There were plenty of villains to go around in 2001. Osama is no longer a viable name for a child, so stick it in the book of proscribed names with Adolph and Attila. Andrea Yates methodically drowned her five children in Houston then calmly called her husband at work to tell him to come home. "Is anyone hurt?" he asked. "Yes, the children, all of them," she said. Timothy McVeigh was finally executed for the 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people. He had no last words, but instead wrote out a few lines from William Ernest Henley's poem Invictus: "I am the master of my fate," it read, "I am the captain of my soul." 232 relatives of the victims and survivors of the bombing got to watch on closed circuit TV as McVeigh 'captained' his soul into the next world via lethal injection. Lawyers Marjorie Knoller and Robert Noel's 120-pound mastiffs, Bane and Hera, attacked Diane Whipple in the hallway in front of her Pacific Heights apartment. Whipple was mauled for as long as ten minutes before she could be rescued. She died after two hours of surgery to her neck. The dogs were ordered put to death and the owners were charged with murder. It turns out that Knoller and Noel have strange connections to white supremacists, prison inmates, and dog fighting rings. What do they say about pets turning out like their owners?

Less obvious are the shades of political gray that were cast across men like Bob Kerry and Gary Condit in 2001. Nebraska Senator Bob Kerry was haunted by allegations that he led a 1969 mission in the Mekong Delta in Vietnam in which civilians were killed. We've all seen Platoon, we know it happened. But the twist this time is that it happened to a prominent politician who earned a Bronze Star for the operation. California Representative Gary Condit's situation is more like something from Silence of the Lambs. While investigating the disappearance of Chandra Levy, one of Condit's interns, Washington DC police found out he'd been having an affair with the 24-year-old girl. What's worse, Condit's been cagey and evasive about the matter to the media and investigators. Condit's decision to run for re-election in 2002 is nothing if not Quixotic.

2001 had its heroes as well. When animals attack, Vance Flosenzier will beat the crap out of them. In Florida, a shark tore off the arm of Flosenzier's nephew. He grabbed the 7-foot fish by the tail and wrestled it to the beach. The arm was retrieved and reattached by doctors. This was the perfect cap to a summer in which it seemed sharks were all but crawling up on the shore to attack people (unfortunately, Flosenzier wasn't around when a Komodo dragon latched onto the toe of Sharon Stone's husband at the Los Angeles Zoo).

Statistically speaking, 2001 was a typical year in terms of shark attacks, but the news was slow enough that shark attacks played big in the media. It also helped that they were more interesting than the summer's big expensive movies. In fact, far more people were casualties of Pearl Harbor, Planet of the Apes, A.I., and Jurassic Park III than shark attacks. Besides, there was much more entertainment to be had scoring celebrity breakdowns. Robert Downey Jr. ran away with the Repeat Offender award, but Mariah Carey took the Drama Queen award. Her timing also probably accounted for most of the twelve people who actually went to see Glitter.

Although he's obviously a cash cow, Harry Potter is arguably a hero. He makes smart cool, nerdy glasses hip, and reading popular. But he's also got kids going to movies and buying merchandising crap in Star Wars-sized droves, pouring money into Warner Brothers' coffers. Now that her character is pregnant, I suppose you could say Jennifer Aniston on Friends is a sort of hero among single mothers. But to be fair, she's just traipsing down the trail that Murphy Brown blazed almost ten years ago. Hey, Rachel, I bet you wouldn't have pulled that stunt when Bush Sr. was in office.

A new kind of hero