I don’t care what anybody says; I’m going to call the new Pope “Joey Ratz” until I get tired of it. This is one side effect of having “The Sopranos” on on-demand cable.

Oy, but it’s going to be a long day. I can feel it already, and it’s barely begun. Last night’s rowing class hit new levels of torture, and the teacher said the real pain lies ahead. I was physically exhausted in that way that makes it hard to sleep, which means I pushed too hard, but after my sedentary winter, it felt good to push. Until it didn’t, alas. My form still needs work, in case you’re interested. Sure you are.

A long, grueling day is probably payback for yesterday, which was a beautiful, non-grueling one, topped by a return to Ann Arbor. I asserted alumni privilege to attend a seminar at Wallace House with none other than Susan Orlean, who is in the very select and small group of journalists to be portrayed by a fabulously beautiful Hollywood actor. Her talk was very good and, like all W.H. events, off the record, so I can’t repeat her very funny anecdote about what it was like to read the “Adaptation” script for the first time. If you ever run into her, ask her to tell it.

This is the last week of this year’s fellowship, and the current class had the look I expected — still cheery, but with a slowly dawning realization that time advances in tidy 24-hour segments, and midnight is approaching, and the coach is about to turn back into a pumpkin. I should have told them what another alumnus told our class in October, back when we were still giddy: “Start the Prozac at the beginning of April. It takes about a month to kick in.”

So, then. Bloggage: Today is the first full day of the papacy of Joey Ratz, which means only a few hundred thousand words have been written about him so far. Before you bother to plow through the ignorant, uninformed ones, check out this profile of the man by John Allen, Vatican correspondent for National Catholic Reporter. Allen’s been turning up here and there on mainstream media in the last couple weeks, and strikes me as that rarity of rarity among religious journalists: A journalist. Level-headed, fair and free of ax/grindstone. Worth the time, if things like that interest you.

I’m frequently in agreement with James Wolcott, but not on his recommendation of “House” as “the best new series on TV.” I’ve been watching “House,” which I prefer to call by Heather Havrilesky’s suggestion, “Dr. Grumpy Pants,” mainly because it comes on after “American Idol” and by that hour, I’ve lost the impulse to look for something better. Wolcott’s right that Hugh Laurie does a great job with the lead role, but the rest of it makes me purely insane. I’m enough of a journalist that I have a limit to how much disbelief I can suspend, and “House” takes place in yet another Fantasy Hospital, where great-looking doctors sit around brainstorming on diagnoses, while Laurie fills his down time treating run-of-the-mill patients whose major complaint is they have this lump. Just once I want Laurie to say, “Your problem is, you have a subplot growing in your abdomen, and it needs to be removed.”

Last night was it for me. Now it’s HBO series, “Idol” and nothing else. I’d be better off writing.

One of the many tricks my dog can do — all of which involve barking — is this: If you say “bow wow wow,” he’ll bark back at you. Usually three times, which I think is really funny, but admittedly in a you-have-to-be-there sort of way:

“Bow wow wow!”

“Bark bark bark!”

So the other day I was walking through the house, singing “Atomic Dog,” which we all know has a great chorus: “Bow wow wow yippee yo yippee yay bow wow yippee yo yippee yay.” And my own atomic dog took up the call. I think “Atomic Dog” should be his theme song. Joel Achenbach asks, “What’s yours?” And yes, one of his commenters calls him on stealing ideas from Ally McBeal.

Sure, its frivolous and frothy, but once you’ve plowed through that Joey Ratz profile, you’re going to need it.

Nothing like an 85-degree day to put your winter coat in storage for another year. No muss, no fuss and no products necessary. Think I’ll go find something smelly to roll in.

Check back later to see what Stefano and his crew of artisans have in store for this scruffy pup.

Is anything as satisfying as a well-crafted thriller? Does anything get you as trembly as discovering a new thriller writer who’s been working for a while, and has a long string of titles for you to work through?

No? Well, I figured as much.

I’m not even a huge fan of mysteries/crime fiction, but the writers I like, I like — John D. MacDonald, Ross McDonald, Martin Cruz Smith, the faboo Ms. Laura Lippman of course of course. There are others. Elmore Leonard, who gives the librarians fits because they don’t know where to shelve him. Ms. Lippman’s first stand-alone — Every Secret Thing — is double-shelved, too, at least in Grosse Pointe, in mystery and fiction, and that’s a good sign.

All this by way of saying after years of seeing this phrase popping up here and there — “the taut, well-crafted thrillers of Patricia Highsmith” — I finally got around to taking one off a shelf. The edition of “The Talented Mr. Ripley” I picked up is post-1999 movie, with Matt Damon’s face on the cover, but I don’t care. It’s just that good.

And the best part? Reaching the final page, and seeing there are at least six! more! Ripley books!

I know what I’ll be doing this summer.

Bloggage:

OK, so we all know the country is being overrun by the religious right, but just in case you need one more piece of evidence at what, precisely, their mindset is all about, consider this story, from yesterday’s WashPost, on the cottage industry Christian conservatives are making of “re-editing” Hollywood movies to take the dirty parts out. Most of the story is pretty predictable: blah blah blah parent’s right to control their child’s viewing blah blah blah artistic integrity blah blah blah and so on, but I was most amused by the little details — you know, what exactly is being excised from which movies, in the spirit of preserving innocence.

Some you can predict: Kate Winslet’s nude scene in “Titanic,” some of the gorier gore in “Saving Private Ryan” (but not in “The Passion of the Christ,” hmm), and so on, but how about the scene in “The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie” in which Patrick the starfish sings and dances in fishnet stockings and high heels?

“We don’t hate homosexuals,” says Sandra Teraci. “We just don’t think that lifestyle should be glorified. It’s becoming rampant in more types of films.”

As Alan points out: “I think starfish are asexual, anyway.” Patrick was just getting in touch with his female DNA. (Technically, they can reproduce both sexually and asexually.)

By the way, when people like Sandra Teraci say “We don’t hate homosexuals”? Why don’t we all take a moment to laugh in her face, figuratively speaking.

Richard Cohen tells the truth about Bill Frist. Lots of people have already, but, you know: Noted.

Jack Shafer explains why journalists love Romenesko, and why lots of non-journalists do, too.

We have black squirrels here in Detroit. (I call them Grosse Pointe sables.) I know, I know — lots of places have black squirrels, but this is my first experience with them, so humor me. I didn’t realized they have such a large fan base, but I haven’t seen anything yet that discusses how aggressive they are. Technically the black coat is supposed to be the only difference between them and the more common gray and red varieties, but just based on casual observation, I’d say the Detroit black squirrel is a breed apart. If I don’t keep the garage door closed, they come in and eat through the trash bags, something I’ve never seen another variety do. Other stories are more alarming, although I’ll say the day one gnaws through my window screens and steals my bread is the day I buy a shotgun.

Enjoy the day. With a high of 80-freakin’-degrees predicted for this one, I plan to.

When it comes to love, everyone wants to make ridiculous comparisons to the animal world. Someone’s always pointing out that any old wolf is a better husband than Donald Trump, that gorillas raise their young with more loving attention than the average lawyer, that the sex life of a hermaphroditic slug is really something incredibly hot.

True, the glimpses I’ve gotten of animal id invite more. My sister-in-law had a parakeet that masturbated tirelessly on a stick in its cage. Equine congress, while brief (seven thrusts and a stallion is done, something to remember the next time someone calls you one), at least has the fillip of violence — mares will kick the crap out of suitors, who pay the ladies back by biting their necks when finally “in the saddle,” so to speak.

Just the other day, I came across the charming springtime ritual of goose love. At first I thought an unfortunate bird was snared on some fishing line at the lake’s edge, but no, as I drew closer on my bike, I saw that all the wing-beating was between two birds, not one, and had the unmistakable flavor of a boudoir encounter. What was interesting was the related action: As the gander finally had his way with the goose, he climbed atop her back, nearly drowning her in the process. Her head was just above water, and he held her neck in his bill — yes, just like Yeats described. (And yes, Yeats was writing about a swan, not a goose, but that seems a minor taxonomic quibble, all things considered.)

But! The hot goose-on-goose action drew an audience! Two others glided up to watch, honking excitedly at the peep show. When the male released the female, they continued to honk, and then the male started honking at the female. She swam off, him at her side, not cooing at her tenderly or smoothing her ruffled feathers, but honk-honk-honking in crude triumph: “You’re mine now!”

It was so disturbing I had to consult Stokes when I got home. According to “A Guide to Bird Behavior, Vol. 1,” they both should have been doing the postcoital Head-Up display. On the other hand, those geese are now mated for life. Which is more than you can say about Donald Trump, certainly.

By the way, the encounter didn’t last long, another seven-stroker, I’d say. Sex is pretty perfunctory when you’re a prey animal; did you know that? Copulation = vulnerability. All the good sex — or at least the longer-lasting sex — happens between predators, despite what those rabbits say. Ask any cat.

In action that had absolutely nothing to do with the aforementioned activity, Alan and I had a rare and unexpected bit of free babysitting Saturday, which came too late to do anything requiring planning but early enough to get the hell out of the house. I wanted ethnic food, and I wanted it someplace other than the east side, which meant we went, rather impulsively, to Greektown, the D’s tourist trap. Yes, I had the saganaki; when in Greektown, do as the tourists do, and there’s always the chance for some real fun when flaming brandy is involved. Ours flared up with nothing more remarkable than the usual “Opa!” It was good, though.

Of course you can’t go to Greektown without a casino stop. I was feeling lucky enough to play some blackjack, but the place was crowded and smoky and loud as hell with all those hideous slot machines. The only tables with any open spaces were the $25 minimums, and no thanks. Craps tempted me, but only until I looked at the table and realized, I have no idea how to play this. I mean, not a clue, other than to step up and say, “Eight the hard way,” the way Philip Baker Hall does. And I would probably lose.

Is there a greater disconnect between the movies and reality than in its depiction of gambling? I go into a casino, I’m expecting James Bond or, at the very least, George Clooney. Reality is some old lady with extra-long cigarettes or maybe an oxygen tank, grimly pouring the month’s Social Security check, quarter by quarter, into the slots. You don’t even have to pull the handle anymore. That’s just wrong.

That said, I always had a hankering to be a blackjack dealer. I love that thing they do with their hands when they go on break. The world is short of stylish gestures, and that’s one of them.

Sunday bloggage? Lots of possibilities, but I’m too lazy to look for them now. Read your own papers once in a while.

Enjoy Dahlia Lithwick while you’ve got her in Slate, because sooner or later she’ll be snatched up by the NYT or WashPost or some other smart editor, and she’ll file less often, or you might have to register to enjoy her common-sensical looks at jurisprudence.

Should pharmacists be allowed to refuse to dispense birth control? she asks today. Answer: Hail no:

A woman’s decision to use birth control or emergency contraception is between her and her physician, period. Hard questions about the circumstances of her pregnancy, her marital status, and her alternatives can be asked there�if they need be asked at all. But for a pharmacist to subordinate a physician’s judgment to his own is the height of arrogance. Reports from around the country�of pharmacists delivering hectoring lectures, discriminating against unmarried women, or refusing to return prescription forms to be filled elsewhere�reveal what happens when pharmacists are allowed to interpose their own values between a physician’s medical judgment and the needs of her patient. Does the guy who drives the Pfizer delivery van hold an analogous right to be a conscientious objector?

It includes liberal lofty quotes from that twit from Pharmacists for Life, too. What. A. Tool.

Oh, but there I go, being a violent, dismissive lefty again.

Ahem.

We’ve had a string of lovely, coolish spring days of late. The forsythia blooms against a blue sky more suited for Arizona than the Midwest. I moved the potted rosemary out to the front porch, and they think they’ve died and gone to Italy. It’s perfect weather for just about everything, so what happens? The newspaper finds something wrong with it. Whatever happened to April showers? Who the hell cares! It rained all goddamn winter!

You can see where my ace news sense has taken me — like a vertical blur straight to the top of my chosen (coff) profession. (coff.)

One thing we did yesterday in the cool blue afternoon was head off to Kate’s school for the Celebration of Learning, sort of a parental open house in which we (I, anyway — Alan was working) were encouraged to paw through their portfolios of work and marvel over the wonders therein. I’m not going to say this is a bad idea, but it is a different idea. When I was growing up, my parents knew who my teacher was, and had at least one conference with him or her in the course of the year, but otherwise, they had their jobs, the teacher had hers. No news was good news. I brought home my papers; if they looked good and there was no note accompanying them, everything was fine.

Compare that to today, when we know our children’s teachers the way we know…our hairdressers? Our therapists? Somewhere in there, anyway. If the teacher is good — something my parents could count on — your frequent meetings are pleasant. If not — something more of my friends report — well, let’s all have root canal together, eh?

I know the meme of the moment says that parents are the true pains in the ass, and it’s the talk of the teacher’s lounge. I hear less about the very common phenomenon of lousy teachers. Here’s a note a friend sent to her son’s teacher earlier this week:

Dear Ms. —-,

Also, I�m sure you�ve probably caught this already, but there is no �t� in �crucifixion.�

One of these days I want her to write a book with that title: “There is no T in ‘Crucifixion’ — Catholic Schooling in the Era of Declining Enrollment.”

Kate’s portfolio was up to snuff. We celebrated with ice cream. I will try to remember these days when good report cards are routinely rewarded with iPods and cell-phone minutes.

And finally, everyone’s making fun of John Bolton’s stupid hairdo. You can go with the WashPost’s take, but I much prefer The Poor Man’s.

Since most of you are either a) not Catholic; or b) “recovering” Catholics, you probably don’t check in with Amy’s blog the way I do. So you probably didn’t know she went to NYC week before last on a moment’s notice, to be interviewed by Stone Phillips for last night’s “Dateline” on “The DaVinci Code.”

Alas, her segment was left on the cutting-room floor, as they say. (Video needs a different metaphor, since there’s no cutting involved; “never exported from the hard drive,” maybe.) I watched anyway, because I haven’t read “The DaVinci Code” and have observed the whole phenomenon from a certain remove. I know the gist: Best-selling thriller claims enormous Opus Dei-led conspiracy to keep The Truth About Jesus from the world — that he married Mary Magdalene and had children. Huh.

Amy was interviewed because she wrote a book refuting the novel’s claims of historical accuracy, which, it turns out are…inaccurate.

I’ve no dog in this fight, having left Catholicism and conspiracy theory behind long ago. But I’m interested in what interests people, pop culture-wise, and thought perhaps the show would help explain that. And it did, sorta — there’s something irresistible about the eternal bells ringing from ancient crumbling churches, robed priests guarding secrets hidden in altarpieces and all the rest of it. Something about Evil works well in a clerical collar, or maybe it just taps into a generation of popular entertainment, from “The Omen” to “The Godfather,” the way we’ve been taught to think space aliens are 4-foot-tall bipedal creatures with big heads and really big eyes. And there’s a perverse amusement in considering that what really rankles the One True Church about all this is the idea that Jesus’ offspring settled in…France.

But a hidden “M” in Leonardo’s “Last Supper”? Sheesh. Haven’t these folks heard of the symmetry of triangular composition? And the few passages of the book I’ve read feature prose that clunks like a decade-old Yugo.

Eventually, of course, you’ll be able to buy “DVC” at garage sales for a dime. If you can’t already. Oh, and as for the whole package, John Cook points out the obvious.

Bloggage:

If you looked at my iPod, you would find my musical id — many, many guilty pleasures; 70s pop; 70s funk; strange instrumentals I thought might make good background music for a video sometime; songs I’m really grateful are being piped into my ears alone and not announced to the world. My iPod reveals, at its thematic heart, that I’m a huge fan of the hit single. So is Ron Rosenbaum, who explicates the Return of the Single via, what else, the iPod.

I’m way late getting to this, but I thought this contrarian view of Hunter Thompson was superb and is well worth the read.

I turned off “Law & Order” at the halfway point last night; it simply can’t hold my interest anymore. Fortunately, the show will always have Lance. Dick Wolf should hire him. He could commute!

Everyone else calls a rowing machine a rowing machine. Rowers call it “the erg,” short for “ergometer,” which I think means, “a machine that measures work.” Because that’s what rowing is — work. There’s a reason the guys down in the galley in those old movies are rowing with a whip on their shoulders. The difference between hiking and backpacking is the difference between “something you can do all day” and “something where you actually consider drilling out the center of your toothbrush to save a gram or two of weight.” And the difference between working out on an erg and on a treadmill is like that.

So…why?

Because I want to take a rowing camp this summer, and maybe get out on the water, now that I’m in a city with decent rowing space. The woman who runs the camp suggested I take her erg class, that maybe it might clear up why my back hurts whenever I row for longer than 10 minutes. Well, of course it did — my form is lousy. My form is always lousy. I’m convinced my body was made for sin, not exercise. It’s too long in the torso and too short in the leg, and whatever I do, some coach is always telling me, “It’s your form.” So now I get to practice on the erg, only slow and careful, with an eye toward muscle memory. Muscle memory — I ask you. All my muscles remember is that they’d rather be lounging in a nice Adirondack chair with a tall cold one.

On the other hand, our family tends to live into the ninth decade. I should start smoking again.

No bloggage today — yet. I spent the day scouring tax forms and checking the smoke signals on the Albom story. I keep thinking it’ll die any minute, and then it grows legs. As Drudge says: Developing.

Between the “John Paul the Great” on one side and the sneering about condoms and abortion on the other side lies the truth. I think Lance comes close:

The good who manage to aquire power do not stay good very long.� Power corrupts does not mean that all hobbits who touch the ring turn into Gollems.� It means that once you have power, your ability to do good is always governed by the karmic equivalent of Newton’s law — for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

You can’t save everyone.� You can’t be everywhere.� Once you start making those choices, about who you will help, who you will have to leave to fend for themselves, you are doomed.

There’s also a lot of interesting observation about where he took Catholicism. If you’re interested in that sort of thing.

The second try at the taxes was better, but not in a good way. A small payment to the feds became a small refund, but a large payment to the Hoosiers became a large refund, which means only one thing — I made a big mistake either the first or the second time, and now I get to spend at least part of tomorrow going over two 25-page tax returns, looking for discrepancies.

Maybe in the afternoon, I can have hemorrhoid surgery, too.

Fortunately, however, you can share in the day’s bloggage.

As my little girl gets older, a lot of parenting decisions that looked easy early on are becoming more…complicated. Take profanity, for instance. I’ve always followed a don’t-freak-out policy: Don’t swear in front of her (with rare exceptions, as when I break a nail below the quick), restrict her exposure to potty-mouth media, but when the occasional mortar shell penetrates the perimeter, I try not to panic. I’m a writer, and I figure one thing I can teach her is the power of language along its full range. And you can’t do that if you’re wetting your pants every time her ears are sullied.

My old neighbor Chuck swore like the Leatherneck he was, but always creatively, and always amusingly. His favorite all-purpose slur was “flatdick,” and I have to say, it’s an unappreciated gem. I wish I heard it more often on “Deadwood,” instead of the incessant f-bombs and the like. It’s one thing to frankly acknowledge that the 19th century was a nasty place to be; it’s quite another to litter your dialogue with so many potholes of profanity it’s nearly incomprehensible. (Poor Mr. Wu, a Chinese character who has to wear a pillbox hat and a pigtail and whose only English word is “cocksuckah” — no wonder he’s so crabby.)

So I was interested to read this WashPost story about the losing campaign against profanity on the playground, if only because I agree with the educator who observed, “There are words virtually disappearing from our English language,” O’Connor said. “When people are mad, what do they say? They say they are pissed off or [expletive] pissed off. No range. There is a big difference between being upset or livid. There is a big difference between irritated and infuriated.”

Or being f—ing infurated at some flatdick, I always say.

I have hopes for the future, though. Kate had dinner at the neighbors’, where roast chicken was served. In our home, roast chicken is known as Chicken With a Lemon Up Its Butt. I asked if she’d mentioned this at table, and was heartened to hear that she hadn’t, since she’d picked up on the fact that next door, it would be Chicken With a Lemon Up Its Bottom.

When I named my daughter Katharine, I knew I was choosing one of humanity’s oldest female names. I thought anything that has lasted since ancient Greece ought to have legs for her lifetime. (Unlike Nancy, which is the Gertrude of the 21st century.) I didn’t think of it as a “white” name, but that’s probably the luxury of being in the ethnic majority. What about “black” names? Read A Roshonda by any Other Name to get an economist’s take on it.

I didn’t know Andrea Dworkin died over the weekend, but I’m glad I know Susie Bright had something to say about it.

Finally, I knew my old pal Mark Brunswick was in Iraq writing about the Minnesota National Guard units there, but I didn’t know he was keeping a blog about it until he returned. I liked the entry on Easter Sunday in lovely Baghdad: Surreal moment of the day: Saddam�s Presidential Palace in the Green Zone in Baghdad. Easter Sunday. Poolside. Plastic bunnies and eggs and �Happy Easter� signs tacked up all over the place. Muscular soldiers with tattoos lounging. Rick James� �Super Freak� blasting through the stereo speakers.

�Ebay,� was his reply.