You have to be careful when reading the news ticker that crawls across various buildings in and around Times Square. They're everywhere now, about three of them in the tourist pen itself, and others outside the various studios in New York: NBC, CNN, Fox, etc.

As Casey and I were taking a cab back to Port Authority after dinner late last night, I noticed out the window the red letters of one of the Times Square tickers. Knowing I may have missed the first part of the headline, I spoke cautiously.

"Oh no!" I said. "I think Weird Al Yankovic may have been found dead in his California home."

Casey gasped.

"I'm not sure," I clarified, "but I did see 'Weird Al Yankovic found dead in California home.' I may have missed part of it."

So when we got home and were watching Saturday Night Live, Casey reminded me to check the internet to see what the Weird Al news was.

He's not dead. It's still terribly sad, but it was his parents who were found dead in their home. So you have to be very careful when reading those short news headlines that crawl around the corners of buildings. They go pretty fast, especially when you're close to them, and you may not be seeing the whole thing.

We'd just spent the bulk of the day traversing midtown. After meeting Casey's dad and stepmom in their closet at the W on 49th near Lexington, we walked down Park to Artisenal, where I ordered a $17 plate of macaroni and cheese for lunch. It's a cheese restaurant, so this wasn't a plate consisting of four boxes of Kraft. This had three or four cheeses I'd never heard of in it, and it was damn tasty.

After all the wine and cheese and bread, we walked over to Lush for some bath products, then to Macy's where we left Carol to shop for shoes and "bed clothing" while we went to the Museum of Television and Radio. There really aren't exhibits beyond photographs. It's mostly screening rooms showing old television shows or TV-related programs like 20 minutes of commercials from around the world. Earlier in the day, the schedule said, they showed an episode of The Simpsons and the Seinfeld pilot. We watched the first half hour of something called American Pop, originally aired on CBS in 1967 as a look at the new sound of pop music, much of it as influenced by the continuing British Invasion of Herman's Hermits, the Stones and the Beatles. The first 15 minutes contained little more than extreme closeups of Leonard Bernstein as he sat at a piano and rambled on about what music he liked and how it was different from what people then were used to hearing. He'd switch from playing clips of songs to pounding out a few bars on the piano while singing (for which he did not have a good voice). Then he had Janis Ian out to sing "Society's Child" with a guitar while backing instrumentation played on the reel-to-reel tape player he had. It was like the programs they used to show us in seventh grade music class. Casey, Jim and I each fell asleep at one point.

We ducked out to catch the reason we were there: A documentary on the Beatles' first visit to America in 1964. When we first entered the museum, we watched their Ed Sullivan Show performance in a room just past the entrance that featured behind-the-scenes photos from their visit. The 45-minute documentary showed them in their hotel room, at a nightclub, in cars and on the train to Washington, D.C. It was amazing to see so much footage of them so young being themselves. At dinner, Jim and I both revealed that we looked at John and wondered if he knew then that he'd eventually move to the city. Just 16 short years after the film was shot, so was he.

In the cab on the way to Port Authority, where we parked the car, the cab driver took us right through Times Square on 7th Avenue because, when we got in at 56th and 3rd, I told him "Port Authority." Casey looked at me and said, quietly, "This is why I tell them 40th and 8th [the address for Port Authority]. Because otherwise they figure you're a tourist." She was right, and I should've specified that he avoid Times Square, going down Third Avenue to the 30s and then cutting over to 8th. But Times Square was jumping and our cab driver did his best to change lanes quickly and often and come within inches of crowds of people standing off the curbs on the islands in the middle of 7th and Broadway. I watched them and the lights and colors all fly by in a blur, and remembering it now, it would've been the perfect time to play with the video function on the digital camera.

But at least we found out that Weird Al is OK.