My parents were Catholic and we were raised that way, but we weren’t Pope People. Which is to say, we knew who the Pope was (one of the Johns. I think.), but we didn’t pay him enough respect, if by “respect,” you mean “attention.” Granted, John was not a rock-star Pope, but the idea of my own mother calling him “the Holy Father” and sighing over his personal appearances is incomprehensible to me, and needless to say, there were no Peggy Noonans in the house:

When I was writing a book about John Paul, I’d ask those who’d met him or saw him go by: What did you think, or say? And they’d be startled and say, “I don’t know, I was crying.”

Huh.

I remember Juan Pablo the Deuce’s first U.S. tour. The Columbus Dispatch send one of its star writer/editors to cover it. From her exhaustive reports, I learned that love beamed from the man’s face, and that everywhere he went, people felt the love. But Noonan is a serious Catholic intellectual, right? So, as we await Benedict XVI, what might we expect, Peggy?

Benedict… is the perfect pope for the Internet age. He is a man of the word. You download the text of what he said, print it, ponder it.

This is what I saw as his popemobile came close by in the square: tall man, white hair, shy eyes, deep-set. He is waving, trying to act out pleasure at being the focus of all eyes, center stage. He is not a showman but a scholar, an engaged philosopher nostalgic for the days – he has spoken of them – when he was a professor in a university classroom, surrounded by professors operating in a spirit of academic camaraderie and debate. But, his friends tell you, he enjoys being pope. He has become acclimated.

There is a sweetness about him – all in the Vatican who knew him in the old days speak of it – and a certain vagueness, as if he is preoccupied.

What is it about the Vicar of Christ that he brings out the swoon in middle-aged women? But what, Peggy, is Benedict likely to say?

Perhaps some variation on themes from his famous Regensburg address, in September 2006.

There he traced and limned some of the development of Christianity, but he turned first to Islam. Faith in God does not justify violence, he said. “The right use of reason” prompts us to understand that violence is incompatible with the nature of God, and the nature, therefore, of the soul. God, he quotes an ancient Byzantine ruler, “is not pleased by blood,” and “not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature.” More: “To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm.” This is a message for our time, and a courageous one, too. (The speech was followed by riots and by Osama bin Laden’s charge that the pope was starting a new “crusade.”)

There you have it. Folks, this is what we call a clip job. Plus a lot of swooning.

As for me, I’m going to follow the visit through the NYT’s Pope blog, to which Fort Wayne’s own Amy Welborn is contributing. Go, Amy.

Folks, I slept late today, and now I’m behind. Content yourself with some bloggage while I finish my taxes and drink the last of this morning’s coffee over ice:

No links in this one, but you get the gist. From the Will You Damn Kids Leave Me Alone file, via Brian:

Logansport woman reported missing by her son

A Logansport woman has been reported missing by her son and police are interested in talking to anyone who may have seen her.

Kim S. Steele, 41, was last seen on Thursday, just before meeting a man she had recently met through an Internet chat room. Repeated calls to her cell phone by friends, family and the Logansport police have gone unanswered.

…According to a police report, Steele left without extra clothing or personal items. The last contact she had with anyone was her son, who told police she was on her way to help move a trailer or camper with man from the Internet. Investigators have entered her name into a national database for missing person.

Later…

Woman reported missing had been camping

The Logansport woman reported missing by her son turned up late this morning.

Kim S. Steele, 41, had been camping out of town with her new boyfriend — the man she met through an Internet chat room. Steele told police her cell phone went dead and that’s why she had not returned the numerous calls made by her family, friends and Logansport police.

When she came into Logansport today, she saw the newspaper article and reported to police that she was all right.

Well, I guess it beats rotting in a ditch for two months until someone says, “Has anyone heard from Nance lately?”

Alan had to edit “MILF” out of a story a couple years ago — those sneaky reporters! — and at the time I think he was one of the very few who knew what a MILF was. Now it’s everywhere.

Hey, it’s J.C.’s birthday! Let’s steal some of his bandwidth:

No, I guess it’s Flickr’s bandwidth. Sign at the Buford Highway Farmers Market, Doraville, Ga., which you may know as “a touch of country in the city.”

Coffee’s done. Off to the bank.

Charlton Heston is dead, and all I can do is scroll through the IMDb “quotes” pages from his movies.

Nefretiri: Oh, Moses, Moses, why of all men did I fall in love with a prince of fools?

I always thought Heston’s life was self-parody enough, but I’ll leave the obits to others. Still, could this be true?

In what could have been Heston’s most audacious Jewish role, the FBI recruited the actor amid the 1993 Waco, Texas, standoff involving David Koresh and the Branch Davidians. Heston was to have played the Voice of God to facilitate negotiations with Koresh, however the plan was never used.

XM should have a separate channel called The Government’s Loudspeaker. It would have a short playlist, but a thought-provoking one, consisting entirely of stuff some law enforcement agency thought might get a holed-up desperado to come out with his hands up. The Manuel Noriega dance mix, I seem to recall, ran the gamut from extreme heavy metal to “Baby I’m-a Want You.” That would make for some interesting radio, but no one asked me.

So how was your weekend? I’m starting to dread my own. The basement drains backed up again, and Alan got two flat tires — one on his car, and one on mine. Since mine is due for four new ones, and his was in a sidewall, that’ll have to be replaced, too. Lately I feel as though I’m closing on a house, at that point where every time you turn around someone wants a check for $300. Only this weekend will be more like $600.

Oh, well, you know what they say: Pain means you’re still alive.

And even a few hundred bucks in un-budgeted expenses couldn’t entirely ruin the first nice weekend of the whole damn year. Gentle temperatures, sunshine, the whole works. We dragged our rosemary bushes outside to the deck and told them to fend for themselves, then raked out the detritus of winter, a basically pleasant task, considering the detritus didn’t include any dead birds or anything. Filled five lawn-and-leaf bags, then checked the forecast — freezing temperatures expected by next weekend. Well, screw it. Rosemary has a week to harden up for it, and forecasts change.

Of course I celebrated with a long bike ride. Rode down to Alter Road to scout locations for my upcoming video, imaginatively working-titled: Alter Road. I want more green before I get going on it, but I also wanted to see if there’s any way I could find a reasonably safe route to the newly opened bike paths of downtown. Google Maps’ street view has some gaps, but what I could see of Freud Street wasn’t good:

View Larger Map

(God. Google Maps street view. Signs and wonders and more signs, and more wonders.)

So I chickened out. For now.

But that made me think, well, maybe I could help complete the map, some real ground-level citizen journalism. Send Google some pictures taken on key street corners, eh? I asked my genius how I might do that. He replied:

They’re so precisely geolocated because a special vehicle with multiple cameras pointing in “all” directions moves slowly down a street and they suck up images with super-duper-precise geolocation, metadata aplenty…driven by some coffee sipping slacker (I’ve seen them in Atlanta.)

I want that job. I want it really, really bad.

OK, some sober bloggage: Funeral arrangements for Ashley are complete, and can be found here. Predictably, they contain a note of humor; mourners are encouraged to dress either traditionally or in Saints gear, or a combination of both. Memorials are to the family, left without a provider. You can Paypal ’em here.

With that, I’ve fiddled with Google Maps too long. Time to get to work. And wait for the plumber. Again.

Sorry for the unexpected day off yesterday. I’d written and crumpled about four posts when the phone rang. It was the school, telling me my daughter has officially inherited her father’s tendency toward headaches. They’d been creeping up for a while, but yesterday was the first appearance of the big-M variety, if my amateur diagnosis is correct. Severe headaches accompanied by vision changes and nausea automatically = migraine, don’t they? (Unless, Dr. Google tells me, it’s multiple sclerosis. Or, you know, a brain tumor.) Anyway, the big purge went a long way toward making things better, but she spent the rest of the day on the couch, and my own was pretty much off the rails.

So thanks to all of you who took the ball and ran with it. Nothing like discussing that old-time cussin’, is there?

One of my old neighbors had a theory that sounds a little New Age-y, but nevertheless has a ring of truth to it. He said every person has a consistent weak spot in their body’s defenses, a door the germs will find unlocked more often than not. His son’s was his nose, Kate’s was her throat, his own was his head, mine was…I guess it was my big mouth, which has no discernment whatsoever, and will say and eat pretty much anything. Although I’ve never had trench mouth, gum disease, or even many cavities. So I guess that theory falls apart.

Anyway, all is well today, if 30 degrees colder than yesterday. Ah, spring.

Between making therapeutic Jell-O and buying Tylenol, I finally got around to reading the Harvard virgin story from the NYT magazine over the weekend. I was looking for some indication that this no-sex club was different from other no-sex clubs, and it seems to boil down to: But this is Harvard. I guess they have Veritas stamped on their chastity belts, or something. And people wonder why the Ivy League still matters. (If nothing else, it’s given us women who’ll be quoted in the paper of record calling oral sex “disrespectful and disgusting.” For you, maybe.)

This meme is making its way around, I notice:

She began talking about oxytocin, the hormone released at birth, in breast-feeding and also during sex. True Love Revolution gives it the utmost significance, claiming on its Web site that the hormone’s “powerful bonding” effect can be “a cause of joy and marital harmony” but that outside of marriage it can create “serious problems.” Released arbitrarily, it can blur “the distinction between infatuation and lasting love,” the Web site cautions, making rational mating decisions difficult. Fredell said oxytocin could also bond people who didn’t necessarily want to be bound, and “you can bond yourself to the wrong guy in the wrong situation.”

This is, I believe, the “science” behind the tape exercise performed in some abstinence classes, where the teacher goes around pressing tape to students’ arms, then ripping it off and repasting it on other arms. This underlines the important lesson that you can get all kinds of diseases from others — because the tape gets kind of gross as it goes around sticking to arms — and also…well, something, I’m sure. If you stick your tape to someone else, not only does it hurt when you rip it off, you’re less sticky the next time around. And this is backed by science! You could look it up!

No wonder these folks can’t get any traction in the real world. Not only are they up against the unstoppable force of humanity, they use bad science and stupid teaching techniques. If people wonder why I pay taxes through the nose to send my kid to a halfway-decent public school, here’s one reason: Because the last time I looked at the health curriculum, it didn’t call for duct tape.

OK, a little lite nosh of bloggage, shall we?

Most people outside the city don’t know that the Detroit mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, rolls with a security posse to rival Suge Knight’s. Brian Dickerson pulls it apart, a little bit. He offers the priceless detail that the entourage, already preposterously large to begin with, has been increased in response to “threats” against Special KK, and then notes:

In 2003, after a diamond-studded L. Brooks Patterson memorably lampooned Kilpatrick’s gangsta style by striding into the Mackinac Policy Conference surrounded by aides sporting dark glasses and earpieces, the mayor’s security footprint grew noticeably smaller.

L. Brooks Patterson is the county executive in adjacent Oakland County, and has spent his entire career goading Detroit in one way or another. Guy has a sense of humor, too.

Baseball’s Opening Day is problematic in places other than Detroit. A cool time-lapse video from Cleveland shows how hard a grounds crew can work when snow is in the forecast.

OK, enough. It’s good to be back. Now I’m up to Kate’s room, which is getting a small makeover, to blow dust off the stuffed animals and make way for some storage pieces (or “solutions,” as they’re inevitably called). Back later.

On edit: Does the type size on this site these days look just enormous? It does to me — more so than usual. I have a call in to J.C., but as long as we’re here, let me know if you like it this big. Does it mark us as a nest of baby boomers too lazy to put on a pair of readers, or is it just easy on the eyes?)

Well, goddamn it all to hell:

Bite me. Guess what Monday is in Detroit? Opening day.

I should take the day off, but instead, I’ll take it easy. Yesterday I ran across something called The Documentary Blog, and found the inevitable Top 25 list. Can I see the hands of all who despise “Grey Gardens?” Of course it was on the list (No. 8); it’s on all the lists. Everybody loves it. Hidden masterpiece, etc., blah blah blah. I finally found it in the library stacks a few months ago and couldn’t finish it. It strikes me as precisely the sort of thing I would have loved at 19, which isn’t saying much — I loved “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” when I was 19. (Still do, at least a little bit. Tim Curry’s the first man in a corset I ever found remotely attractive. The last one, too.)

“Grey Gardens” is the story of two of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’ crazy relatives, who live in a crazy house and do crazy things and feed the crazy raccoons who hang around their crazy Hamptons estate, and if you like watching that sort of thing, well, you should come to Detroit. We have no shortage of crazy people here. You could follow one or two home and see how they live. I suspect the end result would be much the same, except it would happen in a cardboard box, not the Hamptons. Toe-tally crazy! The film was shot in the mid-70s, perhaps the last era in which crazy could read as “wise in a different way.” By 1980, when the nation suddenly developed a homeless problem, “Grey Gardens” would have been a harder sell. It’s easy to romanticize mental illness when it’s not taking a crap on the sidewalk in front of you.

Some things can only be thought worthwhile in their own era. Originality counts for a lot. I try to keep this in mind when experiencing art of an earlier time. It still got on my nerves.

The rest of the list was OK, although I would have made a place somewhere for Michael Moore. I suspect documentarians secretly hate him (because he’s successful), but he got the genre back into the multiplexes, and that has to count for something.

“Hoop Dreams” made the list, too. It was nominated for an Oscar, but should have won the Pulitzer Prize. I remember it mainly for the portrait of the coach at Arthur Agee’s private school, a man who was such a vile p.o.s. you could almost smell him in the theater. Also, that “Hoop Dreams” was one of the films that played during Northwood Cinema’s brief attempt to be an art house, always a dicey proposition in the Fort. I did my part as a customer.

So that’s my frame of mind this snowy morning — nasty, brutish and short. How’s yours?

I slept in — as much as it’s possible to “sleep in” when one’s head is full of crusted snot — and pledged I wouldn’t miss the weight-training class at the gym this morning, so you folks only get 20 minutes of my time today. My Quickfire all-bloggage challenge starts…now!

Our fame spreads. I knew one day all that time I spent reading Ann Landers could pay off. Also, it’s interesting to note the credulousness of the American media was ever thus.

Just a warning: If tomorrow you see a photo posted with a long string of obscenities, I will be taking Friday off to gnash my teeth. Because guess what we’re promised overnight: Snow, and perhaps enough to photograph.

The idea of putting my house up as collateral for a new bathroom never appealed much to me. My parents were Depression babies, and never went in for the sorts of high-wire financial shenanigans so popular in recent years. (They were, however, the Trumps compared to Alan’s parents. One story I recalled at FuneralFest 2008 was the reaction of Alan’s grandparents when their daughter and her new husband took out a mortgage to buy a tiny house in Defiance, Ohio — “You will be paying on that for the rest of your life,” delivered in an accusatory, thou-shalt-be-damned tone. Amount of the loan: $8,000.) I really really really would like a new kitchen, but I really really really really don’t want a home-equity loan to worry about at 3 a.m. Finally, vindication! Ahem:

Americans owe a staggering $1.1 trillion on home equity loans — and banks are increasingly worried they may not get some of that money back.

To get it, many lenders are taking the extraordinary step of preventing some people from selling their homes or refinancing their mortgages unless they pay off all or part of their home equity loans first. In the past, when home prices were not falling, lenders did not resort to these measures.

I remember in the ’90s, I’d see ads touting home-equity lines of credit as a good way to finance a vacation. Whenever I am tempted to spend too much in a restaurant, I remind myself that no matter how good it tastes, it’s going to be headed to the waste-treatment plant in 24 hours one way or another. Imagine being kicked out of your home and staying warm with your memories of the beach in Bermuda. Nope, doesn’t do it for me, either.

Related: A total financial moron explains it all for you. Clip and save. Useful!

Twenty minutes is up. Tell me how my affinity for drug-culture trivia can be monetized in the future. I’m off to the gymnasium to swing some of those newfangled Indian clubs.

We’ll be out of touch today, attending the funeral of Alan’s Aunt Dorothy. (Everyone had an Aunt Dorothy once upon a time, didn’t they? And now hardly anyone does. In 70 years, will we all be burying our Aunt Britnee?) She died two days before her 91st birthday. I met her on the same day I met Alan’s parents. They had recently been to Fostoria to check out the biggest news in years — Jesus on a soybean-oil tank.

“They say the image was made by vapors, but maybe a divine hand guided the vapors,” she said.

“Oh, bullshit,” said Alan’s dad.

This anecdote pretty much encapsulates both departed souls.

Anyway, now she can ask the man himself.

I’ll be back tomorrow. Discuss whatever you like, but I won’t be participating.

Did everyone have a good Easter? I caught a cold, which really frosts an Easter cake served with three inches of snow. So if you came here to be entertained, all I can offer is this: I’ll try not to sneeze on you.

This story is going to get a lot of buzz today, so prepare to weigh in. Dan Barry’s portrait of the virtual runt of a high-school litter is pretty wrenching. Billy Wolfe is the kid whose ass everyone loves to kick, and as bad as his story is, the portrait it paints of a typical American high school is worse. The new technology is galling — the beatdowns of Billy are recorded on cell-phone cameras and then passed around the school — but at the end of this depressing tale, what it really calls to mind is prison. The code of any large population overseen by a much smaller power class will eventually evolve like this, where the most thuggish thugs of the lower class are the real people to fear.

Note how it started:

It began years ago when a boy called the house and asked Billy if he wanted to buy a certain sex toy, heh-heh. Billy told his mother, who informed the boy’s mother. The next day the boy showed Billy a list with the names of 20 boys who wanted to beat Billy up.

What do we tell kids when they’re in over their heads? “Tell an adult.” And look what happens when they do:

Ms. Wolfe says she and her husband knew it was coming. She says they tried to warn school officials — and then bam: the prank caller beat up Billy in the bathroom of McNair Middle School.

Not long after, a boy on the school bus pummeled Billy, but somehow Billy was the one suspended, despite his pleas that the bus’s security camera would prove his innocence. Days later, Ms. Wolfe recalls, the principal summoned her, presented a box of tissues, and played the bus video that clearly showed Billy was telling the truth.

Clueless school administrators can’t stop it? Contemptuous student body reinforces it? Color me astonished. Billy, Billy’s parents, if you know what’s good for you you’ll get out of this hellhole before it turns your boy into a monster. I suggest private tutoring or, at the very least, a very pricey private school, paid for by the public-school administrators who allowed this situation to grow and flourish. Maybe that’ll get ’em fired, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

OK, let’s turn 180 degrees, as befits a head clouded with decongestants.

More proof of my husband’s gay gene: Some years back we upgraded our sleeping platform. Our bedroom furniture was inherited from my grandmother, and the bed was starting to be a problem. It was so noisy you couldn’t roll over from your left side to your right without awakening your partner, and never mind the other thing. Plus, we were ready to make the jump to queen-size. So Alan went in search of something that would please his eye but not require replacement of the two dressers, which are still doing their work just fine. (Plus, I hate matchy-matchy in all things.) He found us something from following an ad in the New Yorker, and it fit the bill just fine.

That was in…? Nineteen and something, so at least eight, nine years ago.

So the “Sex and the City” trailers are out now, and oh my, it looks like Charlotte York finally caught up with the trendsetters:

That’s our bed. (Satin pillows, actresses and child not included.)

“Sex and the City” comes in for a lot of well-deserved abuse, and someday when I’m on a long bike ride I’ll have to decide why it fails to irritate me as much other shows loaded with shameless product placement and unrealistic New York housing options. The writers could be so ham-fisted with it; I still cringe to recall the AOL-plug episode, and the one where Carrie mentions “my new favorite website, Google-dot-com.” Because “Google-dot-com” is what everyone calls Google, right? The many Hermes plugs were totally grating — they squeezed their orange boxes into “The Devil Wears Prada,” too — but I still wear my Hermes scarves. It’s a crime against beauty to leave a Hermes scarf in its box for too long.

I think the thing about “Sex and the City” is, it distracts you with the ridiculous outfits. Once you’ve seen Kim Cattrall in gym clothes with her thong riding six inches above the yoga pants (because there’s nothing that feels good during yoga like a thong), or Cynthia Nixon in her…well, she played a lawyer, so she usually looked OK. And Charlotte was the epitome of good taste, which is why she bought our bed. But Carrie made up for all of them, especially when she ran down the street in a corset, net skirt, seventeen thousand ropes of pearls, stilettos and an Hermes scarf wrapped around her head so that the logo rode over her eyes, and the rest of America gaped and said, “What the fucking fuck?” So you were distracted from the next scene, which was set in the Magnolia bakery. The only Carrie outfit that didn’t make my head spin was the Vivienne Westwood suit she wore for her first day at Vogue. (Says Vogue: “a suit that nobody at Vogue would wear to work (too theatrically chic.)” Well, whatever.

I’m going back to bed. Or to couch. Or somewhere. Be nice to one another.

Down in the comments yesterday, Sue, one of our resident Cheeseheads, made reference to northern pike as “foot-eaters.” It’s safe to say that seven years after being bitten by one of these freshwater barracudas, I finally feel vindicated.

Longtime readers have heard this story, so I’ll try to make it brief:

One summer day in 2001, Alan and I were at his family’s weekend cottage at Coldwater Lake. I’d just finished mowing the grass and was hot and sweaty, so I stowed the mower, walked down the lake, and plunged in for a little refreshment. I surfaced, shook the water out of my eyes, and was enjoying the cooldown when something with very sharp teeth grabbed my thigh, shook it once, and was gone.

“Something bit me!” I squealed. Some of our neighbors were sitting on the shoreline, and offered alternate theories; I’d rubbed against a submerged branch, or no, it was a turtle. If it was a branch, it had disappeared, and turtles don’t even have teeth. So I waded out, looked down, and saw this (minus the tape measure; that was part of my forensic evidence-gathering):

The guy who’d said it was a turtle gaped in astonishment. The bruise hadn’t formed yet, but the parentheses of the bite were clearly visible.

And so began my long quest to find someone to acknowledge this had happened.

Oh, the evidence was clear enough, which is why I took the picture. And certainly, within moments of seeing the bite, and making sure I was properly cleaning the abrasion, my husband had removed a fly rod from the rack and was casting a streamer off the dock, hoping Mr. Big Teeth hadn’t left the neighborhood. (In my romantic fantasy, he was after revenge.) We pegged the fish as a pike because it was the only possibility in that lake, and through the CSI-approved technique of taking a mounted one out of my neighbor’s attic and matching the gaping mouth to the mark on my leg — a perfect match (and a trophy-size fish). But even though everyone said, hmm, yes, well, obviously you were bitten by something, you could see the doubt in their eyes. The DNR officer I e-mailed the picture to said such an incident was unprecedented in his career. Longtime anglers had been bitten by pike when trying to remove hooks from the fish’s jaw, but no one had ever heard of a swimmer being attacked. One thing freshwater swimmers can count on in Midwestern lakes is: No sharks.

It being 2001, internet resources were limited, but nothing I could find said they were known to bite swimmers. (Although I learned the fun fact that their saltwater cousins had been known to hit coke spoons hanging from the necks of stupid Key West snorkelers.)

At the end of the day, the best single observation was my neighbor’s, who said, “I guess he knew well-marbled meat when he saw it.” Wiseass. Although dead-on, I’m sorry to say.

So, Sue, you helped make my day. Downstate pike and muskie might not be as big as the whoppers from the higher latitudes, but they have teeth, and they’re not afraid to use them.

Now I can retire that story for another seven years. But I’m never getting rid of the picture.

Since it’s Good Friday and half of you have the day off (and hence, won’t be wasting company time surfing the web), a few tech-related questions for the crowd today. Feel free to answer any you might know:

Why do those sneaky pop-unders cause my laptop’s fans to go crazy? I assume it’s because they’re making some part of the processor work extra-hard, but which one and why? At night, when I’m working and websurfing at mad-crazy speeds, I have to stop at least twice, hunt those damn things down, and close them all. It’s not unusual to find six to nine ads for Netflix and the Economist hiding under everything else. Bastids! When I’m hunting down news for my employer’s clients, I usually have two browsers running, with about five tabs in each. That’s nothing, however. I was talking to a colleague, one of our true Search ninjas, and he said there have been times when he’s covering breaking news for up to three of our biggest clients — essentially running a private wire service customized for their companies — and he has had up to 27 windows and tabs open simultaneously, hopping between them all. Which is to say, I know I’m working my CPU hard when I’m doing this stuff. But the fans all shut down when I eliminate the pop-unders.

Do iPhones or BlackBerrys make one’s life simpler, or more complicated? My friends with so-called smart phones say they’re the sort of technology that makes you wonder how you ever lived without it. Considering the increased cost, is the new world of possibilities worth it? Or is it just a pretty new leash? (Note: I lived without a cell phone until 2003, and think I could probably live without one nearly as easily. The bigger the city, however, the more essential they are. But my life is pretty simple now, and I never use even close to my minimum minutes.)

If you’ve given up your CD collection, how’s that working for you? I only know one household that’s fully committed to files on a hard drive for all their music needs. (It’s my tech-genius friend, J.C. Burns.) They have everything on a single multiply backed-up hard drive, and play music around the house by plugging their iPods into various amplifier devices. I’m envious of their shelf space, and their generosity, because once everything had been burned to the hard drive, they gave their entire CD collection away. And the longer I’m alive, the less crap I want cluttering up my house. This is terribly tempting. Discuss pros and cons.

And all the rest of you, have a good Easter. I’ll be shoveling snow, or so I’m told.

As personal disasters go, it fell somewhere between breaking a nail and traumatic injury in an auto accident, but maybe a bit closer to the latter. Somewhere between parking the car and arriving at the hair salon across the street, I lost my wallet.

I knew it wasn’t in the car, because I’d had it out to feed the meter. It wasn’t anywhere to be found in the salon; I looked under every possible shelf and structure. (Found some nice Aveda products in sample-size bottles down there, however.) Retracing steps turned up nothin’. Hands-and-knees on the freezing pavement to peer under parked cars — nothin’. And so it began, off to the Grosse Pointe police to file a report, up and down the block to the other businesses to see if anyone turned anything in, a check of all area trash receptacles. Finally, home to start the inevitable process of rebuilding.

In the list of Inanimate Objects I Fear Losing, my laptop is No. 1, but my wallet has to be No. 2. Never mind the cash and credit cards; it’s the documentation that matters. Driver’s license, registration, proof of insurance. Costco card, Blockbuster card, Border’s Rewards card, just in the “commerce” slot. Park pass, library card, health insurance card. My University of Michigan student ID, carried strictly for sentimental reasons, and because I like the flash of yellow (er, maize) I get when I see it there. (Also, because the photo is recent and the expiration date not until 2009, occasionally useful for claiming a student discount on merchandise I consider overpriced.) Every one represented an enervating errand or argument with a clerk. Sigh.

And yet, oddly, I didn’t feel upset. I figured there was an excellent chance my identity was strewn all over some thief’s coffee table, but an equal one that a nice, honest person had picked it up and that the phone would ring momentarily.

(The phone rang. One of Kate’s friends, prank-calling us with one of her stupid voices. She thinks because she star-six-sevens, I don’t know who she is. Oh, to be young again.)

Credit cards cancelled, I set about rescheduling today. First to the BMV; did I have my Social Security card nearby? Yes. Then to the insurance agent for dupes on my proof-of card, jeez I’m not going to get a goddamn thing done today, and…

Doorbell.

A Jaguar stood idling in the driveway, a 50ish gent in a nice topcoat on the step. Holding my wallet. Every card was in its place, my paltry cash reserves untouched. “I would have returned it earlier, but I had somewhere to be,” he said in an eastern European-sounding accent. Of course he wouldn’t take a reward, but he gave me his card; his name is Harry, and he runs Harry’s of Grosse Pointe, a restaurant on Mack. My new favorite place to eat.

I guess what I’m telling you today is: The Secret works! Now if I could only get that billion dollars I’ve been visualizing…

OK, bloggage:

Whatever you do, do not watch the reputed Gene Simmons sex tape. Are you listening? Do. Not. WATCH. Let me just say this, though: The day a man and a woman get into bed together, and the former does not remove his chewing gum, and the latter does not remove her platform flip-flops, they really and truly do deserve one another.

Headline you would only see in Detroit: Chevy Tahoe hybrid sips gas. Relatively speaking. (The particulars: The rear-drive hybrid Tahoe rated 21 m.p.g. in the city and 22 m.p.g. on the highway in EPA fuel economy tests. That compares with 14 m.p.g. city and 20 m.p.g. highway for a similar gasoline-only Tahoe.) P.S. It costs 50 grand. Sigh.

Re the eight-million-word revelation that John McCain is a sleazebag with shady ethics: You don’t say. Best single snark, from Metafilter: I hear she lets him be on top sometimes. That’s a better deal that he’s been getting from Bush.

Another glacier-glasses day. Upside: Ample vitamin D! Downside: 15 degrees. Enjoy it.