Lawns showing any signs of green right now generally owe their verdant hue to the attentions of sticky-weed, really bedstraw, also known as catchweed. Penny Van Horn had a wonderful cartoon on the subject in last week's Chron, but it's not to be found up with her recent strips. There've been no best-sellers in the house for quite some time, probably not since one of the inmates was actually assigned to read the odious Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (not that it's bad to remember that one's personal sway doesn't extend very far when it comes to influencing one's areas of concern; "paradigm shift," however, shows no sign of dying the painful death that it deserves). Courtesy of the library, Blessings was grabbed up from the recent-fiction shelf. What a piece of tripe! Anna Quindlen seems from her columns to be a sharper person than the author of this garbage. The "social observation" so praised in some of the reviews scanned after the book was read is also pure tripe and very condescending, too. Thank goodness we chanced to see a real treat. It took us away from our only semi-customary night of TV (Bernie Mac and Cedric the Entertainer). If we hadn't clicked on early for Wife and Kid and George Lopez and gone to PBS on the first commercial, we would have missed Kiss Me, Kate. I heard two bars of the sound and knew what it was right away. Especially wonderful were the costumes and the choreography.