 10 -- Message on my desk says that a Yitzhak Shamir called. Hmmm, Shamir, Shamir . . . is that the guy who used to play on "Falcon Crest?"Jan. 19 -- Liz Taylor wants me. Ran into her at a party at Le Cirque.

Havre de Grace. -- We recently acquired a television antenna. I'm not at all sure it was a wise idea.Before I was married I didn't own a television at all, but marriage involves sacrifices, and soon there was a little black-and-white portable television perched on the cedar chest in the living room. I can remember watching "The Waltons" on it.Now we have two children and two color televisions. I know where the children came from, but I'm not sure about the televisions. They just appeared, like Faulkner's Snopeses, and made themselves comfortable.

"Wonder Woman: The Complete History," by Les Daniels. Chronicle. 206 pages. $29.95. Had the editors of Ms. magazine been able to read Les Daniels' fascinating, thoroughly researched "Wonder Woman," they might not have been so quick to nominate the female superhero for president. Nor would they necessarily have placed her on the cover of the magazine's debut issue in July 1972. Because of his erratic personal life, Wonder Woman's "father," William Moulton Marston, who created the Amazonian warrior in 1941, would not have held up under voter scrutiny.

Q: My older large-breed dog is having trouble climbing and descending stairs. He has good days and bad days. What's causing this? A: Any time there's a major change in a dog's willingness to do a previously routine activity like going up or down steps, we'd want to check for physical changes. Your dog could be in some pain, or may feel insecure on stairs. Many older dogs develop arthritis. And some breeds (like Labs and golden retrievers) are particularly susceptible to other joint conditions, such as hip dysplasia.