HERE THERE BE SPOYLERS!

If you don't want to hear stuff about the new season of "The Sopranos," you might want to skip the next couple of paragraphs.

The wife and I are devout fans of this show, and have been known to kick people out of our home on Sunday nights so as not to be bothered with off-topic blather while we watch this most anointed of programs. As we are both trained actors, this show is like purest manna for us: I simply don't think there is a show out there that can challenge this cast for sheer firepower. And the hi-lariously fabulous misanthropic writing doesn't hurt either: this is a show that hates all humans, and to make sure we in the audience understands this point of view, it frequently kills many humans, most of whom are guilty either of (a) total venality, (b) lack of observance of The Rules, or (c) making the grave mistake of simply existing within five city blocks of a bunch of terrifying sociopaths.

And you can't tell me there isn't a better show for lining up jaw-dropping, baffling guest stars. The most recent episode featured luminaries like David Lee Roth and Lawrence Taylor. In the same scene! Aren't these guys like antiparticles? Rothons and LTinos, when intermixed, will produce a powerful, killing burst of HasBeenos! Use caution, and wear safety overalls!

And in a very Sopranos development on the home front, the much-mentioned pool has attracted guests: a pair of ducks. This is just fucking adorable. Yes, two mated ducks have adopted our pool as their hangout of choice, and it's killing us. (I frankly have no idea how they are cool with the chlorine--I saw the male take a nice long drink from the water, and I was beset with worry that he was poisoning himself. Nice duck! Don't drink the beastly toxic man-brine!) The wife and I inched up to the pool to coo at them in their throaty language, and we hoarsely cackled: "Mak! Mak! Mak!" The ducks, clearly no strangers to the Big Pink Food-Vendors, waddled right up to us and angled their beaks expectantly. The message was unmistakable: Pink things! They will throw us yeasty sponginess! That is their function. However, since the building management was already notably aware of--as they termed it--"the duck problem," we suspected that they would take a dim view of our feeding them.

So we didn't feed them, which made me terribly depressed. Stupid building. You put a crystalline pond out right in the open air! You're going to get pissy when inncocent ducks think, "Hey, rad water! Let's go take a dump in that!" Of course, this is also a building--condo--where they have bylaws describing in detail the various protocols to be observed while washing your fucking car ("Not to be done in the roundabout!").

I'm pretty sure that they hastily added that last bylaw onto the books once they saw that we were bringing a morose, swaybacked '82 Honda into the covered garage. "Good God!" they said. "It's bad enough we have David Lee Roth in this building. We don't need his hearse out front."

Don't worry, Diamond Dave. When you finally kick it, you're not going anywhere bad. We're going to feed you to the ducks. LT says he'll help heave the body into the pool.