My first name has suffered its 15th straight year of losses, according to Social Security's baby name list. Patrick fell to 129th place among boys in 2009, two spots below last year and its worst showing since 1928.

Meanwhile, continuing last year's worrisome trend, Cooper as a boy first name improved to 84th place. The only good news was that the name still didn't hit the girl list. And Cooper Patrick had a good year.

I'm at a loss. Patrick Dempsey, Neil Patrick Harris, Danica Patrick, the death of Patrick Swayze? Did they do nothing for our Patrick people?

Can't predict in too much hope,
You and me, the Googlenope.

On this bridge I sit but cope,
Roof and desk of Googlenope.

You the beauty, me a dope?
Secret weeks, to Googlenope.

I type again, that word hope,
Singing songs of Googlenope.

Goodbye to snow on the satellite dish. The snow will still be there, but we'll never know. Because we'll never have to shovel the dish again.

For a long time, you see, the Associated Press wires came to us from the sky. They beamed from the AP — located nowhere and everywhere — into deep, dark outer space and bounced back to Earth and Virginia and McLean, and we grabbed the copy when needed for the site and paper. Wars, inaugurations, celebrities, tragedies, victories, and all the mystery that's news landed in big dishes pointed at particular clouds.

Except when it snowed.

When it snowed hard, the wires stopped. The snow covered the dish, and we had to send someone with a broom to knock the snow off the dish. Seriously. Someone went to the roof with a broom and cleaned the dish. And we weren't alone. AP would sometimes send instructions across the wires on what to do with the broom. We would laugh and feel sorry for AP Cleveland and other cold parts of the wire network.

The wires going forward will come to us through the Internet — not quite wires but closer to wires than satellites were. As friend Bob at work put it, we'll just have to watch for blizzards in the server room.

I'll be rooting for that.

One.

Over the past two months, as a debilitating protest in Bangkok took hold and shadowy groups have operated with impunity, I have crouched behind furniture in hotels when grenades exploded on the street outside. I stood on a wide avenue as dozens of dead and wounded protesters were carried from the carnage of a failed military crackdown. I hid behind a telephone pole during an hourlong crackling barrage of gunfire. And on Thursday, a man I was interviewing was struck in the head by an assassin’s bullet and collapsed at my feet.

Two.

I went to see a minister a few days after his death, which was as swift as it was inexplicable — he had been only 43 and remarkably fit, with no history of heart problems. Neither Steve nor I were religious but I wanted to talk to someone. She was wonderful; she did not bring up God or heaven or anything. She was more like a doctor, explaining a diagnosis. “Suffering a devastating loss is like suffering a brain injury,” she said. She spoke really slowly, which I appreciated. “You walk around like a zombie. You can’t think straight. You feel drugged—”

Three.

"For people who are looking for a church, that's a good way of sorting through the good and the bad. But to go deeper, I'm against that consumerism when it comes to community," Wicks said. "People ought to choose to be part of a community and embrace the flaws of that community and work to fix them."

Four.

I was your rebellious son,
do you remember? Sometimes
I wonder if you do remember,
so complete has your forgiveness been.

Five.

The big issue is whether LeBron is going to make a basketball decision or one geared toward marketing, exposure and his personal life. After talking to several veteran NBA players and several club executives over the past 48 hours, it was somewhat surprising to hear that few people believe LeBron will make primarily a basketball decision. Nobody I talked to believes LeBron was humiliated by the loss to Boston. None of the players I talked to believes LeBron is motivated by winning in the same obsessive way Magic, Bird and Jordan were, or Kobe is. They believe that LeBron thinks he has years to win, and isn't particularly pressed at the moment to do so.

Six.

One year after taking the college phenomenon Stephen Strasburg — considered by most scouts to be the best pitching prospect since the Major League Baseball draft began in 1965 — the Nationals can now pick what many view to be the best teenage power-hitting prospect since perhaps Mickey Mantle. Better than Darryl Strawberry, the top selection in 1980. More advanced than Ken Griffey Jr., Alex Rodriguez and Joe Mauer, other first-pick prodigies to whom Harper best compares.

Seven.

Looking at different picture books can feel like taking different kinds of walks in the wood. As you turn the pages the pictures influence the pace at which you read and the attention you give to the images. Some books may feel like being in a forest with tree branches beckoning forward, encouraging you to move at a steady pace down the path. (William Steig is the master of this kind of book, his drawings, easy-going and efficient, so inextricably linked to his words that they lead effortlessly to the conclusion.) An other kind of book may feel more like a great allée of oaks where you are inclined to stop and admire the whorls and indentations of particular trees. In yet another, the experience is more akin to walking through an arboretum, where every turn brings you face to face with an exciting new specimen of bush or flower.

Eight.

Durable, evocative, stale, weary;
renewable, exhaustible, and placid;
benign or neutral, shifty as the moon;
obedient to undeciphered laws:
What we take for granted
vanishes, reconfigures, disappears.

Via Lindsay last week, a good listen is writer Ryan Knighton's 2009 talk at Cusp, the Chicago conference I most wish I could afford to attend.

Blind since 28, Knighton discusses how he uses his walking stick, and his main point is about lo-fi success. There are segments about optics, writing, trust, and technology. There's mention of JAWS, for instance, which is screen-reading software. If you've never read about it, you should. At work, one of the things I'm proudest of with the community publishing tool we built last year is its working end-to-end with JAWS.

But the key theme for me in Knighton's talk is positioning.

Where and how do you place yourself in the world? Once in a place, how does it change you? For a storyteller, how does your positioning affect your craft? Consider Knighton's good account of the "Stephen Hawking" voice JAWS uses and how it developed his writing style.

Or take Knighton's 2006 Modern Love column. "I would give anything to tell you what my wife looks like, but I can't," he writes. "I haven't seen her face in five years, and even my memory of her is rapidly fading. Her expressions, body language, the shapely gait of her walk, all of those things are dissolving in my mind as I move further away from the visual world, and the memory of what it means to see."

He then explains how he assembles his world with his wife — and the complications of assembly. "The notes are singular, a subtle mingling of her own scent with that of her perfume. Then, the full effect reaches me — and this is the important part — the moment she passes. Those are the erotics of smell and space. Different notes twirl in the air after her. They make me want to turn my head. I want to look."

Or read his great 2007 conversation with Jim Knipfel. In brief: "Two blind memoirists walk into a Brooklyn bar and happen to find one another. One of them turned on a tape recorder for The Believer."

RK: Somebody told me there’s a washroom here in New York that’s just a wall.

JK: With the water running down?

RK: With the water running down. That’s the one.

JK: Yeah, it’s at some fancy ass hotel.

RK: That would drive me insane. I’d deliberately piss on the other wall.

In other words, if you live in a world, you have to deal. But there's no reason your dealing can't try at more. That's design but also life.

What I ate, in order: crabcake, Carlyle; chocolate cupcake with toffee-buttercream frosting, Best Buns; corn and tomato gazpachos, Italian bread with tomato topping, Domaso Trattoria; cab franc, Tarara; ribs; Liberty Tavern; soup, Tallula; chocolate pastry, Northside Social; pasta cup, Caesar salad, sorbet, Pinzimini; and a glass of Charval, Tarara.

It wasn't as much fun as last year when crowds of people I knew were pretty much falling from the trees, even if the rain was falling too. But it was great to run into Kim and Ruben, and I did manage to blitz spots I wanted and get some decent pictures. Notes on what's below: Ted's Montana Grill, I'm sorry. You can't hurt the best burger in a Ray's town. NYT, way to show up. Food judges, I was jealous. Pig man — no idea.

More in this post »

Until now! Deanna posts: "Might have made a U-turn, be-lined out of the car without shoes to run across the street to grab a shot…"

The thing about The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is no one has a home.

Not Blondie, not Tuco, not Angel Eyes, not the bounty hunters, not the whores as they live at work, not the troops, not the prisoners, not the missionaries because the battle is coming, not the bystanders because they will die, not the dead because they're unburied or with war atop their graves. The only home seen early is destined for abandonment.

Nights are spent in camps, outposts and trains. Daytime is in constant motion, on horseback, foot and coach, with sleeping, cleaning, bathing, drinking, eating, working, and killing all interrupted. Names are similarly transitive. Blondie, Angel Eyes? No names here, and Blondie, of course, is The Man with No Name. Tuco has a first name, last and four middles. But he's left his family behind, so they add up to nothing. Most-wanted man Bill Carson is a fake name, a couple times over. Last, Arch Stanton is a name that appears to mean something until it doesn't. We're left with Unknown and men whom, asked late for names, can say nothing.

And the war. Yes, the troops have no homes, but further they have no reason to exist. There are no slaves in the West. There are no states' rights. There are barely states. With Bull Run and Antietam, war makes sense. The battleground is the ground at stake. But in the West, land is tangential. Towns are sparse, as anonymous as the few inhabitants, and bridges mean nothing to the men who fight and die daily for them.

As Blondie tells no one, again late in the film, "I've never seen so many men wasted so badly." This suffering is impartial. Thank God for a DVD cut restoring Angel Eyes finding the survivors of the dying Confederate camp. The scene is as beautifully shot and moving as any in the movie.

In this world, as Tuco says over and over, there's two kinds of people… and now my part… those who love moving and those who are terrified of it. I'm the latter. Work is a different story with different impetus. It's personally where I'm the latter, terrified. No, I don't know why. When I move, I worry I'll disappear. When people whom I care about move, I worry they'll disappear. No, this fear isn't grounded, yet it exists. You pack your boxes, and the world shifts. Maybe I never see you again.

That's why I'm up later tonight. That's why I had Netflix send this DVD, why one in the morning was the right time to open this bottle and why the drinking is going slowly, soberly. I'm securing tomorrow, now here. Some people need people to live. I need people and tomorrow to run.

We try to sleep in our homes, in our beds, with our names, wanting.

Everyone's choosing their favorite Exile songs. Jimmy Fallon had bands playing theirs, and the NPR piece has been sitting in my browser tabs for days. It's hard to argue against Tumbling Dice as the world's choice — two weeks ago, I spent half an hour listening to it on repeat — and the album's opening set is so monster as to bias any listener subtly against the second half. So, I'm going with my favorite Exile songs of yesterday alone: All Down the Line and I Just Want to See His Face.

On the latter's merit, an All Music Guide mini-essay is perfection:

… "I Just Want to See His Face" sounds ancient and from another planet; a swampy, stompy gospel song hat was recorded to intentionally sound as if it is a field recording document of a long-ago church basement revival meeting. … The inspired lyric suggests surrendering in the midst of trouble and finding the spirit, getting into the mystic, as Van Morrison would say, and letting go of any intellectualizing about religion; the comfort that comes from a shoulder to cry on: "Sometimes you ain't got nobody and you want somebody to love/Then you don't want to walk and talk about Jesus/You just want to see His face."

Audio:

The best add to Exile on Main Street's re-release is Plundered My Soul. Previously bought on Record Store Day and played in this space, the song has gotten love from Casey and other friends. When's the last time we all talked about a new (sort of new) Stones song? It's cool.

But something I've loved alongside the discussion is how the song's history has slowly gathered exposure on the Web. Glorious Noise picked up on re-recording mentions in March, and Stones message boards rumbled with rumors. When Plundered hit a few weeks ago, GloNo surfaced the board reactions: The whole vocal was new! The site claimed the vocals came in 2009, but sourcing wasn't strong.

In recent days, though, we're receiving Mick confirmation. USAT:

Varying amounts of guitar, vocals and percussion sealed other cracks, with results seamless enough to fool Jagger's friends.

The additions "are in the style of Exile and quite believable," he says. "Not that I was trying to fib about it, but when I played it for people and they said, 'Oh, you found it like that?,' I said, 'Uh, yeah, yeah.' It was a bit strange finishing songs 40 years later."

Bare-boned piano ballad River required lyrics and vocals. Both Jagger and former guitarist Mick Taylor made fresh contributions to the caustic midtempo Plundered.

"We were not on the original," Jagger says. "Obviously, we were off in a bar somewhere when it was recorded. I asked (Taylor) to come back and do overdubs. It really makes the track complete."

Charlie Watts talks to Rolling Stone this week about the changes, "My only criticism of the new ones is that the voice sounds like it was done yesterday." In the Chicago Tribune, Greg Kot calls the added sound "a misguided attempt to update an album that needs no updating."

But Kot interviews Jagger a bit, and the text is fascinating. "I started from scratch on vocals," Jagger says. "There was nothing in terms of melody or lyrics." No lyrics! Later, Jagger notes Plundered's preserved music was the opposite — "very together, no mistakes, no messing about, very arranged, very thought out, obviously very together."

I'm glad to hear about the lyrics because I'd been wondering.

After you hear the vocals are new, it's obvious. The tone is richer at mid-tempo, more consistent with modern Jagger — he's a gentleman now — than his ragged Exile-era singing. But the lyrics have had me thinking in the shower. It's easy to start singing Plundered My Soul in the shower and find myself in Forty Licks '02 cut Stealing My Heart. "I thought you were dinner / but you were the shark" fits well the story of "I thought you wanted my money, but you plundered my soul…"

But I like it. While I wish the Stones would dump all the Exile tapes on the Web and let their hardcore fans build wild mixes for the rest of us, at least we have one good song here. Aging Mick may be baroque to young Mick's broke, but these days, if half a songwriting process can give results this good, there's life in the band yet. Plunder the vaults.