Etc...

Oh, you've come up short

This has been an unusual year in marathoning - you know, the races in which the winner (who's usually from Africa) has showered, put on street clothes, and been seated at the awards banquet while some contestants are still out on the course. Take the Quad Cities Marathon in Iowa and Illinois, for example. It was disrupted by two freight trains. Then there was the Sept. 28 Kansas City Marathon, whose top finishers may not qualify for the sport's showcase event in Boston next spring. Why? Because they didn't exactly run a marathon. Due to confusion on the part of the driver of the police car leading the runners, they all skipped a section and ended up covering four-tenths of a mile less than the standard distance.

While a record 83 women are serving in the House of Representatives in the 109th Congress and 14 are in the Senate, not all female political luminaries can be found in Washington. For example, eight states - Arizona, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, and Washington - have female governors. Then there are mayors of larger cities. The female mayors, all of them Democrats, their cities, and the populations (not counting greater metropolitan areas):

Laura Miller, Dallas 1,188,580
Jane Campbell, Cleveland 478,403
Beverly O'Neill, Long Beach, Calif. 471,000
Kay Barnes, Kansas City, Mo. 441,545
Meyera Oberndorf, Virginia Beach, Va. 425,257
Shirley Franklin, Atlanta 416,474
Heather Fargo, Sacramento, Calif. 407,018
Pam Iorio, Tampa, Fla. 303,447
Teresa Issac, Lexington, Ky. 260,512
Colleen Seng, Lincoln, Neb. 225,581
- Center for American Women and Politics