John Ruppell was arrested for drunk driving when Florida police saw a 31/2- foot, green-and-orange iguana piloting his car. . . . Long-term heavy drinkers suffer no psychological or intellectual deterioration—according to researchers at the, uh, Australian National University. k The just-launched My Pet TV Network began with four times the subscribers of cbs’s Eye on People cable channel; shows include “Furriest Home Videos” and “Hollywood’s Rich & Furry.” . . . “Tourists recognize the television reporters; they never recognize the senators,” Senate historian Donald Ritchie reports. . . . Anyone for conspiracies? Chuck Norris’s “anachronistically masculine” TV series receives far less publicity than The X-Files even though it has 2.5 million more viewers, Time notes.
 Promise Keepers,which urges tens of thousands of men nationwide to be responsible, self-disciplined, and God-fearing, has drawn fire from National Organization for Women president
Patricia Ireland: “Promise Keepers have created a false veneer of men taking responsibility when they really mean men taking charge.”  Several states are considering legislation that would make obtaining marriage licenses difficult or impossible without proof of pre-marital counseling. . . . Genetic intuition: A study of women whose chromosomal eccentricities resemble those of men found that such women tend to lack “awareness of others’ feelings” and be “oblivious of the effect of their behavior” on other family members, reports Nature.  Michigan’s and Ohio’s economies, once seen as Rust Belt dinosaurs, are soaring; the states now spend tens of thousands to
attract high-skill workers to labor-starved companies. . . . Yet “in a 1987 bestseller, Ravi Batra wrote that a new Great Depression, at least as bad as the one in the 1930s, ‘will occur in 1990 and plague the whole world through at least 1996,’” aei fellow James Glassman reminds us.  The Washington Post editorializes: “a new middle-class entitlement for college tuition…may, perversely, lead
to increased tuitions rather than increased enrollments.”

On “Evans and Novak” Jesse Jackson supported boycotts of offensive TV shows: “They feel no constraint but to dump onto the public sex without love, and violence and drugs…lifestyles that are hurting the children and rotting our culture.” . . . A ten-year-old boy convicted of raping a 5-year-old girl told the judge he decided to experiment after watching a sex channel on cable TV. . . .  National TV-Turnoff Week has been endorsed by the American Medical Association, the American Federation of Teachers, Literacy Volunteers of America, and numerous other organizations. . . . The Pope last year urged “fasting” from TV.  “Lott for Sale: Will Build to Suit,” read buttons from the conservative National Center for Public Policy Research.
 “Do you let your kids on the Internet?” D.J. Howard Stern was asked. “They had America Online for about 15 minutes,” he replied, “until they got in trouble on it. Hey, I have three girls.”
 Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) is pushing his “Anti-Hypocrisy Act,” which would alter military regulations to permit almost unlimited “consensual sex”—adulterous, homosexual, or otherwise. The Family Research Council complains the law “would make Tailhook normative.” . . . Soldiers in the U.S. Southern Command may soon be assigned to guard rain forests or build parks in Latin America. “This is a legitimate military  issue,” insists Timothy Wirth, undersecretary of state for global affairs. . . . “Let’s face it,” says one wag, “The Citadel and vmi are dead. Would that they had died with their boots on, instead of pumps.”  Randall Kennedy, a black liberal who teaches at Harvard Law School, is skeptical of Clinton’s racial “conversation”: The “peril” is that he will “sponsor a series of scripted pseudo-events devoid of the candor and contentiousness required for any serious attempt to grapple with the race question.” . . . Reparations anyone? Revolutionary-era Americans loyal to the British crown often had to flee to Canada. Their descendants now want compensation for land left behind: One “chap…says he has the deeds for most of downtown Philadelphia,” sniffs Canadian legislator Peter Milliken.  The Rev. Bill Hybels, who has monthly spiritual meetings with Clinton, has urged him to support a partial-birth abortion ban. k A Field Poll finds that even in laid-back California, a majority disapprove of same-sex “marriage,” and half support California’s not recognizing such “marriages” performed in other states.  Only 45 murderers were executed in 1996, down from 56 the year before (the U.S. suffers over 20,000 murders annually).  Actual lawyers’ questions at trial, as reported by the Massachusetts Bar Association: “Did he kill you?” “You were there until the time you left, is that true?”    —SW