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.