Vast

HAPPY NEW year! I miss the good old days already. I was just starting to get comfortable with 2002 when it got shoved out the door by that upstart, 2003. What's with this strange newcomer, and what does it hold in store for us? New years can be scary. Who knows what lurks out there in the uncharted future? Couldn't somebody scout ahead and come back to warn us? In the meantime, before our next anxiety attack arrives, we have certain comforts to which we can always cling. Or, as we like to call them each year at this time: Reasons to go on living ... There's still time to buy a belated wedding gift for that cute couple, Jennifer and Parris Glendening.

Last week, we got several perfect days in a row in St. Paul - fresh and sweet in the morning, afternoons balmy, and evenings you could sit outdoors until midnight and talk extravagantly about life, as you did when you were 25. I have no idea what it was like in Minneapolis, but St. Paul was perfect, and so of course one felt the urge to get out of town. Possessing the ideal makes a person nervous: You sense the inevitable decline just ahead. Better to leave early and get a head start. So I flew to San Francisco, where it was chilly, highs in the low 60s, damp, foggy, perfect sleeping weather.

''I can't believe we'll go to war,'' says one neighbor to another, chipping ice off a car window on a January morning. The two are amateurs on war. But then so are the experts. The neighbors seek some small comfort from the exchange.''Something will happen at the last minute to stop it,'' says an acquaintance at the check-out counter. He says this with bravado or is it denial or perhaps bewilderment?In a dozen such daily exchanges, I sense the surreal quality to this approaching war. The pre-war maneuvers have been so deliberate, so apparently rational, as to appear somehow ''unwarlike.

Now that a number of state courts have refused to redefine marriage to include same-sex unions, cries of "discrimination" are being heard. The "equal protection of the laws" provided by the Constitution applies to people, not actions. Laws exist precisely in order to discriminate among different kinds of actions. When the law permits automobiles to drive on highways but forbids bicycles from doing the same, that is not discrimination against people. A cyclist who gets off his bicycle and gets into a car can drive on the highway just like anyone else.

A great debate is raging over "Caller ID" telephone services, which display the number of the calling telephone on a small liquid-crystal display screen.Some people say the service will enhance privacy by allowing the receiver to screen unwanted calls. Others say Caller ID has the potential to erode privacy by, for example, forcing the caller to divulge an unlisted number.In either case, many people believe the computer technology that underlies the advances in telephones is likely to emerge as the focus of the privacy debate in the electronic 1990s.

Oil companies put squeeze on independentsAs the manager of an independent gas station, I can see where the gas price increases are leading us. The large companies are selling gas to us for more money than their stations are charging at the pump to their customers. Once we are put out of business, and I am fighting for my very livelihood right now, the consumer will be the big loser. Then the large gas companies will have the whole show to themselves and they will be able to raise the price of gas to any amount they want.

NEW YORK -- John H. Gutfreund's large desk on Salomon Brothers' vast trading floor, the desk that once could claim to be the vortex of Wall Street, is now the property of an English non-trader, Deryck Maughan.The chauffeur that took Mr. Gutfreund to work at dawn is gone, as is the $2.3 million annual salary, as is the evening social life that he once complained dragged him off to three or four balls a week. The public relations office at Salomon says the firm's former chief executive left no forwarding number, nor has he been in contact with his former colleagues since Aug. 18 when he resigned under pressure in an emergency meet ing of the firm's board.

Sometimes a topic uncorks a strong response from readers.My recent column about the possible entry of Total Beverage, the Virginia-based chain of wine "superstores," into Maryland was one of those.Here's what some readers think of the idea:From Peter Griffith, Baltimore: Enjoyed reading your column this Sunday as usual, but wanted to comment on retail markup as actually experienced by the "regular customer."My wife and I routinely get 20 percent to 30 percent off retail price at the shops where we go regularly (Pinehurst and the Roland Park Eddie's)

WASHINGTON -- It has changed how the landscape is experienced and how cities are shaped. In it uncounted millions dTC of marriages have been proposed and relationships consummated. From courtship to crime to consumption, from the American economy to the American spirit, almost nothing would be as it is were it not for the handiest thing that ever happened for the hot pursuit of happiness. So let us now praise the automobile, born, sort of, 100 years ago.The auto industry's centennial is being celebrated because in 1896 the Duryea brothers of Springfield, Massachusetts, sold 13 cars.

The North Koreans were eager to talk. "Did you see CNN?" was our guide's first question the morning after the missile tests. Knowing that most North Korean citizens are completely cut off from any information about the outside world, I wondered how much our guide herself knew about the tests. As guests in a Pyongyang hotel for foreigners, my companions and I had access to the 24-hour news channels we take for granted at home, and had just learned that the first of seven missiles had been launched into the Sea of Japan.