Time Out: Jesse Jackson, who will be...

Time Out: Jesse Jackson, who will be sworn in today as the District of Columbia’s non-voting representative in the U.S. Senate, was more into football than prognostication in New Orleans on Tuesday. “I’m here playing father, not predictor,” he said as he parried newsmen’s questions about his new role and its effects on any further presidential ambitions. Jackson’s son, Yusef, was also in New Orleans; he’s a linebacker for the University of Virginia, which played Tennessee in the Sugar Bowl.

Time on Our Hands: If Connecticut attorney Stewart I. Edelstein, 42, has his way, we’ll all enjoy three-day weekends twice a month beginning in the year 2001. Edelstein is pushing a new calendar in which months are made up of four weeks that alternate between seven and eight days. The current calendar, he says, “makes no sense” with its “arbitrary clustering of . . . 28 days in one month and 31 in another.”

Knight Time: Crime novelist P.D. James is now a baroness and romance writer Barbara Cartland a dame. They were among the 995 people on the New Year’s Honors List drawn up by Margaret Thatcher before leaving office as British prime minister. Among the others are Alastair Morton, awarded a knighthood for his role in the digging of the English Channel tunnel, and Graham Gooch, national cricket team captain who was named an officer of the Order of the British Empire.

Time Lapse: Monique Barry, 12, from Wilkinsburg, Pa., has been crowned “World’s Champion Liar” (at least that part of the world west of Washington, D.C.) in the Burlington, Wis., Liar’s Club 60th international contest. Her winning lie: “Her sister is so thin, she plays Hula-Hoop with a Cheerio.”