Wrench... drill... Ryan Seacrest?

Some guys came over Wednesday to do a little work on the house. These are guys who sweat for a living.

At one point they were debating back and forth, so my ears perked up. I figured they were deciding whether to go with the hand wrench or the ratchet.

They were talking about who’s going to win “American Idol.”

My wife and I have never latched onto the show – we tend to obsess over one TV show at a time, and this year it’s “24.” The good news is, you don’t have to watch “AI.” Everybody else watches it for you.

I haven’t seen a minute of it this year but I know it’s down to Taylor and Katharine, and Taylor is the better singer but Katharine is more polished, and no way either of them are better than Chris.

On Thursday I’ll pick up on the ending by osmosis. Or maybe I'll just get the guys to come back and do some more work on the house.

Speaking of “24,” I screwed up bigtime Monday night – I set the VCR to tape from 9 to 11, not knowing the final episode ran from 8 to 10.

No need to offer tapes -- got one. But along the way I found out that we might be the only household in America without a digital video recorder.

TiVo is tempting, but we don't need more TV in our lives. So here's a question for those of you with DVRs: Since you got one, do you watch more TV, or less?

This doesn’t go on your permanent record. Be honest.

UPDATE: OK, I watched the last five minutes of "Idol." Was Taylor, like, overcome with emotion or something? Because based on that five minutes -- I don't know how to say this delicately -- the guy can't sing. Please tell me this was just an off moment. Fantasia would've wiped the floor with this guy.

Long-distance dedication

I'm way past the target demographic for KISS-FM. But I still check in once in a while, and every year there's a Top 40 song that gets me totally hooked. Something like OutKast's "Hey Ya!" or Kelis' "Milkshake."

This year it's "SOS" by Rihanna. (View a video clip)

If you haven't heard it, turn to KISS -- you'll hear it in the next 15 minutes. The young'uns out there just like the song for what it is. But we chidren of the '80s love it for a different reason -- it's based on a sample of the Soft Cell classic "Tainted Love." (The little two-note riff that sounds like somebody banging on a pipe, or maybe a submarine going under? That's it.)

When I hear those two notes, I'm in my buddy's car back in high school. He had been through a tough breakup with a girlfriend. For months, the only song that played in that car was "Tainted Love."

Songs carry us back all the time. But has a sample ever carried you back? Stories of love, longing, laughter and loss below. (Jeez. I sound like Casey Kasem.)

Flying the coop

Driving out on Wendover Road today when I saw this sign at a street corner: LOST COCKATIEL.

You don't see that one every day.

(Plus I had just seen a bumper sticker that said MY PARROT IS SMARTER THAN YOUR HONOR STUDENT. It's been a birdy day.)

It reminded me of my favorite lost-pet story: When I was a little kid in Georgia, the folks across the street from us had a pet python. We discovered this when one of them came over to our house to notify us that they had lost their pet python.

A day or two later, some guys came to that house to deliver a sofa.

Guess what they found.

My mom can still see the delivery guy sprinting from the house, faster than Carl Lewis.

Add your lost-pet stories below. Points taken off if your dog ran off to rescue a little boy from a well. That wasn't your dog. That was Lassie.

The last-gate blues

Lots of airline adventures this past weekend. US Airways lost my wife's luggage on the flight back from Kansas City -- we ended up standing there by ourselves at baggage claim, like the kid at the end of "Sleepless in Seattle." Meg Ryan never showed up, but my wife's suitcase did -- about six hours later. Did you know they have somebody bring your found luggage to your house? The woman was very friendly. I hope we never see her again.

The other thing I noticed, as we hustled through the airport to catch the flight out of Charlotte (we were a little late to the gate), was that our gate was the absolute last one at the end of the concourse. And when we got back, we ended up at the absolute last gate at the end of ANOTHER concourse.

It seems like every time I fly, the gate ends up being the one at the far end. I walk by people sitting peacefully at the gates along the way, but I never see anybody get on a plane there. I'm thinking those people are airport employees taking a break in those seats, because they know all the actual passengers have to go down to gate E-64.

I'm going to call this the Law of Terminal Frustration -- no matter where you're flying, your gate is always the one at the end of the concourse.

It goes with the two other rules of modern life:

1. The Grocery-Store Theorem: The line you're in is the one where the customer in front of you can't figure out how to work the debit-card machine.
2. The Law of Interstate Congestion: When there's a lot of traffic on the highway, whichever lane you're in automatically becomes the slowest. (The Midas Corollary: The car you get stuck behind is always blowing exhaust like a coal plant.)
   

Any other natural laws along these lines that we should get on the books? Scientists really need to look harder at this instead of, you know, finding planets and stuff.

A long view of Charlotte

Last night a guy named Matt Lassiter taught me more about Charlotte in two hours than I've learned in years.

Lassiter is a University of Michigan professor who recently published a book called "The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South." He spoke at the Levine Museum of the New South to a crowd of a couple of hundred -- they kept dragging in chairs to handle the overflow.

He studied Charlotte along with Atlanta, Richmond and several other Southern cities to see how they dealt with the big issues of the past 50 years -- mainly, growth and integration.

A couple of revelations (or at least they were to me):

-- Charlotte was one of the most integrated Southern cities 50 or 60 years ago, before several key decisions -- mainly zoning laws, and decisions on where to put the interstate highways -- pushed black families into the same neighborhoods.

-- The language used by Charlotteans in the battle over school integration in the '60s is exactly the same as what we use today. Lassiter dug up quotes from old newspaper stories and interviews. Some people wanted their kids in the school closest to home; others wanted diversity, and wanted their kids to have a shot at the schools with the best facilities. You could've stuck the quotes in any schools story today without changing a word.

-- The most interesting point: He gave Charlotte credit for at least still talking about the direction of the schools. He said most cities (including Detroit, where he lives) gave up long ago. White kids make up less than 10 percent of the population in a lot of big-city school districts. Governments create separate suburban districts, or parents send their kids to private schools or just move away.

So are we beating our heads against a wall? Or is the conversation still worthwhile? Comments, debates, arguments below.

Remembrance of pit-stops past

Had some relatives in town the past few days. A couple of the guys are NASCAR fans so we rode up to the speedway, then stopped by the Hendrick Motorsports complex nearby. The race shops there include the ones for Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson. (If you speak Racin', that would be "the 24" and "the 48.")

There's also a fairly cool (and free!) museum. But the one thing that sticks with me was a box on the counter in the gift shop:

USED LUG NUTS $1.00.

There were 20 or 30 of 'em in there, all with chipped yellow paint. Could've been from one of Gordon's Daytona wins. Could've been from a minivan out in the parking lot. The sign didn't say.

I'm thinking about a tearful moment, three or four days after a funeral, a family sitting around the dining-room table. There's a gentle thunk on the table, followed by a moment of silence as everybody stares at the thing in the Ziploc bag. And then somebody says: OK, y'all. It's time to decide who gets Daddy's lug nut.

So what's the most bizarre souvenir you've ever seen for sale? What's the weirdest one you've ever bought? And more important: What's the souvenir that still has some sort of hold on you, even now?

Comments, stories, tearful revelations below.

Have a seat

Picture your favorite table, the place where you have the best conversations. Maybe it's a corner in the back of a bar. Maybe it's your regular spot at the diner. Maybe it's at home in your kitchen. Comfortable chairs, cold beverages, interesting company.

You talk about anything, everything, and when the night's done you realize you never once looked at your watch.

That's what I want this space to be like.

Every so often I'll throw out something to talk about -- a story that's not quite a column, some chatter from life in the city, little flakes of things that move me in some way.

Feel free to help steer the conversation. I'm not sure where this is going. That's what makes it fun.

Let's get started.

April is such a great sports month -- the Final Four, the Masters, the start of baseball season. The time when gifted athletes do things they'll talk about in their rocking-chair years.

But the quasi-jocks among us, the ones who never made it past church-league softball -- we have our stories, too.

Here’s mine:

Mid-1980s, Panama City Beach, a club called the Spinnaker. We’re drinking some kind of watermelon punch that comes in a bucket, and we’re sitting on the top deck, three stories off the ground. Below us, maybe 75 feet out on the beach, there’s a garbage can.

I take a hunk of watermelon rind and aim for the can. Thunk – right in the bottom. High-fives all around.

But a fluke. Right?

Couple minutes later, I break off another chunk of rind and say Watch this. As soon as I let it go, I can tell it's way off to the right -- but then the wind kicks up off the waves, and the rind arcs left, a celestial curveball.

Dead center of the can.

Applause from the bar. Bragging rights for years. I can still close my eyes and see it, except now the trash can is 200 yards away, and orchestral music swells in the background, and I am played by Brad Pitt.

So how about you? What's your one semi-shining moment? Don't be shy -- we'll accept everything from bowling to horseshoes to Madden. (Not Asteroids, though. NOBODY could whip me at Asteroids.)