Shouldn’t it be the bi-millennium? Anyway, for those not of the Christian faith, which as far as I know is all of us, the millennium, according to South Park, is the day every thousand years when Jesus comes out and if he sees his own shadow, we will have a thousand years of peace and contentment.

Jesus will appear on the Mount of Olives, and you can watch it on web-cam. Well, you can if your web-server isn’t an incredible wimp like mine, which is shutting down for a day just to be safe.

With increasing mutterings about whether the Russian apartment building bombings were just a Reichstag/Tonkin Gulf-type incident, the Russians miraculously arrested some of the culprits yesterday. Very believable.

So on Monday Turkmenistan abolishes the death penalty, and on Tuesday it names Niyazov president-for-life. I’m sure this amounts to some sort of collective statement about life imprisonment, but whatever.

Guatemala elects a president who is a confessed multiple murderer and, worse, a crony slash puppet of Efrian Rios Montt of evil memory. And it wasn’t even close. In Peru, Fujimori is also giving that president for life thing a go. And in Venezuela, the first thing former failed-coup leader and now elected-president Hugo Chavez does when there’s a national disaster is start wearing military fatigues. At least in the good old days immortalized by the movie Bananas, when these assholes seized power through coups rather than elections, you could kid yourself that the locals would probably prefer to live in a democracy.

A perhaps unfortunate headline in the Washington Post: “Tipper Gore Has Lump Removed.” But he’s still running for president, right?