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.

As many of you know, most mornings I wake up, pet my dog and say, “What do you want to do today?” This explains why, on Friday, I didn’t finish my taxes and, instead, took a metaphorical nap in the daffodils. Which is to say, I didn’t exactly nap in the daffodils, but I did some other stuff, more satisfying than taxes. That meant that I had to spend Sunday doing taxes. The news is about what I expected — minor pain in the grand scheme of things. It’s hard, at tax time, to look on the bright side, to say, “Well, the reason I owe is because I made more money than I expected last year.”

Now I get to do them a second time — to see if tweaking cuts the pain a bit. The first time is the worst, though; now I know how the movie ends, and what the scary parts are.

It didn’t help that Alan’s last words as he left today were, “I don’t see why it should be so complicated.” Easy for him to say; I’ve been doing his taxes since we got married. My sister’s comment was far more helpful: “Taxes are uncomplicated until you actually have some money. Then you have to work at least as hard as the people trying to take it away from you.”

Now that sounds like a Republican talking. I’m just a person who didn’t plan well for the rainy day.

The weekend kept me away from the computer, so no tasty linkage today. Maybe tomorrow.

Coffee? Check. TurboTax? Check. Shoebox full of barely organized receipts? Laptop with fast connection? Deeply felt fear of what sort of misery might be waiting on the other end? Check, check and check.

In other words, the grown-up world requires my presence today. Y’all go back to watching the Pope’s funeral, and I’ll catch you after the weekend. Feel free to discuss whatever’s on your mind in the comments, but me, I’ll be sweatin’.

There may be nine million stories in the naked city, but there’s also just one. I expect most people would say Detroit’s story is encapsulated in its nicknames — Motown, the Motor City, the Arsenal of Democracy. Those who could stand to read a few more sentences might insert the decline of its industrial base and uncertain future. Me, I think it all boils down to race.

Take this picture:

It’s not precisely the border between Detroit and Grosse Pointe Park — the legal line is behind the row of houses to the right. But that is the last street in Detroit, as it gives way to the Pointes. That waterway is a canal that runs up from the lake, and the houses on the left side back up to it, on the Detroit side. When our Realtor drove us by, I said, “A fence? You’re kidding.” He chuckled and said, “Some people call it the moat.”

True, it’s not a fence with, oh, locked gates. You can get around it here and there. I took the picture from a bridge. But as a psychological barrier between the black city and its white suburbs — water and a fence — it’s hard to beat.

I rode down Alter Road, the one in the photo, to see where the waterway ended. It runs below a bridge and into Lake St. Clair just south of Windmill Point, the prettier of GPP’s two lakefront parks. This is where you could once find the Lakeside Trailer Court, now scorched earth. There’s a city park down there, filled at noon with fishermen. There’s a bait/party store (do fishermen need anything more than bait and beer?).

And there’s the usual decay. Detroit is usually described in terms along the lines of “a burnt-out shell of a city,” and that’s not far wrong. But I can’t help it — there’s still something alive in the place, and it makes itself known in the strangest ways. Alan was driving to work the other day and a cock pheasant ran across the road in front of him. A pheasant! At first I thought it had to be an escapee from some Grosse Pointe plutocrat’s personal zoo, but no. Turns out they’re making a comeback in the city. Why? Because so many structures have been knocked down and returned to grassland, it’s…pheasant habitat. Go figure.

On the down side, we also have, oh, feral dogs. That find abandoned bodies. But pheasant, too!

So, bloggahhhge:

I forgot to mention that when I crossed over the line from the suburbs to the city, at that very moment, the iPod tossed up a Dr. Dre track, followed by Smokey Robinson. Either my iPod has GPS, or it’s smarter than I am, or…it’s Jesus Christ. Jon Carroll parses the religious iconography of your operating system.

I don’t know if some of these crackbrain ideas the religious right is floating are trial balloons, but if so, it’s time to start taking aim. Take this particularly moronic column in the L.A. Times about the burgeoning “pharmacists’ rights” movement. Note the flying leap here:

I once worked in a philosophy department in which one of the professors was active in NAMBLA, the controversial North American Man/Boy Love Assn. The secretary, a deeply religious woman named Judy, was assigned the task of typing up his man-boy love book manuscript and sending it off to the publishers.

I think of Judy when I think about the issue of whether pharmacists should be permitted to refuse to fill prescriptions at which their conscience balks. The conscience of some pharmacists balks at birth control and morning-after pills.

Note: Taking birth control pills, and expecting a pharmacist to fill a prescription for same, is equated to man-boy love. Who ARE these people? And who gave them the keys to my country?

It goes on: What you should ask yourself in this case is not whether you think people should have access to birth control, but whether you should be required to do things that violate your deepest convictions. Should a soldier be required to torture prisoners, for example? Should he refuse to do so if ordered? Birth control = torture. I can’t stand it.

I don’t read celebrity bios as a rule — with exceptions — but I’m especially not going to read Jane Fonda’s. But this review was a hoot, especially the dirt on Ted Turner: Turner calls Fonda the day after her divorce from Hayden hits the newspapers to ask her out on a date. She demurs. He calls back three months later, and she accepts. She appears in a black miniskirt, halter top, and spike heels, and Turner becomes so frantic that he has to excuse himself six times during dinner to use the toilet. On their second date, at Turner’s Montana ranch, the billionaire pleads, “Come on, why don’t we make love? Huh?” When Fonda relents, Turner squeals, “Hot dog!” Fonda says little about the prostrate aerobics that follow, though she coyly alludes to the spurting fountains of Versailles. After nine years of marriage, Turner dumps Fonda for what he charmingly refers to as his “backup.”

“Hot dog!” Now that’s one I’ve never heard before.

Tomorrow, then.

Someone asked the other day if I was feeling OK. The answer, as of today, is: Hail, yes. Yesterday the temperature topped 70, and I took the bike out for what I hope is months and months of heart-pumping daily exercise in the great outdoors, which is, lately, the only kind I can handle. (Gyms — threat, menace or just boring as hell?)

And everybody was feeling good. I rode out past the G.P. Hunt Club, where a cute gray gelding had just been turned out. He rolled on his back, scratching the last of the winter coat off, before clambering to his feet and running off, bucking and farting. There’s a springtime sight to lift your heart. I kept riding east, turning north when I dead-ended, until finally I came around a corner between two McMansions in the Shores, looked out and — cue hallelujahs — there it was. The lake. All my life I’ve been waiting to live next to something that isn’t muddy and running toward something else muddy. Lake St. Clair may be polluted, but it’s blue and it’s close.

It’s also shallow. Alan went out and bought one of those U.S. Geological Survey maps of the lake, and the depth markers were the biggest surprise — it’s only about a dozen feet deep, except for the shipping channel, which is dredged to about twice that. I guess that fits, since at the north end it’s basically a river delta. But it’s packed with sailors and kayakers, and so it suits our purposes. And after a long winter, it’s a welcome sight.

Which seems as good a time as any to introduce you guys to my new fave website, Boatnerd, which covers Great Lakes shipping traffic the way only a boat nerd can — with love. And lots and lots of pages.

Note to self: Since I missed the March memorial service for Great Lakes shipping at the Maritime Church of Detroit, mark calendar for the November Edmund Fitzgerald service. Yes, this is the church Gordon Lightfoot sang about. It’s also where Patti Smith married Fred “Sonic” Smith.

Not much other bloggage to report today, other than how depressing it is to see Prince Rainier, ruler of an inconsequential country the size of a golf course, is getting better play for his obit than Saul Bellow is for his.

Also, since the WSJ doesn’t allow for casual linkage, I can’t direct you to yesterday’s outrage — a story about how pregnant women, increasingly denied maternity benefits by health plans — are reduced to haggling with doctors over what they’ll pay to give birth. One midwife was quoted as saying at least half her clients come to her not for the crunchy-granola experience of giving birth at home while surrounded by one’s family, aromatherapy candles and Miles Davis on the CD player, but because it’s cheap.

But remember: The health-care crisis du jour is whether a husband should be able to make medical decisions for his brain-damaged wife. I ask you.

Did you know the Pope is lying out there on his bier…unembalmed? Ewwww. I knew it would pay to read Amy this week.

Finally, whenever I hear these Italian priests on TV this week, I’m reminded anew of how much I miss Father Guido Sarducci.

Me, I’m off on another bike ride. Today: south. Full report later.

We’ve all done it — unloading the dishwasher, carrying the plates from down below to the cabinets above, when you misjudge something and bonk! your head on the edge of the open cabinet door.

Oooh, that smarts. If you’re really unlucky, you hit it on the corner of the cabinet. And if you’re really really unlucky, you scream a few obscenities, and then open your teary eyes to find blood dripping onto the floor.

I was only really really unlucky. If I’d added another “really,” it would have meant a trip to the ER for stitches, a wound I know is called a “scalp lac,” thanks to years of “ER” reruns. Add another “really” to that scenario, and I would have fallen unconscious onto the still-full silverware rack, with all its upturned forks and paring knives, and risked becoming a Wayne County brief — Metro Woman Hospitalized in Dishwasher Mishap — and then almost certainly an “ER” subplot, for comic relief. As it was, a little direct pressure with a dish towel got things under control and all I have is a bloody scab and a headache.

Of course, if I had gone to the ER? Some doctor would have looked at my head and said, “Huh. You were lucky. Could have been worse.” I’m sure whole squadrons of Jerry Seinfeld wannabes have made routines out of the idea that the first thing a doctor says to you after you’ve been in an accident is, “You were lucky.”

I don’t like Mondays.

But my hair-color appointment in a few days is safe.

Congratulations again to Julia, who is probably sleeping off last night’s Pulitzer party. It’s my recollection that Julia was, when she was living and working in Columbus, the focus of ongoing harassment by a self-appointed “media critic” writing in the local alt-weekly. He was mainly bugged that Julia, who has a PhD, made the outrageous assumption that at least some of her readers were as smart as she was, and used fancy vocabulary and made the occasional literary reference. He called her “Dr. Keller.” He was an asshole. Still is, I expect.

Julia also told me that, like so many of these folks, her critic was egged on and fed items by a particularly jealous colleague, whose name she shared with me. He’s still in Columbus. He’s an asshole, too.

I wonder how they’re feeling this morning. Probably pretty sour. Being bitter and jealous is its own punishment.

As for Julia, she has a certain cat/canary look in this photo. I’m sure she’s not thinking of either of her tormenters. Being smart and accomplished is its own reward.

But within 36 hours, I expect some editor at the Trib will ask her, “So, what do you have for Sunday?” Oh-bla-di, etc.

Richard Cohen writes a deft column today about the Pope, warts and all. A refreshing break from the face-beaming-love crap in most newspapers.

Finally, I read stories like this, and I yearn for the days of tar and feathers: In a Senate floor speech in which he sharply criticized a recent Supreme Court ruling on the death penalty, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) — a former Texas Supreme Court justice and member of the Judiciary Committee — said Americans are growing increasingly frustrated by what he describes as activist jurists.

Cornyn continued: “I don’t know if there is a cause-and-effect connection, but we have seen some recent episodes of courthouse violence in this country. . . . And I wonder whether there may be some connection between the perception in some quarters, on some occasions, where judges are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public, that it builds up and builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in, engage in violence. Certainly without any justification, but a concern that I have.”

What do you suppose Judge Lefkow, up in Chicago, did to bring on the murder of her husband and 90-year-old mother? How about the judge in Atlanta? I supposed God killed him so Brian Nichols could come to God, eh?

Another asshat. They’re everywhere, I tell you.

Oh! Google Maps is now doing satellite images. Too, toooooo cool.

Or among the first, anyway, to congratulate our old pal and colleague Julia Keller for winning the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. We always knew she had it in her.

The story, or stories, was about the effect of a tornado on the city of Utica, Ill., although Julia, being a Pulitzer winner and all, said it was really about fate. Speaking of which…

This was the sight outside my sister’s back door Saturday afternoon. It doesn’t quite capture the heaviness of the snowfall, nor the sideways angle it took as it fell. But I hope it gives you an idea of the landscape outside, and suggests how I felt when I checked the weather radar and discovered…

…it wasn’t snowing in Detroit.

Fragile paranoiacs have snapped on less evidence.

But like a toddler’s tantrum, the snow was simply gone by 9 a.m. the following day, when it dawned sunny and warm and springlike. Winter always thinks it deserves the last word. It usually gets it.

In this case, it did. Saturday was my sister’s birthday, and we’d planned a standing rib roast with the whole family (meaning, “us, plus my brother”). But brother Charlie got up with a headcold, looked outside and called in sick. So curse you, winter! Because of you, I had pepperoni pizza for dinner Saturday night, instead of roast beef!

I’m sorry he was sick, because one purpose of this trip was to teach Charlie how to use his new computer. His first computer. Yes, his first. And his first after being innocent of pretty much the entire digital revolution. They still exist, these virgins — in this case a small businessman who always found a pencil, paper and calculator adequate to his bookkeeping needs, books and newspapers for his information and a deck of cards for entertainment. I was interested in where we would start, remembering the story a friend of mine told me in the mid-’80s, about a man who came into the Radio Shack where he worked, bought a Tandy and took it home, only to return it the next day. It didn’t work, he said; he’d typed, “How much money should I put into my truck?” into it and hadn’t gotten an answer.

I figured we’d start with the concept of an operating system, progress to files and folders, explain applications and RAM and ROM, and then wing it from there. It’s so hard to learn how to think like a computer. Another late-adopting friend of mine took weeks to learn that e-mail addresses weren’t like U.S. Postal Service addresses — that while you could send a letter to “Mr. Hodson” at such-and-such an address and the Mr. Hudson living there would probably get it, leaving the underscore out of an e-mail address meant it went to the dead-letter office.

Next time, I guess.

Oh, what did he buy, you ask? An iMac G5. I told him it’s like someone who waits until 1960 to see if this horseless-carriage thing is going to last, and then goes out to buy a Porsche.

(By the way, in case you’re wondering, my sister’s getting quotes on having that puddle drained.)

Me, I dealt with the weather in the classic way — retail therapy. I bought an antique glass-doored Mission bookcase, and I told Alan after we reloaded it, “Time to let the well refill.” We got the bass-drum coffee table in place, our framed chart of Lake St. Clair by the back door, our new bookcase, and the house looks like it’s ours, which is to say, it looks occupied by some fairly eccentric people and their goofy dog.

So, bloggage:

Amy is cementing her place as the Only Catholic Blogger Worth Reading by keeping up a fast and furious pace in this inter-papal period, even though she’s on vacation, crazy nut. (She’s no New York Times, which was on strike for the ENTIRE PAPACY of John Paul I. Damn unions.) Her readership is like her — orthodox Catholic — so for the most part I stay out of their discussions, although I dip a foot in every so often. One thing she asked her readers is, what do you hope the outside world sees of the church during this period? I have no answer, but I hope one thing I see is this: More journalism, less bathetic bullshit.

For me, the tone of JP the Deuce coverage was set very early, when my alma mater sent an old Catholic editor to cover his first American tour. My memory is Swiss-cheesey and faulty, but it tells me that every story began the same way: “His face beams love to all who look upon it,” or some such variation on the theme. It continues with the furrowed brows of anchors who don’t know a pope from an ayatollah, and inform me how bad I’m feeling: “The world mourned today for a man whose face beamed love to all who looked upon it.” Nothing queers me on a story faster than being informed of how I’m feeling.

I’ll keep reading Amy. Although I’m sure, sooner or later, she’s going to link to Peggy Noonan.

I really wish these snooty fashion writers would stop hatin’ on my homegirl Camilla. Although the NYT story at least cut her a bit of slack: This type of English countrywoman values looking “practical and tidy” above all else, Ms. Higginson noted. That’s because she often has more important things on her mind than what’s in Vogue this month: caring for her horses, gardening or taking her dogs for a walk. Such women are often great animal lovers, Ms. Higginson said: “Their Labradors and their horses are up there with their husband and their children in their affections.”

Mark my words: This woman’s going to die with more fans than Diana. Maybe not so many gay men, but certainly every woman who’s rather walk a Lab than a red carpet.

Long weekend. Long week ahead. See you then.

It should be obvious to all you sensitive readers that my spirits and energy are flagging, and the best treatment for flagging spirits is, of course, a road trip.

So we — Kate and I, plus the dog — are hitting the road. Are we bound for Florida or a cruise, as many of Kate’s classmates were this week? Are we going to Madrid, like the kid next door? No and no. We’re going to that city of light, city of magic, Columbus, Ohio. Call me on my cell if you need me, and if you don’t have the number, you don’t need me.

In the meantime, one last bit o’ bloggage. While I’m increasingly weary of the line-by-line Internet “takedown,” every so often someone finds a new way to do it, as when World o’ Crap marries Peggy Noonan to her spiritual predecessor, Jack Handey.

Oh, and it seems Jon Carroll batted another triple today. Or it might just be that I’m vulnerable to the message — trapeze art and change and listening to your broccoli. Yep, that could be it.

See you back here after the weekend. I have a full tank of gas, temperatures in the 60s and a mind to do anything, anything! With an 8-year-old in tow, however, it will likely be something like “have another scoop of ice cream.”