Tuesday, April 19, 2011

love and death


It is one of my favorite Woody Allen films.  Maybe because it has great lawyer jokes.


And Woody starts delivering them from the prologue on.  The protagonist Boris tells us why he is in jail awaiting execution for a crime he didn't commit.


"Isn't all mankind ultimately executed for a crime it never committed? The difference is that all men go eventually, but I go six o'clock tomorrow morning. I was supposed to go at five o'clock, but I have a smart lawyer. Got leniency."


I was thinking of that routine during my recent tour of laguna cleaning.  My goal is to get rid of some of the vegetation.  But my grappling hook has brought up far more than water hyacinth.


It is amazing the things people will throw into bodies of water.  Including bodies.  Which I have not yet discovered.  But Jimmy Hoffa is out there somewhere.  I'm certain.


But I have discovered enough.  Plastic bottles.  Plastic bags.  Disposable diapers inconveniently disposed.  Various pieces of clothing.  The lid to an old washing machine.


And this beauty.  Another view is at the top of this post.



I could see it in the shallows when I started this project, but I could never quite hook it.  At first, I thought it was the bulb of a large water lily.  But it finally gave way to the hook.


My romantic side suspected it was the head of a young crocodile killed by a larger version of himself.  Oedipus on the Nature Channel.


But that was obviously not true.  Crocodiles are not round heads; they are cavaliers.  (And, yes, I know.  References to the English Civil War are seldom witty.)


It has to be a bird.  A big bird.  And we have plenty of big waders in the laguna.  Great blue herons.  Great egrets.


But my gardener, who is a professional fisher, has a different theory.  He thinks it is the skull of a pelican. 


And he may be correct -- even though most of the photographs I have seen of pelican skulls reveal a much smaller skull.  Maybe this fellow was a Klingon subspecies.


Pelicans we have.  But not in the laguna.  I will not discount the possibility some pelican mob boss dumped a rival pelican in my inlet.

 
While I was cleaning the skull in the garden, I noticed an odd shape near one of the bushes.


An egg.  Well, you might say, it is Easter.  Perhaps, the bunny left it a bit early.


My vote is the Easter serpent or the Easter lizard.  This beauty is about the size of the tip of my thumb.


My land lady and I moved it closer to one of the shrubs to protect it from all of the back yard activity.  We will see what sprouts from it. 


I have been tempted to put it in a box to protect it -- and to see what pops out.  But I have seen Alien enough times to know I do not need to do a personal reprise of John Hurt.


According to Woody, I should not even be concerned about the love aspects in my garden.  "Some men are heterosexual and some men are bisexual and some men don't think about sex at all, you know... they become lawyers."


But even Woody is not always correct.  Just funny.

22 comments:

John said...

Doesn't look too big to be a pelican - we see some BIG ones around the boats in Puerto Escondido. They are big enough to walk up to a good sized aluminum boat and peer into the belly of the boat standing boat-side.

Kwallekno said...

There is a well known pelican that hangs out at Johnny's Place in Monterrico Guatemala that is just under 4 feet tall. The locals feed it live fish from a fountain, it walks around like it is the mayor of the town. This pelican is so well known that it is mentioned in the tourist guides as something to look out for...

NW said...

And some lawyers even become men.. Uhem, present readership included, of course.

Steve Cotton said...

"Big" may have been the wrong word. "Disproportionate" would have been better. The skull on this guy looks huge compared with the beak.

Steve Cotton said...

We have lots of pelicans in town -- mostly migratory. But nothing is big as 4 feet tall. Two years ago there was a huge die-off of pelicans due to the onset of early winter in Oregon.

Steve Cotton said...

The clinic says I am getting better.

Kwallekno said...

This bird seems to be a different breed from what we see in the north, very white in color, the skull you show could be from its kin. This bird has been around that beach town for many years, very tame, very very bad breath,

NW said...

Yeah early winter, late winter, summer-winter, spring-winter, all year long winter, rain, rain, rain, and then we have actual winter when it rains more.

Steve Cotton said...

I would put summer in Oregon up against almost anywhere else as the practically perfect season.

Steve Cotton said...

There are whit and brown species of pelicans. We get the browns here.

NW said...

You are right I forgot about July 12th, I'll give you that one..

ANM said...

Perhaps, given the small brain volume to large mouth ratio of the skull you found, may we conclude that whatever species of bird it was whose skull you found, that in life, the old bird made his living as a lawyer, serving the justice interests of jail-birds?

(I will assume the groan I hear coming from the cyber audience is a groan of deep appreciation.)

ANM

ANM said...

Isn't that the same clinic recently featured in a 60 Minutes article about mental health care quackery? Putting leeches on the skull does not, as the clinic asserted, suck bad thoughts out of one's mind. Any fool knows that ridding oneself of bad thoughts has to do with the pineal gland as Descartes observed.

ANM

Steve Cotton said...

Crickets. Just crickets.

Steve Cotton said...

My physicians are not leech-oriented. They believe a good old-fashioned blistering will remove the bad humors far more quickly. Of course, the bad humors then float around and get stuck in my blog.

ANM said...

My money is still on the Cartesian therapeutic transcendental manipulation of the pineal gland to clarify and sharpen one's cogitative perturbations, assuming, of course, there are any to sharpen.

ANM

ANM said...

We have only proper pelicans in Oregon, none of which would ever think once about dipping into an alligator-infested lagoon. It's just simply not done!

ANM

NW said...

Hijole!!

Steve Cotton said...

Do you mean the Cartesian easy-bake pizza oven. Or is that half-baked?

Steve Cotton said...

Sir -- No alligators reside here. That is NOB stuff.

mcmaas said...

I think what you have there is a dolphin skull, sans teeth. Note the characteristic ''telescoped'' arrangement of the cranial bones, with the nasal opening close to the top of the skull.

mcmaas said...

Looks like a dolphin skull, sans teeth -- note the characteristic telescoping of the cranial bones, and the position of the nasal opening close to the top of the skull.