And so we say farewell, and if we'd only stopped there, we'd have been fine.

Unworthy confession. When the NPR news reporter adopted that funereal tone and began "Veteran British actress and Oscar-winner Dame . . ." my mind was already racing ahead. "Oh, please, not Judi Dench, not Maggie Smith." (Two of my favorite actors of all time.)

And then it turned out to be Elizabeth Taylor. Phew.

Oh, I'm very sorry, of course, but the news was tinged with a little relief after my assumptions. Well, Dame E's only a couple of years older than the other two (who were born just three weeks apart), but she had long retired from our screens, and her frequent bouts of ill-health had culminated in a hospital confinement since the beginning of the year, so although still sad, this development wasn't unexpected; while M and Professor McGonagall are still going strong, and have, in fact, made another movie together, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, which is due out later this year.

By the way, at what point did "legendary" become a legitimate term for news agencies, synonymous with "well-known"? Is it another "miraculous"? (The Catholic Church, despite its vested interest, is scrupulously cautious and thorough about granting the status of a miracle. New York's eleven o'clock news broadcast seems to think they happen every day. "Well, truly a miraculous escape for a Bronx mother after a taxi goes out of a control . . .") Okay, it may be a shade of hyperbole that's crept into the dictionary definitions, but shouldn't a journalist be the last to adopt it?

You can't make this stuff up.

In a BBC radio documentary about the current state of the Roman Catholic Church in England, the reporter covers several controversial elements that have torn congregations apart. Among them, whether or not the priest turns his back to the worshipers at a key point in the mass, and that old favorite, the sly return of the old rite, the Latin "extraordinary form" of the service.

A priest who is unrepentant about this harking back to older values, justifies his actions:

"People also complain that because of Latin, the mass can't be understood," he allows. "[But] the mass is not immediately intelligible in English either."

Nonplussed, the reporter asks politely "Isn't that a bit patronizing?"

"Of course, people can understand English," the priest concedes. "But I wouldn't necessary be able to understand somebody talking about high energy physics. In theology, and in the words of the liturgy, it is a technical and specialized language. The prayers of the church aren't an attempt to make that language intelligible to everybody, any more than a nuclear physics textbook for postgraduates would be written in language that I could understand."

Is it me, or is this . . . ?

Hasn't that Bieber kid's voice broken yet?

Secundus has set himself the task of naming twenty singers. He lowers it to ten, but successfully completes his decalogue with a clutch of teenage female singers who all seem to have Nickelodeon or Disney Channel shows. Or vice versa.

"You missed a big name," I tell him. "What about Lady Gaga?"

"Yeah, I wasn't really thinking about any old singers," he says.

Gaga is 24.

A myriad of thanks.

Hey, I just saw that my hit counter has gone over the ten thousand mark. Yes, I know that's a pretty low number compared with a lot of websites. (Kathi Taylor's over half a million, but she claims that's because she blogs about American Idol for the Pacific time zones. I think that's just false modesty. Have you seen her knitting? Wonderful.)

And yes, I know a good chunk of that number is me, logging in to make edits.

But given that my latest book is still on the conveyor belt, and so I am not yet a household name, I just want to thank any regular readers who catch this entry for checking in from time to time. And I know there are a lot more of you than the nice people who've signed up as followers. (I'm not sure what being a follower does for you, compared with just clicking a bookmark, but feel free to find out.)

And yes, that's what a myriad means, literally. Ten thousand. If you didn't know that already, my work here is done.

Love

Anal, the well-known typo.

Spring forward! (Okay, shamble forward, then.)

Primus is not a morning person, and the advent of daylight saving time makes it worse. My irruption into the bedroom at seven o'clock, with merry cries of "Good morning, campers!", an impression of a bugle playing reveille, and a tara-diddle or two on Secundus's drum-kit is unappreciated for some reason.

He stumbles into the kitchen twenty minutes later, and my cheerful exhortations over breakfast to "Get to school and show 'em what you got!" or "Tell them to get behind you or get out of your way!" produce only silent scowls. Eventually, he speaks to his beloved father:

"If you didn't feed me, I'd disown you."

Visitor from above.

A red-tailed hawk, who decided to perch on the railing of our deck for half an hour yesterday afternoon. (A good place for hunting bunnies, if the droppings behind the swing-set are any indication.)

This picture wasn't taken with a particularly powerful telephoto (55mm on a digital SLR, equivalent to about 90mm on an older film camera), and I haven't cropped it much. The bird let me get within five feet. Well, with a beak and talons like that, what does it have to get nervous about?

Nashional defecit.

And so the year of Ogden takes off. The story so far: immortal poet Ogden Nash was born in Rye, New York, and spent his childhood here. But this still comes as a surprise to many Rye residents, and part of the problem is the absence of any significant memorial to our most famous son. So I'm trying to get the City Council to name something after O.N. (Plus the Rye Arts Center is having a celebration of Nash in September, which I'm currently researching.)

And now, read on. Here's a link to my article, which appeared in this week's Rye Record.

Buttons? That's so 2010.

I'm having lunch with my friend Cindy to see her pictures from her recent trip to Cambodia and Vietnam, two more places I may never get to in this lifetime. (Cindy's down there on the right, among the followers of this blog.)

We're viewing the images on her new iPad, which is an excellent way of displaying digital images (which is to say virtually all images these days: since the demise of film, paper as the final destination for a photograph has gone from being the principal choice to a mere option).

But we can't find the button that moves us from one picture to the next. We try the slideshow feature, but the images change too fast, so we're constantly stopping it and restarting it. Tapping on the glass brings up a frieze of tiny thumbnails at the bottom of the screen that lets us select individual pictures, but they're too small to use effectively. We're convinced there must be a "next image" arrow button lurking somewhere, but it eludes us, and we don't have the manual with us.

After about ten minutes of this, I notice that a small hair has landed on the screen. I discretely swipe it out of the way with my forefinger. And that's when I accidentally discover Apple's neat, intuitive way of progressing through the pictures, one at a time -- just a swipe. (It's not like I don't already have an iTouch.)

There's a very good ad for a new car model that I saw during this evening's Oscar broadcast, addressing the point that even though there's nothing ground-breaking about the technology, the car takes it to a new level. It shows a world where people stopped inventing after the first idea, including internet cafes with typewriters attached to brick-like cell phones and a guy carrying a record turntable through the streets and wearing huge headphones. (And there are zeppelins over the buildings, which I think is pretty cool.)

I'm clearly living in that world. But at least I've started putting the right year on my checks.

Fourth-grade logic.

Secundus has been taking a lot of pictures with my four-year-old Canon 30D -- not exactly the cheapest camera around, but I grit my teeth and encourage his artistic endeavors. You never know when any of the boys will display a bankable talent that means I can afford to retire early.

He shows me some "ghost" pictures he's taken of his friend. They look more like double exposures to me than long, low-light exposures during which she may have moved, and I wondered how he managed them.

"Oh, the camera just does that from time to time," he tells me airily.

Just does that? "It was working fine before you used it last," I say. "If you've damaged it, that's the last time you get to touch it."

"Well, duh," he replies. "Why would I want to use a broken camera?"

Un Flambeau, Jeanette . . .

My childhood friend Jeanette, who lives in Derbyshire, England, says I'm such an unreliable correspondent that she follows the blog just to make sure I'm still alive.

So for her: Hi, Jeanette! (Glad you found the cat.)