Only for this last bit because I've seen the tiara:

And pontiffs used to be crowned with a tall, three-ringed tiara of precious metals known as the triregnum.

But Paul VI was the last pope to be crowned, in 1963, and he donated his tiara to the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, where Benedict will preside at two events next week.

Despite the fond wishes of some liturgy buffs, Father Selvester doesn't expect the pope to duck downstairs and try on the tiara.

"That's not going to happen," he said with a laugh.

Vestments are more than just clothes for the pope", Star Ledger, 4/13/08

via Commonweal

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... from the comments ... and this might deserve a post in its own right:

"Confessions of an American Catholic - The Pope vs. Parish Priests" - New York Times, Dan Barry, 4/13/08:

Let me say at the outset that I am your classic stumbling, grumbling, trying-to-sort-it-all-out American Catholic. I consider myself a practicing Catholic because I dearly need the practice.

I was 7 when Paul VI became the first pope to visit the United States, in 1965. I remember the nuns and teachers at SS. Cyril and Methodius School being in the kind of tizzy reserved then for the Beatles, and my mother hunched before our black-and-white television set, just as she was after the first Kennedy assassination, only this time she wasn’t crying.

I must have lost track of the second papal visit, that of John Paul II in 1979; back then I was a student at St. Bonaventure University in upstate New York, more concerned with the Bonnies basketball team’s visit to Niagara than with the pope’s visit to Manhattan.

For stumbling, grumbling worshipers like me, though, obedience to the pope has morphed into a respectful taking of his pronouncements under advisement — a cafeteria-like approach that drives more rigid Catholics to the brink of saying the Lord’s name in vain.

And peace be with you.

I would add to that list disgust, more than mere disagreement, with the way the church has handled the priest scandals of the last decade.

But what does all this mean?

It means that I got my Catholic Irish up when I read recently that the Rev. John Hagee, a Texas televangelist, uses code language for the Catholic Church when he speaks of a “false cult system” and — what was it again? Oh, yes: “the great whore.” The good reverend says his words have been misconstrued, and I don’t want mine to be: It would be my humble honor to share a dinner of solidarity with the pope — a dinner, even, of mackerel.

But all this also means that I read the parish bulletin and the gospels, not papal encyclicals or L’Osservatore Romano. That I mutter more about the priest’s aimless homily or some action by the local bishop than about anything the pope has said or done. That on Sundays, though hardly every one, I try to concentrate on the Gospel and on the celebration of the Eucharist as best I can with a distracted 10-year-old and a squirming 4-year-old.

That I never once ask myself: What would the pope do?