Ever left your keys behind somewhere? Or maybe you left your cell phone on someone else’s desk at work? That’s OK. Someone, probably not you, left their car, yes their car, on the Kingston-to-Edmonds ferry yesterday morning. The forgetful owner eventually showed up. The police were of course called to look the vehicle over.

I didn’t intend to take an entire week off from here, but it worked out that way for various reasons. Being a parent certainly keeps life interesting. For now I have a few tidbits to share:

Orders for the new Buffy comic (Season 8) have exceeded the first printing of 100,000. A second printing is coming.

I thought Jasper Fforde was done with Tuesday Next, but a new sequel arrives in July.

The L.A. Times details the trail of a thief who stole two violins from the house of a Los Angeles Philharmonic violinist on December 23rd. He flew to Europe with his dog intending to sell the violins and live off his profits. Dealers in a Paris violin shop, suspicious of this guy’s story, checked the Internet and found the instruments had been stolen.

Administrative Goings-On: After briefly investigating other blogging software, I realized I don’t have time right now to learn how to manage a different tool. So I bit the bullet and upgraded to the new version of Blogger. I’ve also decided to give FeedBurner a whirl. Redirects are in place to make the RSS changes (hopefully) seamless so no action is needed from you. My RSS file has changed to index.xml. The previous index.rdf has a permanent redirect to index.xml. index.xml does a temp redirect to the FeedBurner feed (which in turn is actually reading from the feed file that Blogger generates). If you see any problems, email me.

Spring’s around the corner which means it’s bulk Zoo Doo time at the Woodland Park Zoo. Those who want to get in the lottery for purchasing Doo in bulk or the new offering of Bedspread (a composted mulch) can send a postcard in for the random drawing.

The Denver Post fine arts critic notes that a half-dozen young female violinists are poised to bring balance to the male-dominated world of solo violinists. Female violinists have achieved fame in the classical music world before, but this up-and-coming group of mostly 20-somethings illustrates the changing demographic in the field. “Women have made up at least half of the violin students in music schools for at least 15 years.” And they are going on to success at the highest levels of achievement. Kids entering music as a profession no longer feel it’s a man’s world. I’d like to see a gender comparison of salaries for professional musicians.

WA is running out of license plate numbers. “State Licensing Department spokesman Brad Benfield says Washington is about two years away from running out of all configurations of letters and numbers in the current system” (AAA-000 through ZZZ-999). A decision on the replacement scheme will be announced in a couple months.

Lush opened this weekend in Seattle’s Westlake Center. (And as an Eastside resident I must point out that we had it here in Bellevue first.)

I don’t know which was more surprising: finding out that there’s a company that will spin your pet’s fur into yarn or finding out that a woman had a sweater made out of her cat’s fur. A YouTube video of the news report has close-ups of the knit and of course the long-haired cat who provided the 5 gallons of raw material. (via StyleDash)

Kelsey Grammer as My Fair Lady’s Henry Higgins is no-brainer casting. The rest of the casting in this New York Philharmonic concert staging at Avery Fisher Hall is even more inspired. Kelli O’Hara (Light in the Piazza) as Eliza, Brian Dennehy as her dad, Charles Kimbrough (Jim Dial from Murphy Brown) as Pickering, and, most wonderfully, Marni Nixon (the singing voice of Eliza in the movie, and many other uncredited dubbings) as Mrs. Higgins (unfortunately not a singing role). (N.Y. Times review)

YouTube videos of toddlers are a lot funnier when you have one. Emma Feeding Crowley Popcorn illustrates superb toddler logic: of course daddy can see you when he’s on the telephone. Besides, when she gets a phone of her own one day that will be true! The Amazing Breakdancing Toddler demonstrates those brilliant mimicry skills essential to early learning. And a 22-month old playing Wii Tennis…well, I don’t know what to say about that!