If I hadn’t been sick this weekend, I’d have finished the wallpaper stripping. Instead, Alan did, proof that marrying him was the right call. When Alan works on a home-improvement project, he likes music on, loud. From my sickbed, I monitored the progress:

Radio, WDET’s usual eclectic weekend mix. He’s singing along with a song or two. Good.

He switches to CDs. “Every Picture Tells a Story,” really loud. He’s getting bored.

The sounds of wall-scraping becomes louder, an occasional expletive finds its way up the stairs. The music switches to Miles Davis, “Bitches Brew.” Hmm. Hard to say what this means; I prefer insipid pop music when I’m working.

Long pause, then P.J. Harvey, “Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea,” really, really loud. Uh-oh. I thought I’d best go downstairs.

He was rubbing the wall furiously with a pot scrubber.

“This goddamn paper was put on with something like” (rub rub rub) “rubber cement or something” (rub rub rub) “it’s like it doesn’t even dissolve, it just balls up and sits there until you scrape it off.” (rub rub rub curse rub)

Now it’s all down, and the spackling begins. At least all that rubbing purged the original idea for a color — yellow. Now we’re thinking sort of a cool violet, something to capture the violence of the room’s recovery from the land of bad wallpaper.

I like “Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea,” but for rolling the windows down and blasting in the car when you’re all alone, you can’t beat “To Bring You My Love.” Just sayin’.

Sometimes last year I thought I was the only person in the country who didn’t give a fat rat’s gluteus about Scott Peterson, Laci Peterson and even the unborn Peterson baby. In the annals of homicide, the so-called domestic can be either fascinating or banal, and the Peterson affair was definitely the latter. A man kills his pregnant wife? Jeez, that only happens every week somewhere in this country; we had a case in Fort Wayne where a man stabbed his newly delivered girlfriend in the chest while she was breastfeeding their baby, killing her and sparing the infant. For a domestic, that was positively cinematic compared to the Peterson case, which, face it, had one thing going for it: Good-looking white people close enough to a major media market in a pleasant state. Otherwise, I simply refused to pay attention. For a thousand reasons.

So I was glad to read this in the Chicago Tribune yesterday, by Douglas MacKinnon, pleading with the media to admit the inherent racism in the circuses over Lacey, Elizabeth, Jennifer, etc., and the comparative lack of coverage of any number of non-white female disappearances:

Define racism. One could certainly make the argument that the cable networks that continually focus on these missing white women, to the virtual exclusion of minority women, are practicing a form of racism. The racism in this case, however, while predicated on color, does not concern itself with the color of one’s skin. Rather, it is based on the color of money, ratings points and competition. Would an African-American woman who went missing days before her wedding receive the same (or any) coverage as that of Wilbanks? Not likely.

Duh. Obvious, but worth reading, anyway.