I never bought into all this anonymity stuff on the internet which leads me to the tiff between Judge Shirley Strickland Saffold and The Plain Dealer.

Apologists for the internet claim you can't have honest discourse without anonymity. Bull roar. Anonymity is a veil for cowards. You find honest discourse face to face in bars. On the internet it is often gossip, slander, scandal and malice.

I read letters to the editor in the paper because they're signed by actual people using their real names with serious thoughts. I don't read e-mails which are signed by nicknames, the way long distance truckers once were known by CB "handles."

First, the sad news that retired Plain Dealer sportswriter friend Paul Baumgartner died in his sleep Sunday in Lorain. That report from his son, Paul Baumgartner Jr. via e-mail Wednesday. No other details available. I'll update as soon as they are available. Please send this bulletin to any old PD people you know.

Statues at Notre Dame Are Moving

I've been to a lot of wakes and funerals lately. Dear friend Bill Hickey, the former Plain Dealer writer, has been gone two weeks now. The line at his wake at Hanna-McGorray went from 2 to 9 p.m. non-stop. The wait was anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour. That's a lot of people.

Jack Moffitt, the former general manager of Channel 43, departed this world last week at the age of 80. I went out to Chambers to bid him adieu. There was a genuinely nice man, a Lakewood High grad, class of '46, and Western Reserve University ('50).

Long-time Plain Dealer television critic Bill Hickey was 83 when he died of cancer Friday morning. Please pass this along to other old-time PD writers and editors on your social network list. The obit will be in the paper Saturday or Sunday. McGorray's Funeral Home on Center Ridge Rd. in Westlake from 2-8 on Monday. Funeral Mass Tuesday morning at 10:30 at St. Raphael Catholic Church, Dover Center Rd., Bay Village. Get there early. Huge crowd. Bill and wife Joan have nine children and 32 grandchildren. They'll all be there.

At least it will keep a few thousand Irishmen out of the bars that night.

St. Eds and St. Ignatius will meet at 8 p.m. Wednesday night, March 17, at the Wolstein Center at Cleveland State University in the regional basketball semi-final. That happens to be St. Patrick's Day.

It's the second half of a doubleheader, with Mentor and Avon Lake meeting in the other game at 6:15. The regional final is Saturday night in the same arena.

The documentary movie "Pinned," which I wrote about several weeks ago, has been selected for the Cleveland International Film Festival, where it will be shown three times.

This is quite an honor for Mike and Pat Norman, the brothers who produced the 91-minute film about high school wrestling. They began the project four years ago, going behind the scenes for a season with the St. Edward team and a parallel story of a Lakewood High wrestler.

I liked Stephen Colbert's observation about curling. "It looks like housekeeping," he said.

The 108 continuous hours of curling coverage on MSNBC got me so fired up, I went around the house dusting everything.

Do you think that if any country swept through the curling competition unbeaten, it's anthem would have been, "Get out the brooms?"

Seriously, I'm going to start training for the 2014 Winter Games. I'll be in the prime of my curling career. I'll be 75.

Here's why American figure skater Johnny Weir placed no higher than sixth at the Olympics earlier this week.

It was that ridiculous costume. It's my theory that the judges were repulsed by his silly peek-a-boo outfit. Where would you get such a garment? What kind of store would stock such a thing?

Tiger Woods did what he had to do -- and one thing he did not have to do -- in his carefully staged and manipulated mea culpa on ESPN Friday afternoon.

He apologized all over himself about a dozen times for his sexual binge during which time he deposited his seed over all four time zones in North America and possibly all 24 time zones around the world. He turned planet Earth into his personal brothel. It must have been hard for Tiger, standing in front of a national TV camera and saying, for the first time in his life that he was wrong, shameful, selfish and an embarrassment to himself, his family, his friends, his sponsors and the game of golf. It was the most humbling 13 1/2 minutes of his life. In an emotional sense he had to crawl on his belly like a snake. He must have felt like a piece of dung. For a guy like Tiger, it must have been agonizingly difficult. I wonder what was his most compelling motivation to do that, his sponsors or his family. He was a businessman before he was a family man.

That's what I was telling my son, John, as we watched the St. Ed vs. St. Ignatius basketball game in Sullivan Gym last Friday. The St. Ed Eagles had a terrible first half. Missing about 10 of 15 free throws was only part of the problem. They also lost the ball with careless no-look passes in the chaos underneath the basket more than once.

"They watch too much television. They see LeBron do that and because he makes it look easy, they think it's easy," I said to John.