(FORTUNE Magazine) – In which Keeping Up semiproudly presents its almost annual (we forgot it the past two years) list of the ten most hootworthy events of the annum just ending. Back when this highly idiosyncratic act was getting started, we billed it as the ''ten most depressing'' events of the year (1985), but somewhere along the way your servant noticed that tuned-in readers were tending to cackle knowingly rather than weep into Kleenex. The entries for 1993: (1) The menace of price stability. ''We have economic news tonight . . . September was a good month for consumers. There was no inflation at the retail level. But low inflation . . . is bad news for Social Security recipients, whose cost of living increases are tied to the inflation rate.'' -- Tom Brokaw on NBC, October 15. (2) The emergence of Flotus. We learned of this person from a November 4 White House press office news release dealing with speeches delivered to the people of Ambridge, Pennsylvania, by Potus and Flotus. It turned out that they were in fact not the Bobbsey Twins but the President of the United States and the suddenly acronymic First Lady. Hmm. First Lady of the United States? What's wrong with Queen? (3) Phony statistics on the march. We were uncertain whether to give the annual P.S. prize to Business Week, whose cover recently proclaimed that crime ''is costing America $425 billion a year,'' but opted instead for a study, published in the November Journal of Clinical Psychiatry and uncritically hailed in the New York Times, holding that the annual cost of depression is $43.7 billion. We admit to being somewhat influenced by that ''0.7,'' a deft if daring touch, but had no doubts at all after plowing through the portion of the Journal article wherein wobbly assumptions are piled atop one another in an effort to quantify the particular economic costs attributable to depressed folks who come to work but then perform at subpar levels. Alleged cost of their subparness: $12 billion. (4) Victimology, Italian style. It had to happen; ergo, it's happening. The Italian-American Legal Defense and Higher Education Fund is suing the City University of New York on the ground that Italian Americans are statistically underrepresented on the CUNY faculty. Responding to this charge, which also surfaced in a U.S. Labor Department complaint, the university's ethnic number crunchers avowed last May that on the contrary, persons of Italian-American ancestry now represent 5.52% of the faculty, even though they constitute only 4.33% of the ''available recruitment pool.'' For good measure, they added that in a period when non-Italian-American whites were losing ground because of affirmative action, Italian-American profs were gaining market share. (5) Flotus speaks. ''I can't go out and save every undercapitalized entrepreneur in America.'' -- Hillary Rodham Clinton, responding disdainfully to a Congressman's question about the effects of her proposed health care package on small business. (6) Janet writes. Even if J. Edgar Hoover really cavorted in dresses, which seems doubtful, weirdness in federal law enforcement scaled new heights with the appearance of Attorney General Janet Reno on the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour in October, at which time she said the networks are steering our kids wrong with their endless depictions of violence and proffered a script she personally had written. Its story line: ''A 14-year-old kid is my hero who helps raise his two siblings while his mother is recovering from crack addiction, and he got her into treatment, and the end of the story is three years later, she goes to law school, and he graduates as valedictorian.'' (7) Best gag at the Gridiron Dinner (but one that won't be repeated by its author). ''Every time I enter the General Assembly, I am overcome with a sense of awe. Never have so many nations been represented in a single room -- since Ron Brown sat in his office alone.'' The reason U.N. Ambassador Madeline Albright can't repeat it is that Commerce Secretary Brown is in increasingly ( hot water for allegedly selling his government connections to foreigners. (8) Cheers for pregnant high schoolers. The media overwhelmingly supported the four pregnant girls dismissed from the Hempstead, Texas, cheerleader squad, but the main reason high school officials rescinded the dismissal is that the school faced a loss of federal funding if they didn't, as the 1972 Civil Rights Act bars discrimination against pregnant students. (9) Dumbest interview of the year. From an ABC Nightline exchange on the death penalty between reporter Nina Totenberg and Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun: Q. Have you cried over these cases? A. Have I ever what? Q. Have you ever cried over them? A. No. (10) Bias in quotations. ''I'm not going to disguise the fact that I despise Ronald Reagan.'' -- Justin Kaplan, editor of the revised Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, explaining why it included only three quotes from Ron, the same number as from Zach (Taylor), and not explaining why George Lucas and Star Wars get credit for ''evil empire,'' a phrase that will be forever linked to Reagan and the Soviet Union.