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.

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.