Yeah. So. Leni Riefenstahl has died at the age of 101. It's with mixed emotions that I note her passing. As a Jew, and one who lost family members in the Holocaust, it is hard to reconcile her willing role in the propaganda machine with the absolute beauty and magnificence of the work itself. But as a student of film, there is no question but that she deserves my respect and admiration. Her work was seminal. Singular.

But, and it is a huge fucking but, the subject matter of that work is unconscionable. She did the work willingly. She volunteered for the job of film maker to the Fuehrer. She did not just follow orders. She made the orders. She gave a face -- a glamorous, Hollywood face -- to that which should have been painted as evil.

From the AP story of her death comes this quote:

Germany's Culture Minister Christina Weiss said Riefenstahl's life tragically demonstrated that "art is never unpolitical, and that form and content cannot be separated from one another."

That will be Leni's epitaph. But her legacy will be seen in the flickering shadows of film forever.

Norway's bravest son. I can still see his headless body stalking through the night, in the muzzle flash of Roland's Thompson gun.

I once hung my head of purple hair out of the driver's side window of my beat up Jeep, and sang that at the top of my lungs, as I drove full out down the West Side Highway, terrorizing a car full of bridge and tunnelers to my left.

Warren would have been proud.

Warren Zevon, R.I.P.

a moment of silence, and then....turn it up to 11.

She asked me if I was angry with her. I told her no, that I was merely disappointed. But what you don't know at that age is that there is no such thing as "merely" disappointed. Anger, even hatred, passes, but disappointment and regret last forever.

So I'm disappointed at bad life choices. But it's not my life.

For the record, I said, oral sex is still sex. Let's set the record straight. Penetration of any orifice, with any object, for the express purpose of individual or mutual gratification, is sex. Are we clear now?

You've let the genie out of the bottle, I said. Yeah, she shrugged, but you don't have to always rub the lamp.

Except that blow jobs are the gateway drug of sex. You do this, you do that. You want more, better. More. And where is there left to go, but all the way.

I told her a long time ago that the best sex you'll ever have is the sex you never have. Kissing. Petting. Longing until you literally ache in places you never knew had the capacity to ache. That's the best sex. Because we all know that it's all in the head anyway. I told her, wait. Wait, because no matter what you think, no matter how hard you believe that this one is different, that this guy is your friend and still will be after you give in to the desire, he won't be. It'll be different all right. It will destroy your friendship. Or at the least, alter it forever in ways you cannot imagine or comprehend.

When you are an adult, sometimes you can still be friends after you've had sex with a friend. But not often. It is an end, not a means.

C'mon. Tell me that you did. Tell me that your day just was not complete without reading my whining and complaining and general all around bitching about the world. Tell me that you had a panic attack seeing that little page not found message.

And then I'll tell my brother in law, who switched servers without telling me, thereby sending this and my other sites into (say it with me a la Riffraff) O-blivion?

But a quick note to the geek gods of Register.com and here I am, 48 hours later. Happy to rag about just about any and everything that crosses my field of vision.

Item 1: Standing in front of the entrance to a small mall, a small boy. He is pissing in the hedge. His mother is standing nearby, encouraging him by telling him that if he will only face INTO the hedge, and not look back at her, nobody will notice that he's peeing. Except, of course, that we all do, and she looks me right in the eyes and smiles and explains that her boy "is making pee-pee." Really? No. I'd never have guessed. I reminded her, coldly, that there are public bathrooms in the mall.

Item 2: Did you know that the U.S. post office doesn't consider mail lost until it has not arrived at its destination after a full month? And that's for their PRIORITY mail. I shudder to think what a mere first class letter has to do to get itself declared missing. The exact response from my friendly mail clerk was "Well, it's the mail, it'll get there. Or not." Thank you.

Item 3: Oh. I guess there isn't an item three. How about this, then? I'm getting a mammogram at 2:30 this afternoon. I suggested to the service that they offer a glass of ice cold chardonnay afterwards to all their patients. While the lovely woman at the other end of the phone allowed as how that would be nice for us, she also noted that the staff would drink it all and there wouldn't be any for the patients anyway.

Tomorrow I have a date with my surrogate daughter. We're going out for dim sum and then I am going to teach her how to drive a stick. We are going in the Cabrio. She will not be learning how to leave a patch. She will benefit from the wisdom of my earliest college boyfriend, Steve Berger, who taught me two important things about cars.

The first thing was "It's just as easy to park your car correctly as it is to park like an asshole." I still hear that in my mind every time I pull into a space. It's why I'm the jerk taking time to position the car between the yellow lines, and not over them.

The second thing was "Always listen to your engine. It will never lie to you." Your tach can, but the engine cannot.

I hope it sounds as good coming from me as it did from Steve.

Long weekend. Lots of naps. A whole night of uninterrupted sleep that lasted 12 hours. Loafing about in the pool, floating on a raft. Friday night: Thai food. Saturday lunch: Dim Sum. Sunday: home made tabouli with loads of garlic and fresh parsley. Monday early morning: gym. Monday late lunch: Mexican.

Thought for the day: Why, if they hate it here so much, do people stay in Miami and bitch about their life choice?

Solution: move and leave the city to those of us who love it. Less traffic, shorter waits at restaurants. More and more pleasant conversations with those left.

And now, back in the office, refreshed and ready to be a good corporate worker bee.

The birds I saw sitting high in the bare trees along the edge of the Everglades were ospreys, easily identified by the black band across their eyes. Or if I'd remembered that fact, it would have been easy.

I didn't, and so had to go digging through the guide books. Books, plural. Once I got to the top of the home library shelves I also took down the field guide to amphibians and reptiles, and identified the big green lizard in the royal poincianna.

Big. Green. Lizard. So big that it is mistakenly referred to by the locals as an iguana. We're talking a foot and a half of neon green lizard with lemon yellow head stripes. Quite the handsome fellow, with a light pink throat flappy thing. He is a knight anole. Native to Cuba, introduced to a very small area in and around Miami, where he took a liking to the climate, so similar to his home.



I will forgo the obvious jokes.