• Country music star Merle Haggard passed away on April 6.  Pop music star Prince died on April 21.  Between those days, 2,275,000 other people died.  It’s been a sad April.

• True confessions: my social memory is like a dry sponge.  If I remember a personal detail about you, it’s only because you told me three or four times and somehow put up with my inability to soak it up the first and second times.  I seem to be able to store one important item about a person per encounter.  I hang onto your years-old emails to remind myself of the names of your children and what your interests and concerns are.  If only I were so loosely tethered to my own concerns.

• Humanity is about being humane.  What is the corresponding term for other members of the animal kingdom?  Do dogs have wagacity?  Do pigs have baconity?

• Last night, I dreamed I was a staff member at the United Nations, and they told me to draw a map of the messy parts of the world.  My first impulse was to get out my crayons and color the whole thing mud brown, but then I figured that some gradation of tone was in order.  So I started to think about things that make life messy.  Like poor sanitation.  Disease.  Wars.  Abusive relations.  Feeling like you don’t belong.  Were there some places in the world free of all that?  I just went ahead and colored the whole map mud brown.  How nice, for me, that this was just a dream.

• Earlier this week, former Navy SEAL Kristin Beck lost her primary bid for a Maryland congressional seat.  She ran as a Democrat, but her positions sounded very Republican.  She probably lost the vegetarian vote when she said this: “The IRS is above all law. They have their own laws, their own courts and they meat out punishment for both economic and political reasons.”  And how do I know this?  Because her website is one of the handful of results one gets when searching for the term meat out punishment.

• I have this thing about reciprocity: if other people invite me to care about them, maybe they might also care about me.  This has landed me in (horrors!) social-media purgatory.  Recently, one of my Facebook friends shared a post by Sen. Elizabeth Warren discussing her husband’s birthday and his skating lessons.  Now, I favor Ms. Warren’s progressive stances, but she is not a cult figure to me as she is to others, and her relationship with her spouse is not my concern, just as ours is of no interest to her.  She is a political figure, not a personal friend.  I decided to add a comment to that effect on her Facebook post.  One of her fans promptly responded: “If you don’t like it, stop reading.”  Okay.

• I don’t really understand the appeal of Trader Joe’s.  Especially its wine, supposedly one of the best deals in the store.  Based on a online review, I decided to try the “Velvet Moon” Cabernet Sauvignon.  I was, to put it tactfully, vastly unimpressed.  It is priced about the same as Jacob’s Creek (usually on sale for $5.99 in our supermarket) but it is thinner and more juice-like, which makes it a great communion wine for pass-the-chalice Unitarians.

• Speaking of religion, or lack thereof: I find it interesting that it takes a foxhole to convert an atheist, but it only takes a mixed-religion betrothal or that new church down the street to convert the faithful.  Even then, it’s more like flipping a pancake.

• If I have insulted anyone, then those I did not insult just wasted their time reading this conditional clause.  The non-insulted should have stopped at the comma.