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• Here's something that doesn't happen every day at mwbh. The current Lenten series "Sermons for Shut-Ins," featuring Cardinal Rigali, elicited a favorable comment -- from its producer. Dan Kearns from the Archdiocese of Philadelphia wrote: "With great thanks for linking to Living Lent. It is a wonderful service you do (I love the "Sermons for Shut-ins" title!) and your spreading the good news is much appreciated." And so, an extra Tip of the Black Hat this week goes out to a Man in the Red Hat. (Yo, Eminence! I'll make a deal with you; keep it up year-round and I'll keep it up here.)

• They finally coughed up an explanation: Anne Nicole Smith died of an accidental dose of perscription medications, as did Marilyn Monroe (officially). Imagine how underwhelmed we are here at mwbh. FOX News analyst Michelle Malkin explained who could continue to be fascinated by this: "There are too many Americans who are celebrity-obsessed tabloid junkies, who live in an unserious [sic] world, who don't deal in reality, and would rather live vicariously through C-list has-beens and their groupies." She neglected to mention that these same people... vote.

• I had a major hard drive failure at the office yesterday. And since we're the only office in the entire agency that runs on Macs -- hey, we're designers, it can happen -- it will be like pulling teeth to get a contractor in here to determine whether I've lost the last three months worth of work that wasn't backed up. Fortunately, my class work is all backed up at home. What's left I can actually re-do for the most part. There's two weeks of my life I'll never get back. That's assuming the worst. Stay tuned...

• Everyone else is yammering about the "imminent" motu proprio from Rome, that would permit broader use of the pre-conciliar form of the Mass in Latin -- the so-called "Tridentine Mass." In at least three locations, my head's spinning with a continual round of polemical deja vu. The New Liturgical Movement actually has some intelligent analysis on the subject. You could almost ignore the rest and not miss much. Which is why I'm attempting the same.

• I finished class last week, and have only one week of respite before moving on to "Intermediate Scripting Languages." This class is in the evenings too; Tuesdays and Thursdays instead of Mondays and Wednesdays. That means that I can get back to watching NBC's Heroes and CBS's Jericho. Hey, I never claimed to be a Luddite about the mass media, okay? Sometimes even the "Big Three" do something right. As to the class, I just hope I do at least as well as with the Fundamentals session. I've got a mid-term review coming up later this year, when a group of faculty try to tell me everything I've done wrong for the last two years, and I try to tell them they're not dealing with a punk-ass kid this time around. It should be great sport!

• One of the great television dramas, which has created a record three spin-offs, is NBC's Law and Order. Most of my self-confidence in a courtroom can be traced to watching the re-runs. Fred Dalton Thompson, who currently plays the district attorney, was a senator from Tennessee before getting into acting full time. And he is considering running for President. I saw him interviewed recently, and I was more than impressed. He opened his position on abortion with two words: "Pro Life." That was enough for me, but he also explained by Roe v Wade is "bad law," and he is right on the money. Who knows, I might actually vote for a Republican again. (Of course, if he runs, they'll probably pull the ones that show him. That's really gonna bite.)

• And for the moment (not counting the fact that recent events have created a backlog of material just begging to be shared with the world), that's all the news that fits!