n the wake of the pope’s alleged death last week, the Vatican has released John Paul II’s will and personal diary to the media. Among the juicy tidbits revealed with the publication of the papal diary was the 84-year-old man’s dying wish that the bloodthirsty media would please, please, please keep their grubby mitts off his motherloving diary.

Published in newspapers, and on websites and Happy Meal boxes around the globe in over 90 languages, Catholics and heathens alike thrilled to the pope’s private inner thoughts and the great man’s eloquent musings this week, drinking in the pope’s thoughts on the nature of privacy and his joy at having this one small respite from a life lived on such a public stage.

Hounded all his life by an overzealous media desperate to know what made the pope tick, John Paul II poured his thoughts into the small, leather-bound volume in a scrawl that some have called “Pope-script.� Among the nuggets revealed with the diary’s publication are the details of the pope’s third-grade crush on Margo Holzarian from the Ukraine, and his strange, life-long fascination with American actress Mariel Hemmingway.

“Thank God no one is ever going to read this diary,� the Pope wrote in one of his last entries, dated March 2005. “It is only through this precious cove of privacy that I cling to my very humanity.� According to various sources, the pope misspelled “humanity� in the original text, but newspaper editors have universally agreed that it is highly unlikely the pope was clinging to a humanatee.

Many readers have been especially touched by the earliest entries in the diary, which date back to the pope’s youth.

“Dear diary: Man, being the pope is hard. I miss my mom and dad, and sometimes I just want to go home. Everybody says I’ll get over it though, once I make some new friends. Well, gotta go. Love, The Pope.�

Some less-scholarly Catholics have been equally surprised to learn that John Paul II was referred to as “the pope� even as a small boy, which made for several humorous anecdotes about grade school roll-call.

Garnering somewhat less attention has been the publication of John Paul II’s last will and testament, which some Catholics awaited with great suspense over who would inherit the pope’s collection of pointy hats. In the end, however, it turned out that the pope’s will was written in Polish, so the Vatican instead handed out his belongings on a “first come, first serve� basis to the assembled masses.

“This is fucking awesome,� raved German tourist Himmel Blaus. “I got the pope’s toenail clippers and a pair of boxers with the dude’s initials on them!�

“I got the pope’s soap! The pope’s soap on a rope is dope!� shouted another ecstatic inheritor, dashing out of the room, apparently in a hurry to bathe.

Publishers worldwide are currently in negotiations for the hardcover publishing rights to the pope’s diary, though as of yet, none have thought to tap the gold mine that is the commune’s recent “Pope’s Diary Mad Libs� feature.

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OH MY GOD SNOW

I'm a ravenous collector myself—be it shoes, dresses, slacks, blouses, socks, or jewelry, if you can wear it and it impresses people, I can collect it. But it's not just limited to normal collectible items. I also collect strange and fun items that most people don't know about.

For quite a few years now I've collected valuable birth control pills. It's a peculiar market that takes a lot of time and effort to learn about, and I've expended the time and effort. My agent even jokes I've spent so much wasted time on my hobby I could've been taking acting classes or pursuing more auditions—he's a terrific kidder.

Birth control pills become collectible when they're not taken and result in pregnancy—obviously birth control pills that are taken cannot be collected, at least not without grotesque invasive procedures. Birth control pills that are not taken and have no consequences are plentiful, especially when taken by people who are not having sex. The real diamond out there is the birth control pill not taken and ends with a baby. I started out collecting them after I found out my mother said she already had one, though she never told me the full circumstances of how she got it and how she knows it resulted with pregnancy. Since I already had that one to start me, I started seeking out other valuable birth control pills to start a collection, not only for fun, but to provide some financial security in my golden years, 35-40.

It's a hard market to get in on, I know that from experience. People look at you like your crazy when you ask them if they have any valuable and rare birth control pills for sale—by my best guess they either don't know the market or are hoarding their own private stock. But a few guys, who at first glance seem pretty unreliable and swarthy, in fact have a great collection that they're occasionally willing to part with, for the right price. From one guy I got six different pills of differing value, one resulted in the birth of Freddie Prinz, Jr., and several others led to the births of the members of O-Town, though they're obviously not as valuable as, say, the birth control pills that caused N*Synch—birth control pills both despised and priceless.

The most treasured in my collection—and I'll never tell where I keep it or how I got it, though a drug addict down the street hooked me up with it, that much I'll tell—is the birth control pill that failed to prevent the birth of Prince Charles of the Whales. It's a real rare and old birth control pill from early in the century, back when they made them to look and smell like Altoids. And I got it real cheap from the guy. What a sucker!

My birth control pill collection has grown so much that I had to give up some of my other hobbies to concentrate on it, namely my collection of Who's Your Daddy? memorabilia, which office nerd and financial wizard Ramrod Hurley actually said is worth quite a lot of money now. Still, it didn't mean as much to me as my new collection, although I hate the idea of all that lost money.

I had it all, too— Who's Your Daddy? bedsheets, Who's Your Daddy? pressurized cheese, Who's Your Daddy? "cast sings the blues" CD, and Who's Your Daddy? birth control pills. Too bad I couldn't cross over that collection with my latest in some way, but those damn things work too well, from what I've heard. Anyway, that stuff was so rare that some of the items fetched a price between $100 and $2,000, so I almost wish I had held on to some of that stuff. Instead of selling it to Ramrod Hurley. But hey, a collector's pride is in adding the rare and hard-to-find to your collection, not in financial payoff. At least for me. Ramrod Hurley seems happier with his new Lincoln Towncar.

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"There's nothing like a good tornado to put the fear of nature into you. The Hartwig family had their tornado experience back in the early '40s, in the days of us vs. the Germans and Japanese. You'd almost think God was a Nazi, throwing a big heapin' tornado on top of a hardworking American family.

We were doing evening living room things—us kids playing our favorite game, Flapper Smacking—while mom sewed bodybags for the boys overseas and Dad read the paper. Then, Dad looked out the window and raised his eyebrows, the warning to us all like an air raid drill.

The sky outside had turned a frightening Prince-colored purple. It had grown darker and darker by the second, a terrible foreboding like a fat man in a dark suit walking on a miniature Lego city, which I think is hilarious. I'm cracking up just thinking about it. But this storm coming on quick was no laughing matter. It was a peeing-your-pants matter.

'To the underground shelter!' shouted Dad, then ran ahead of us outside to the tornado cellar. We all followed, except Goose, who was getting out his kite and running out to meet the storm like Captain Ahab meeting his whale.

We all climbed inside and Dad barricaded the entrance with wood and nails. We told him it wasn't necessary, but he said tornadoes were sneaky enough to undo mere latches and closed doors. He also said tornadoes were taking all the American jobs and had murdered good Americans at the Alamo.

We survived the tornado, of course, but I spent years carrying confusing stereotypes about Hispanics and tornadoes around, thanks to Dad's lack of education."

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