I was talking to my cousin the other day, and telling her about my cute, cute, cute little cake mold from Martha Stewart for a beehive-shaped honey cake.

Being Jewish, honey cake is a big deal. At least once a year someone has to make a honey cake. And, universally, everyone else has to pretend to eat it, all the while trying to feed it to the dog and complaining about the density (somewhere near that of a black hole).

I said to Barbara, honey cake is the Jewish equivalent of Christmas fruitcake. It's expected to show up at the appropriate holiday. Everyone makes a fuss. Nobody likes it. They are small, weighty blocks useful as doorstops and little else.

Except, of course, for the one made with Martha's recipe. It is light, almost airy. It is flavorful. I make mine even better than the original with the addition of instant coffee to the batter.

I made the cake complete with the little marzipan bees, once. Since then people have had to settle for the cake alone. I don't know if I'll do the marzipan bees this year or not, since I'm going to have a new audience for the production. (Different family at the holiday table -- new audience, same thing.)

Anyway, I'm off to my parents' house tomorrow and I'm packing up the cake mold, my laptop, a book, a bag of needlepoint, a loose leaf binder full of recipes, a pack of smokes, and a bottle of vodka. Oh yeah, there's clothing in there too, but mostly this is about mental survival.

Wish me well, I'll be gone for a week. I'll try to post, but if I can't, just leave messages on the guest map and peruse that long list of links, over there on your right.

And do NOT feed the dog any more honey cake.

Last night's episode of "Whoopi" just cracked me up. I'm probably the only person in America watching and laughing (except for my darling husband, who laughs at some of the same things I do). But laughing I am. Last night skewered our nation's new color coded warning system for terrorist dangers. They had a code orange, which meant that unattended packages in the lobby required blowing up by the NYC bomb squad. On yellow days, unattended packages are safe.

Maybe I wouldn't have found it quite so humorous if Miami wasn't under an Orange Alert this week. You might think that the front page of our local rag newspaper would feature this notice. You might also think the world is flat. You would be wrong on both counts.

Yesterday, the story was buried somewhere in the newly graphically destroyed redesigned paper in a sidebar on an inner page in the local section under a headline that read (and I am NOT making this up) Miami Under False Code Orange Alert. The story went on to say that the Feds thought we should be under an Orange Alert due to super secret de-coded messages that threatened a terrorist attack on the city. The local FBI thought that the messages were bogus. So they split the difference by issuing the alert and telling everyone "Never mind" like some kind of spy network Emily Litella.

Today, the story made it to an actual body copy story. Same thing. National says that the threats were very specific: day, date and city, but they refuse to actually name names. Or date dates, as the case may be. Just a generic sort of "some time this week" in Miami. Or not.

It's not like I work in a tall building in the county hospital (the designated treatment center in case of a mass casualty event) in the direct flight path of the air port, or anything. I'm not nervous. I'm barely cautious. But every time one of the choppers comes in to the Trauma Center, or a plane comes in for a landing, or even when the MetroRail glides into the station at the foot of this building, my stomach clenches.

This is just great. I have a light in my car that doesn't designate any particular problem, it just lights up when you need to take the car to the mechanic. I call it the random anxiety generator light.

I feel like the FBI has put a random anxiety generator light on the entire city of Miami. Or maybe the FBI is being run by Jewish grandmothers. "I don't want you should worry, but..."

To quote the ever eloquent Jodi, "feh."

* A note. I used to do a radio comedy program on my local NPR station. It was "The Pandemonium Midnight Uprising," and I did a weekly movie review in the person of Rhona Remora. A remora is a fish that sticks (literally, via a patch of like, backwards pointing scales on the top of their heads) to sharks. When the sharks swim, the remoras go along for the ride. When the sharks eat, the remoras get the leftovers. A very little imagination can take you to where I was when I named this character. Anyway, as much as I loved doing Rhona (she has a high, very nasal New York accent, via Brooklyn) she finally went to the cutting room floor when Pande ended. But after seeing a movie this weekend, I had to bring her back. Take it away, Rhona. Cue the cheesy intro music:

Hiya, Rhona Remora here with another Pandemonium Movie Review.

This week I went to see "Once Upon a Time in Mexico." This should not be confused with "Once Upon a Time in the West." Or, for that matter with "Once Upon a Time in America","Lagaan, Once Upon a Time in India", "Once Upon a Time in the Midlands", or even "Once Upon a Time in Beruit."

I'd been told that this "Once Upon a Time" was a sort of remake of the great Clint Eastwood classic, "The Good, The Bad and the Ugly". By sort of I guess they meant that it was a film. I had just seen TGTBTU on cable, so I remembered the plot. There was a lot of money. The good guy (Clint, of course) knew where it was and was going to steal it from the dead guy. The bad guy (Lee Van Cleef) didn't know where it was, but he had the good guy captive and was going to kill him after he had stolen the money from the dead guy, and then steal the money from Clint. The ugly guy (Eli Wallach) was along for comic/violence relief since he was never going to get the money from anyone: good, bad or dead.

There was none of that in OUTIM. Well, no. There was money, and two of the Mariachis got it, one of them was The Drunk, and the other was The Kid. There was plenty of ugly, with both Willem Dafoe and Mickey (O, my god, what happened to his face?) Roarke. Neither of them live, or get the money.

Antonio Banderas gets the money, but then he throws it off the roof of a building so the villagers can grab it. I think. Maybe. Or maybe the money is blowing around in the village square because the building it was in blew up. Hard to tell, because pretty much everything in this movie either blows up or gets shot up.

Even the predictable fruit cart chase ends up not with a fruit cart crash, but with a massacre of harmless fruit. Watermelons exploding from armour piercing bullets. Bananas spattering. Unidentifiable pulp and juice everywhere.

Johnny Depp plays a CIA agent and Ruben Blades a retired FBI agent. They both take a lot of lead. Neither one gets any money, but Ruben gets Mickey Roarke's chihuahua. Depp gets the girl, but she turns out to be bad, and so he gets to turn her into one of the dead.

There's a cameo appearance by someone I think is the director's grandmother. In the middle of one of the never-ending gun fights, an older woman in a military uniform unlike any of the other military uniforms, steps out of a doorway and plugs away with a shotgun. She appears in no other scene. Maybe they were smoking in the cutting room, and she belongs in one of the other "Once Upon a Times."

But that was the movie. Lots of blowing up stuff, lots of bullets flying, lots of body count and a really gross thing happens to Depp. Maybe this should have been called the Pretty, the Dead and the Missing Plot.

Until next week, this is Rhona Remora saying: Remember, in the dark, they ain't all alike.

Aw, damn. I hope that this is it for a while of celebrity deaths that I actually care about. I suppose I should tip the hat for John Ritter, but frankly, I thought that Three's Company was one of the low points in American Pop Culture.

On the other hand, saying goodbye to the man in black is hard. Johnny Cash. Shit. I remember, but not from where, the story of Bob Dylan meeting him for the first time when both were young (one much younger) men. At Newport Jazz, maybe? Bob circling Johnny like an oak tree, and then saying "Yeah."

One of my earliest concerts was at the Palm Beach, uh, convention center? What were they called before they were called that? It was where they had live wrestling, before that became such a mainstream event.... My parents took me to see Johnny Cash. It was cool. I was still young enough to not be embarrassed to be there with parents. I wanted to go, so they took me. Wasn't a matter of me trailing along with them.

I've heard other artists sing his songs, and Johnny sing the songs of others. There've been duets with Dylan. Covers of Springsteen.

His was a voice from a time and place long gone in America. The country artists of today are manufactured from the same machine that spits out pop tarts (the musical kind, not the toaster variety). Their songs of hard work and pain are spun from focus groups, not actual labor in a cotton field. And that's made all the difference.

Mr. Cash was the real deal. Maybe the last of them.

Back in the day, in my other life, when I was married to a criminal defense attorney (aka: The Anti-Christ) there was a great one-liner that went like this:

Want to hear a lawyer joke?

Ed Meese (Ronald Reagan's Attorney General, for those of you who slept through American History)

So in that same spirit, I present this little collection for you today. Especially today.


"Finally, a candidate who can explain the Bush administration's positions on civil liberties in the original German." -- Bill Maher, on Schwarzenegger running for Governor.

"President Bush is supporting Arnold but a lot of Republicans are not, because he is actually quite liberal. Karl Rove said if his father wasn't a Nazi, he wouldn't have any credibility with conservatives at all." Bill Maher

"They're saying Arnold will get 95% of the vote. At least according to his brother, Jeb Schwarzenegger." Craig Kilborn

"President Bush has been silent on Schwarzenegger. Of course, he can't pronounce Schwarzenegger." David Letterman

"Here's how bad California looks to the rest of the country. People in Florida are laughing at us." Jay Leno

"Well, we're all excited because President Bush has started his 35-day vacation. He's down there in Crawford, Texas and on the first day of his vacation he went fishing. He didn't find any fish but he believes they're there and that his intelligence is accurate." David Letterman

"The United States is putting together a Constitution now for Iraq. Why don't we just give them ours? It's served us well for 200 years, and we don't appear to be using it anymore, so what the hell?" Jay Leno

"President Bush held his first full press conference in over five months this week. He announced that the war on terrorism is continuing, much, much more work needs to be done on the economy, and Saddam Hussein has not yet been captured. And then he said, 'I'm going on vacation for a month.'" Jay Leno

"President Bush is leaving to go to Crawford, Texas, for a 35-day working vacation. This should go over big with all the people taking a can't-get-work vacation." David Letterman

"The White House says that the vacation in Texas will give President Bush the chance to unwind. My question is, when does the guy wind?" David Letterman

"President Bush's economic team is now on their jobs and growth bus tour all across America. I think the only job they created so far is for the guy driving the bus." Jay Leno

"President Bush has refused to declassify portions of the congressional 9/11 reports about the Saudis, because he says it will help the enemy. Not Al Qaeda, the Democrats." Jay Leno

Ba-dum-dum.

I'm trying not to go to sleep at my desk, but the floor under it is looking pretty damn good to me right now. I've had lunch. The city is steaming outside my window. The only work to do at the moment is whatever I invent for myself. The only invention I can think of is to place my needlepoint pillow on the floor, and call the carpet under the desk a bed.

Work is so slow that one could be excused for thinking that we'd fallen into a black hole, or one of those quantum singularities where time is pulled like taffy, and no matter how thin, it still stretches out, elongating every moment.

And it's hot. Did I mention that it's hot and humid? I shouldn't have had to, after all, it's September in the little latitudes. Equatorial heat.

Instead of passing out on the floor, and horrifying the boss when he wanders back in, I am reading this and trying to convert my site to CSS.

Then I can design another dozen logos for the Pediatric Residency group to look at because they don't like the type we used for the previous administrator and they didn't like the first 6 designs I gave them weeks ago, and I haven't got a clue as to what they didn't like. They just e-mailed me and asked for some more choices.

In other colors? Using type effects? Using different type faces? What? What do you want different from what you have, and what was used before? Can you give me a starting point from which to move? Or should I just go through the entire fucking type catalog until you find something that YOU think is "cheerful, friendly and childlike."

I mean, jeez, I used the type from the Brady Bunch. For a program aimed at young GenWhazits who grew up watching the show after school when they were still little latch-key sprats, I thought it would be a great subliminal hook. "Let's go to med school with Marcia."

Or not.