I received my spring issue of Tricycle and was surprised to find the Buddhist quarterly playing the numbers game on the cover. But instead of promises to take off 20 Pounds in 30 Days or 143 Ways to Please 7 Girls, this issue presents “Tricycle’s 28-Day Meditation Challenge.”

Sound anomalous? Challenge, meditation — kind of like military music? Well, Buddhism didn’t just spread across India and Asia by itself and I think it’s fair to say that Tricycle sees itself as part of the vanguard of the Vipassana, or “mindfulness,” school that has gained in popularity over the last few decades. In fact the principal author of the challenge is the venerable Sharon Salzberg, who has almost single-handedly warmed up Americans rather cool picture of Buddhism with her writings about Lovingkindness and Faith.

Though Tricycle is written for practicing Buddhists, and its advertisers include the makers of Zen clocks (“Shouldn’t you be asking what time isn’t it?”) and services like Dharma Match (“Where spiritual singles meet”), its editors are savvy enough to know that most of us are wannabes. We’ve meditated, probably been to a few retreats, read a few books — but who has time for the daily dose, aside from say Jon Stewart’s nightly Moment of Zen? By challenging readers to join her in a week-by-week program (and even answering questions online from participants), Salzberg is acknowledging our basic laziness and tendency to stray. As the editors note, “It’s the coming back that deepens our practice.”

So what have you got to lose — except those unsightly attachments? The challenge begins with the Five Precepts (who did some great stuff with Gene Chandler) and those include a commitment to refrain from intoxicants and use speech in an ethical way. If you get started now, you can be finished by St. Patrick’s Day. Talk about starting over.

This week’s Newsweek tackles the timely topic of The Girl’s Gone Wild Effect. (Caveat emptor: If you’re using Safari, the MSN site often crashes my browser, which I can only conclude is due to Microsoft’s inherent evil.) You know, Lindsey, Paris and Britney bringing civilization to its knees by going out sans underpants.

There’s a sexist joke there that I won’t even bother with. The topic is as timeless as the girls in question are ephemeral and the magazine includes a sidebar of bad girls of the past (Marilyn, Mae West). I only regret that they did not turn the wayback machine dial a little further to remind readers of the scandalous Jean Harlow, who also famously forewent bra and panties on public occasions. The difference was, she used her real-life reputation to enhance her screen image. “Dissembling innocence was not Harlow’s way,” David Thomson wrote in his invaluable, nutty Biographical Dictionary of Film. “She was too candid. She winked, she liked her nipples to pout as if to say, ‘Get a load of this.'”

Harlow died when she was 26, but not from sex — and not from anorexia. I had originally written that she drank herself to death but received an outraged riposte from Kathryn Sweeney, president of the Sacramento chapter of the Jean Harlow Fan Club: “As a child she had strep throat –before antibiotics–resulting in scarlet fever which damaged her kidneys. (Often the heart valves are wrecked as well but I don’t know if that happened to her.) Later on her kidneys failed and she died. Because her mom was a Christian Scientist there has always been a theory that she might have recovered given better medical care. I’m not saying she didn’t drink plenty, but it didn’t kill her.” Point taken, Kathy.

Harlow’s life and death helped usher in the censorious Hays Code in Hollywood and a lot of young women saw her tale as a cautionary one. The crucial difference between her influence and that of today’s Bad Girls is that Harlow was an idol to young women of legal age. The Newsweek story, by Kathleen Deveny with Raina Kelley, focuses on the adoration bestowed upon the decidedly less talented trouble trio of today by tween and young teenage girls — girls my daughter’s age.

Franny recently got in some trouble, at school and at home, for some obscene email she had a hand in, and the whole incident has caused some soul searching on the part of her parents. Topics considered included her interest in the kind of brat/slut culture Paris et al represent. But just as Deveny concludes that the fascination many girls have with this outre behavior falls short of admiration (a middle-school teacher in Illinois is quoted saying her students “can’t understand why Britney would wear no underwear” and ultimately brand her a “hootch,” ie skank, ho etc.), we have found Franny doesn’t think much of these girls, either.

“What’s it going to say on her grave, that she partied a lot?” she once asked of Paris, and while she may have heard some version of that line from her parents, there is nothing wrong with having your voice in your child’s head. Consider all the others competing in there — including the one that tried to defend her dirty email as the kind of humor “kids my age think is funny.” You want to have a vote. Let’s hope that she keeps giving us air time.

We live for our children most of the time. Okay, there are some parents who put their amusement and sense of well-being before that of their offspring but by and large we have been conditioned to give our kids what we ourselves did not have and try to get some vicarious kicks out of seeing them enjoy pastimes we were denied or just missed somehow.

Both Adam and Franny got guitars when they were preteens and lessons from the same place that I bought them: the Musicians’ General Store on Court Street. Franny never really took to it, propelled more by a fantasy born of School of Rock than a real desire to spend hours in her room practicing her fingering, while Adam at 22 is pretty accomplished. This is one of the only fringe benefits of a fairly friendless adolesence: mirror-star mastery.

So when I saw MGS closing its doors for the final time in the fall (the landlord had spiked the rent to make room for another gym, when what Cobble Hill really needs is another Starbucks — you can walk blocks before finding a Frappacino!) I went in and plunked some money down on a guitar for myself. Now all I had to do was learn how to play it.

I grew up around musicians. LIke most kids my age I wanted a guitar after seeing the Beatles (though I actually I think I had wanted one when I listened to the Clancy Brothers, who were bigger than the Beatles in my pre-ten-year-old imagination) but my parents couldn’t afford one and I was always quick to take no for an answer. By the time I was in high school I numbered a few fine guitarists among my friends but it never occurred to me to ask one of them to teach me even a few simple chords. Even though the ability to play, the very possession of guitar, increased their popularity and success with chicks exponentially, I clung to my loser status, playing air guitar in my room and imagining myself a star.

If it was fear that kept me from trying to learn then, I realized I would need a new excuse now. I had the time, the money and absolutley no expectation of being anything other than a kitchen plunker in my old age. “I don’t have any fantasies of playing on stage at my age,” I told my guitar teacher on our first meeting. “I just want to be able to strum a few Bob Dylan songs when I’m alone and blue.”

By the end of our first lesson he had taught me the chords to “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” — which is not to say that I have learned them. In fact, after six lessons it’s safe to say I have not learned much of anything and have scarcely improved though he has demonstrated the patience of a saint as he watches me making chords with the agility of the frost bitten. If Adam has natural ability (which his teacher often said) I may have just the opposite. But as I try to make power chords that bear some resemblance to “All Along the Watchtower,” I can honestly say that my mind is engaged with no other task. I have no attention in those moments for any of life’s concerns. Including my children.

When first I moved to NY, 17 years ago this year, I was struck by the blase attitude most New Yorkers seemed to have when confronted with famous people. I was from San Francisco, where sighting any of the handful of immediately recognizable local celebrities — Robin Williams, Sam Shepard, any member of the Grateful Dead — was cause for comment for days. It took me a while to appreciate that one of the reasons celebs like NY was that people didn’t bother them on the street, no matter how much they might secretly crave the recognition.

Then again, the stars I spotted at first were of such low wattage that they hardly recognized themselves. I remember having lunch at Wolf’s Deli on 57th Street and sitting next to Steve Allen, who was speaking into a minicassette recorder. The only person I could think to tell who would care was my mother back in Petaluma (“That’s nice, dear.”) Wolf’s is gone now, as is Allen and my mother.

As time went on and my social circle grew I came to understand that the rules were not so simple. While New Yorkers feign a blase attitude, I have many friends (and friends’ wives) who never miss making an opportunity to tell me what famous actor/writer/bon vivant they have recently supped/weekended/gone shopping with. They will even underline the connection, giving me the celebs bonafides and intimate details (names of pets and children, make of automobile, visible tattoos) so I don’t miss the point. Whatever it is.

Plainly, this isn’t a regional conflict. The other night I had dinner with a few people from the midwest who I didn’t know. Within minutes it was made plain that the woman beside me was related by marriage to the most famous person in her city, one with more than its share, and what a burden it was for her and her family that everyone knew and made a point of belaboring the connection. (One I would not have been aware of were it not for her.) She told the table of a stranger who said to one of her children, “I just read a book by someone. Do you know who it is?”

The kid, for whom books still have pictures and end with a goodnight kiss, blanked. “Santa?” he said.

Just a reminder for all the egos in the room: there is fame and there is international superstardom. Any fool can write a book/host a show/star in a movie. Come see us when you’ve given away a few billion gifts.

Finding a family-friendly movie to watch at home is a challenge when your 13-year-old daughter favors slapstick and your wife wants romantic comedy but you’re in the mood for something more existential. I floated the possibility of the two-disc Beckett on Film that Netflix had just delivered but settled for something more meaningful and absurd. Groundhog Day.

Actually, I had introduced Franny to the film this summer when we were vacationing in Amagansset but the DVD we rented out there was damaged and we only got halfway through Bill Murray’s endless day. Santa had brought her a fresh copy for Christmas and though I’ve seen it about a dozen times now, I found it had only improved with time. The time that stands still, of course.

I usually skip the extra features on DVDs but Peggy and I ended up watching a short entitled “The Weight of Time” afterwards, featuring interviews with director Harold Ramis, screenwriter Danny Rubin, Andie MacDowell and ubiquitous character actor Stephen Tobolowsky who plays insurance salesman Ned Ryerson. (You know: Needlenose Ned. Ned the Head. Bing!) Rubin confessed that Ramis had changed the order of the script — originally the audience met Murray’s obnoxious weatherman Phil Connors when he was in demigod mode, boasting of knowing the story of every single person in town — and made MacDowell more of a love interest.

The latter was an obvious move: without a girl to get it would be hard to care about Connor’s dilemma, continuously reliving the same day, but by following his transformation from arrogant asshole to selfless saint, catching kids falling from trees and fixing old ladies’ flats, Ramis did more than employ the character arc. He made Groundhog Day a story of enlightenment. He said he knew they were on to something when he started to get letters from Buddhists saying that he must be one of them, or Christians who said it was a parable of the Passion, and Hindus and Jews… I even saw it as a 12 step allegory: Connors, who lives only for himself, finds escape through service. It takes a while, of course. Rubin estimates Connors lives the same day in Punxsetawney for thousands of years.

“You are locked within your suffering and your pleasures are the seal,” Leonard Cohen sang. Ned Ryerson might add: “Watch out for that first step; it’s a doozy!”