Thank God the wizards got that Twitter problem sorted out. Between bouts of bicycle comedy I and a bunch of people I’ve never met have been trading tweets that consist entirely of Tom Waits lyrics. And that’s important, because without Tom Waits, the terrorists win.

So now of course I’m listening to “Bawlers” from “Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards,” right after reading an interesting Q&A with the man himself. To say I’m easily distracted is an understatement on a par with calling Rush Limbaugh a bloated, dope-addled fartsack with the intellect of a crab louse and the morals of a hyena on a gutpile.

The Mombo Club-El Rancho Delux mob saw Waits a couple or three times in his jazzy, bluesy days, when he was cutting albums like “Nighthawks at the Diner,” “Small Change” and “Foreign Affairs.”

The first time was at a most unlikely venue — the Red Rocks Amphitheater, where he filled in for an ailing Dan Fogelberg as the opening act for his Asylum labelmates the Eagles, who had covered his “Ol’ ’55,” from Waits’ first album, “Closing Time.” Waits was on his second or third song before most of the country-hippie stoners in the audience figured out that he wasn’t just another roadie tuning the piano for Glenn Frey.

Another time was at a much smaller venue in the Denver clusterplex, and several of us dressed in our best Waits style, which is to say battered tweed jackets and newsboy caps. I believe we were also wearing shirts, pants and shoes, but I can’t swear to it.

Waits was using a massive, old-style brass cash register as a percussion device during “Step Right Up,” and gin-soaked legend has it that at one point he caught a glimpse of us and muttered, “Who are those guys?”

• Extra Special Bonus Tom Waits: An appearance on “Fishing with John,” as in John Lurie, one of his co-stars in the Jim Jarmusch film “Down By Law.” Several fish were harmed in the making of this episode. And at least one pair of pants.

Frank McCourt, author of “Angela’s Ashes,” dies at 78 of metastatic melanoma. Ah, but what a book he left us with. As The New York Times recalls:

“When I look back on my childhood, I wonder how I survived at all,” the book’s second paragraph begins in a famous passage. “It was, of course, a miserable childhood: The happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.

“People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious alcoholic father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying schoolmasters; the English and all the terrible things they did to us for 800 long years.”

The book had an inauspicious beginning. He took a stab at it while studying at New York University, but didn’t hit his stride until after he retired from teaching. Again, from the NYT:

“After 20 pages of standard omniscient author, I wrote something that I thought was just a note to myself, about sitting on a seesaw in a playground, and I found my voice, the voice of a child,” he told The Providence Journal in 1997. “That was it. It carried me through to the end of the book.”

McCourt, who certainly had every reason to lack a sense of humor, said it was exactly that which keeps the Irish going.

“I think there’s something about the Irish experience — that we had to have a sense of humor or die,” Mr. McCourt once told an interviewer. “That’s what kept us going — a sense of absurdity, rather than humor.”

Sure works for me. May you be in heaven a half hour before the devil knows you’re dead, Francis McCourt. Tell Harold Joseph O’Grady of County Clare to buy yous a pint on Patrick Declan O’Grady so.

Herself and I saw “The Wrestler” this afternoon, and it’s a must-see for Mickey Rourke fans. We watched “Barfly” last night to limber up for it, but “Requiem for a Heavyweight” might have been better training, or maybe “Raging Bull,” the theme being poor choices and the consequences thereof. You certainly won’t recognize the pretty-boy Rourke of “Diner” in this one, although there are brief glimpses of his earlier face among the ruins.

The screenplay cuts a few corners, especially as regards Randy “The Ram” Robinson’s estranged daughter and the finale, but it’s Rourke’s remarkably restrained performance as an elder statesman of pro wrestling fallen on hard times that holds your interest.

Director Darren Aronofsky told Terry Gross on “Fresh Air” that he didn’t think he got everything Rourke had to give, but I’m not so certain. And I’ve dated a stripper and met a couple of pro wrestlers — to say nothing of spending way too many dope-addled hours in high school watching Mad Dog and Butcher Vachon, Verne Gagne and Andre the Giant locked in combat on “All Star Wrestling” — so naturally that makes me an expert.

If you need any further encouragement, cinematographer Maryse Alberti also shot “Gonzo” and “Crumb,” documentaries about Hunter S. Thompson and Robert Crumb, respectively. Go spend some money, get the economy back on its feet, you lazy sonsabitches. And don’t forget to buy plenty popcorn.

Late addendum: Herself says the Ram was a marvelously sympathetic unsympathetic character, and the addition of glasses and a hearing aid when not in the ring made her want to weep for him. And speaking as the spouse of a free-lancer with no health insurance, she’d like to know how the hell he paid his medical tab.