Walking Jasper tonight - the sun finally emerged after four days of rain. Still cool, but bright. Birds chirping. Dogs yelping, kids shouting. Happy spring day. There’s a squirrel in the street -

I look again; Jasper stops, peers: it’s half a squirrel. The back half is flat. The tail is flat. The back portion is almost completely flat. The squirrel is up on its front legs, and is staring at us impassively. Yes, I was run over. Whatta gonna do. Just have to die now. Crap.

I noted the street address, and thought I’d call animal control; someone could come by and put the squirrel out of its misery. How, I don’t know, but I assume they have some sort of squirrelinasia kit for these things.

Then a crow circled down and landed a few feet away from the squirrel. He settled his wings, looked at us and said: Caw. Caw.

Translation: I’ll take it from here.

Ten minutes later we returned to the spot. No squirrel.

It’s a brutal world. Pretty, efficient, lovely and brutal.

Got the email resolved today, thanks to a Microsoft tech supervisor who was nasty, efficient, ugly and brutal. Without question the most unlikeable person I’ve ever spoken to in a tech situation. Friday I’d been told by a tech that a sysadmin would be deleting & recreating my file, which should solve the problem, and I’d be contacted in 24 hours. Needless to say, the problem was not solved, and no one contacted me. So I called again.

Went through the rigamarole, explained kindly to the tech support guy that I had changed nothing on my end, that three techs had said it was a problem on their end, but no one knew what to do. He put me on hold. Queen Bitch came on the line.

“You wanted to talk to a supervisor,” she said. That was her hello. I said No, I hadn’t requested that, but as long as she was here, I'd be glad to tell her my problem -

She informed me that they didn’t support Mac products. I told her that this wasn’t a problem on my end, but theirs. She got pissed and told me that they don’t support Mac products. Mind you, I’d said hardly a word about what my problem was. When I mentioned that my mail server was not MSN’s, she had a cow on the spot, and those horns must have hurt on the way out. She said that this was SOMETHING ELSE they don’t support. I kindly reminded her that this was a recent change to their policy - that wasn’t the case when I signed on, and in any case I had made the changes the techs requested to go through MSN’s server - I had, as they all said, added “secure” to my SMTP settings -

“Why?” she barked.

Because they told me to. Every single time I’ve called.

“Well, you don’t have to. Do you have a cable modem? A LAN? No? don’t use secure.”

I said I’d give that a try.

She hung up without saying another word.

I removed the word “secure” from the settings.

Mail works now.

They had changed things. That’s the only explanation. But no one knows what’s going on, because 99.7% of all calls come from people who are semi-2D squirrels on the infosupway.

Tomorrow: Salvation Army Fun! See you Wednesday.

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There’s one part about buying a house I don’t quite understand: no money seems to change hands. Just paper. It seems like the sort of transaction where one ought to bring sacks of money with a $ sign on the side, or perhaps suitcases full of bills. Or bars of gold: clang. No. Then again, I don’t really deal much with money anyway, just its symbols. And of course money itself is a symbol, a nice consensual hallucination. When I was a kid, all the sci-fi stories had units of money like “credits” - might as well admit that’s the world in which I’ve come to live. The company puts credits in my account; I give a slip of paper to this person giving them credits, or let them use the PlastiToken (the debit card, but in the future these things always had names like PlastiToken or CredMon or some other nonsense word no one would ever use) to take the credits out electronically. I suggest we just do away with the term “dollars” and replace it with something more fanciful. Quatloos, maybe.

If all goes well, the transaction will be zipless: I give them a check from the sale of the old house, sign some papers, write a few checks here and there, and voila: Immense Crushing Debt is mine. I’d feel better if I actually had to give someone a twenty. It would seem as if something had really happened.

We met with Crazy Andy, our longtime friend and mortgage man. Twenty years ago we were sitting in a booth at the Valli arguing foriegn policy. Now I have a kid in my lap and a wife by my side, and we no longer argue about foreign policy; we agree with great gusto.

Went to the Salvation Army yesterday to divest myself of unneeded Stuff. . . . and I’ll be damned if I didn’t write something about this that I’m going to use in a column, so I won’t use it here. Apologies: this week, this month, and the next are going to see some pretty sketchy Bleatage, but I’m stretched to the limit nowadays. That makes for exceedingly dull reading, I know. Let’s just put it this way: Monday’s Bleat will explain all. And much more. Can’t say what’s going on now, but Lordy massy me, I’ll flap my gums about it then.

Lordy Massy Me: where did I pick up that one, exactly? Can’t remember if it’s one of those expressions I heard someone using in earnest and adopted for sarcastic use, or vice versa. It’s from the Land-o’-Goshen school of Biblical oaths, but now that I think of it, the expression gives off a whiff of Aunt-Jemima racist stereotypes - big-eyed Mammy with her hands a’flutterin: Lawdy Massy Me! So remind me never to use that one again.

As long as we’re on the subject of nasty old stereotypes: for a while, in the 30s and 40s, there was the stereotype of the grindingly literal Swedish janitor. Really. I’m convinced of this. Hard to believe, but the “Ole” character, or “Sven” character, was an urban stereotype - the ya-sure-yew-betcha bachelor, stooped from his labors, a snoose-spitting crude immigrant who’d be sweepin’ up de dart on de fleur. Watch enough old TV shows and movies, and you’ll see him. Not always a loveable figure, either.

Speaking of loveable, specifically Gruff but Loveable - last night’s Mary Tyler Moore show had a mid 70s classic moment: Gruff-but-Loveable Lou Grant has to deal with his wife getting remarried. That was one of those Bold plot arcs that gave the sitcom some dramatic heft, but even then it made me snarl - his wife left him because she’d never been to Edie, in the parlance of the day. She wanted to discover herself. She loved her husband and their life together, but now that the kids were gone she wanted her own apartment so she could take pottery classes and not shave her legs every day, or something like that. There was absolutely no good reason for the divorce. None. Poor Lou: victim of a with-it, relevant plot development.

But the next episode was a favorite: Mary gets a new apartment. She moves to a highrise.

I used to live in that highrise. Well, part of it. I had a girlfriend in Mary’s building for a few years; I spent a year in another part of the complex. It was a gargantuan development near downtown, a place called Cedar Square West. “A New Town in Town,” as the parlance had it; New Urbanism 70s style: build a gigantic dense complex in the middle of a small-scale funky downmarket neighborhood. The main tower in the complex, named at the time after one of the founders of 3M, was almost 40 stories high; the rest were 15-25 stories, grouped around a godless concrete plaza. Unless you’re used to East Coast housing developments, you cannot believe how big this thing is - and it was intended to be ten times bigger. I hated living there. It smelled, and the walls were thin, and my building had bugs.

The MTM show got one detail right: Mary lived in the building that was regarded as the best, and cleanest, in the complex. But for a while it made for some amusing viewing - I’d be sitting in my room in the D tower, and Mary would say that there was a new Chinese restaurant down the street - and I’d think, well, no, there isn’t.

Ruined my faith in TV, it did. Ruined it clean through.