Rudy’s Blog

Check it out, an altered McDonald's billboard in the Haight, including an actual moving animatronic Ronald McD. The tagline is from a Golden Age (1953) SF story by Damon Knight (later adapted for The Twilight Zone) where some aliens arrive and say they're here to serve man, and they're herding people into the giant mothership to go to a better world, and they have this special alien guidebook called To Serve Man and then someone figures out that it's a … cookbook.

Details at Laughing Squid.

Here’s the cute glasses case that one of my daughters knit for me years ago. Glasses are alive, they have legs so they can run and hide. [New info: It was Georgia who knit it, it was the first thing she ever knit, she made at "Big Three Days" at Seven Hills School in Lynchburg, Virginia, in the 7th grade.]

Yesterday we went to a party to celebrate Rudy and Penny’s engagement at this great people’s park called the “Albany Bulb”.

This is a spot in the SF Bay behind the Golden Gate Fields racetrack. It was once a dump, but now hipsters assemble art there, people walk dogs, and wild vegetation rules.

A bunch of Rudy and Penny’s colorful friends were there; we carried in loads of food and beer.

August and Laird have banana-shaped cell-phone holders that Laird invented.

And I think Rose said she’s a belly-dancer.

I gave Penny a plastic jellyfish that bounces on a string.

The dogs were retrieving sticks from the water. I love how the one on shore is being a spectator.

Mighty Slug was there, and I got a great little 1 Meg MPEG movie of him shaking. Click here to view movie.

I’ve always been fascinated with Diane Arbus’s pictures, of how the subjects are always kind of looking askance at Diane as she takes the picture. I managed to get a photo somewhat in this style of Shannon and her tattoo; I put it in black and white to enhance the Arbus look.

It was a great party. Yay Rudy and Penny.

My better half and I spent the night in San Francisco the other day. In the morning we walked down California Street to the Ferry Building. The hills of SF always give you such nice views.

There’s a lot of great old buildings on lower California. The Union Bank Building near Battery Street has some cool stone walruses set into its wall, remnants of the Alaska Commercial Bank.

All these complicated machineries. Vaguely like the cityscapes in Star Wars III, which I just saw. That traffic in the sky in Star Wars really bothered me. Who’d want to live under that? Terrible to see, also. Like having dinner in a restaurant next to a freeway with the headlights streaming by. You feel temporary and rushed. Not that I felt rushed in the spot behind the Ferry Building where I took this picture. Calm there.

And here’s an elephant graveyard of dead mufflers. Let’s suppose that Yoda the green attack-chihuahua is hiding underneath. I used to like to hate Yoda, but now I give up, I love him. His ears are so beautiful in the new movie. Like segments of conch shells. Slightly twitching. Remember in one of the old Star Wars when Yoda rises up from near a swamp and you just see his ears? I used to tie my handkerchief around my hand with the ends pulled out to make two Yoda ears for the kids.

Cameras and bots are everywhere, lurking. But where's Jar Jar Binks? I love him even more than Yoda. I never understood the public vitriol against the fellow. He got like one second in Padme's funeral this time out.

I picked up a bit of an anti-Patriot-Act message in Star Wars III, which was good to hear. But Lucas wrote the script? He can't afford to hire a professional SF writer? What is this with writer-directors? They don't try and create their own computer graphics, do they? Or build their own sets, or sew the costumes. But, hey, anyone can write…

Thanks, Narrenschiff, for the new add_coment_cgi.php. I put it on my site and tried to post a message with the p-word and it wouldn't go up.

Exciting to get help in this odd global way. Like we're white blood cells.

But then I couldn't post any comments at all, even though I replaced Narrenschiff's file with a fresh version 4 SPHP add_comment_cgi.ph. Probably the problem was actually that I'm using an older version of the SPHP ware, and I've edited that so would rather not change.

So then I went and told Rudy Jr., owner of my host www.monkeybrains.net , and he had a similar fix that worked, based on the same version of SPHP that I have installed, he uses it on his First Twins site.

Here's the fix, with the red disk standing for an OR-separated string of dirty words, and the pointy-bracket-enclosed letter b being the HTML tag for boldface, which is a style that sp*mmers like to use.

Onward through the fog.

Talking this over with Rudy at the new Monkeybrains World Headquarters in San Francisco, it was funny, he said “Don't use the p*oker word too much, or talk about c*mments, or even about bl*g, or the BOTS will notice, they'll 'hear' and they'll come swarming.” Peeking in like attack dogs.

Reminds me of how people sometimes are reluctant to say G*d's name or S*tan's.

The Web is seething with artificial life.

Every few days some online p*ker bots post a sp*m ad for themselves as a c*mment on my bl*g.

I use some free blog ware based on PHP, whatever that is.

Rooting around in the blogware, I find a file called comments.php with this function, written in, I guess, javascript (script type=”text/javascript”):

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Question Anyone know how to edit this so as to reject any theform.blog_text.value or theform.comment_name.value that includes the string “p*ker”? (I don't want to use the actual word here as I don't want to provoke the bots, watchful as mind parasites.)

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Ever since Big Sur, I've been playing with this idea that just as it is, our world IS perfect. That's my new slogan, it could be the conclusion of the novel. They start in another Earth and go throgh a series of them and they meet God, who happens to be a giant jellyfish, and they end in God's profoundly considered and much pondered best of all possible worlds, and they in fact end up here. Where we live.

This is a picture I'm trying to paint of myself among the Micronesian jellyfish. (It's not done.) And here's another movie of me looking at stream eddies in Big Sur, it's an unconscionable 33 Meg. Click here to view movie. As before, the sound is a bit blown out, and you have to let it run jerkily once and only then can you click and play it at normal speed. Yes, I'm a geek, but I'm a happy one.

Sur obviously being the spot where I got the notion of our world being perfect. You or I are little universally computing eddies in the flow of it all.

Synchronistically, I found a passage in Borges to the same effect the day I got home. Here's a picture that Pearce took of me in a tree at Sur.

“We are not in paradise,” the young man stubbornly replied. “Here, in the sublunary world, all things are mortal.”

Paracelsus had risen to his feet.

“Where are we, then, if not in paradise?” he asked. “Do you believe that the deity is able to create a place that is not paradise? Do you believe that the Fall is something other than not realizing that we are in paradise?”

— from Jorge-Luis Borges, “The Rose of Paracelsus,” in Collected Fictions, Viking Penguin 1998, pp. 505-506.

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Yes, you may say, but if this world is perfect, what about spammers? What about Iraq? What about the Chimp?

These things are unavoidable information-theoretic occurances. Turbulence of a certain type that has to occur. Any river has ripples in it.

Easy to say, of course, living in peace, I admit, and perhaps borderline fatuous. But how much does the daily news matter, really, compared to reality's rich computation? What if you just decide to think that everything is perfect, at least for a day? And if it works, try it for the next day too.

There was a lovely moonrise over the El Sombroso hill east of Los Gatos last night. Perched on the ridge, the moon looked almost like a big ball the size of a baseball stadium that could roll down. Look out! Actually, it would be kind of bouncy, I imagine, resilient enough so that if it rolled over you, it wouldn't be a disaster. But you'd never get over that the first-hand glow. They used to say that if you slept where the full moon could shine into your face, you'd wake up a lunatic. I had moon on my face all night in Big Sur, though screened off by mosquito mesh. Hope the “orbs” didn't get to me.

***

Mac Tonnies alerted me to the existence of so-called “orbs” which are regarded by some as alien craft captured in digital photos — which happen to be more prone to light flares than old-school film photos.

And that is indeed a fine specimen spotted next to the seething brain of Professor Pearce. A bit of zoom and image enhancement reveals an alien face riding within the orb, evidently peering in at us through the mouth of an Einstein-Rosen Bridge. Perhaps its even seeing out through the screen of your computer! “Haaah, gaaahs.”

I camped in the Andrew Molera walk-in campground this weekend at Big Sur with my friend Jon Pearce and his daughter and some of her friends.

Molera used to let an unlimited number of people camp there, which was nice in terms of going there, but the rangers came to feel the site was getting overused. Now there’s only 20 or so sites, no reservation, which is nice for those of a more spontaneous bent, just first-come-first serve. For the weekends, you pretty much have to show up by two or three in the afternoon on Friday; week days is usually easier. This time of year is nice in Molera, the meadow is still green, and the ground squirrels aren’t so ravenous as they are in, like, September when the ground are pretty much naked hard clay. I had a site right under this enormous old poplar tree, in the night the stars hung in it like lites. It’s so great to wake up and already be in Big Sur.

Jon didn’t show up till the second day I was there — I went early on Friday to secure a site — and Saturday morning I went alone to Pfeiffer Beach, thinking about the ending for Mathematicians in Love. I got a nice offer for it from Tor Books just the other day, and it's time to be wrapping it up and trimming it back. You're paid to do a mural, then the mural has to fit the wall. I pretty much figured the whole ending out at last; here’s a table that I drew in the sand.

The three rows are the three characters, the three columns are the three versions of each character (there’s three Earths), and the cells correspond to where that character-version ends up. As I’ve mentioned before, my characters are Bela, Paul, and Alma, and they go to another world called La Hampa by surfing through a “gate” that’s at Pfeiffer Beach. I remembered the gate as being wider, well, it will be in my novel which, after all, starts out on a different Earth and only ends up on ours. Here’s me and the gate.

I made a little 3 Meg MPEG movie of a wave coming through the gate. Click here to view movie.

I worked my way up along the beach and found this great creek running into the ocean; by walking into the gully where the creek comes out, I could get out of the fierce Big Sur beach wind. “Where the pine meets the brine.” It was a very beautiful spot.

I always like taking pictures of gnarly water, clouds, fire. Someday maybe I’ll make a long movie of gnarl.

Meanwhile I’m making MPEGs. This next one is 25 Meg, so don’t think of viewing it unless you have broadband and a few minutes to kill. It’s of me singing to some eddies in the stream. I'm very happy here. Click here to view movie. By the way, on the first run-through, a downloaded MPEG will be jerky, you have to then click the replay button to see it run smooth. The mike noise is air eddies hitting the unshielded holes on my camera. Maybe I'll tape some foam rubber over that spot.

Back on the beach, voila, God a. k. a. the Divine Muse had brought Bela, Paul and Alma to the beach to go out next to the La Hampan gate!

A bit hard to see them in the big picture, so here’s the zoom. Ready for the surfin' hampajump!

In the usual nature of magical apparitions, they disappeared after two or three minutes — they weren’t there when I walked back. They were in La Hampa.

Back at Molera with Jon and the young people, I was struck by a sunset view up the Big Sur River. It reminded be of being at the same spot in late August, 2004, right when I was finishing The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul and being momentarily struck with the fact that, deep down, despite what I argue in the book, I don’t really believe that everything is a computation.

As I write in one draft of the Lifebox book, “It was a hot day, that August, and I had the chance to stand in the cool clear flow of the Big Sur River, up to my neck in a big pool that accumulates right before the river flows across a sand bar into the Pacific. Standing there, I closed my eyes to savor the sensation of water and air. My arms were weightless at my sides, my knees were slightly bent, I was at perfect equilibrium. Each time I exhaled, my breath would ripple the water, and reflections of the noon sun would flicker on my eyelids. I was all there, fully conscious, immersed in the river. And I became powerfully aware of a common sense fact that most readers will have known all along: 'This isn’t a computation. This is water!'”

But, as I’ve mentioned on this blog, I had a follow-up vision in Micronesia when I decided that yes, maybe even water is a computation.

Sitting around the fire this weekend with Jon and the others, I was digging the computational gnarl of the flames, and for the first time tried photographing them.

Oh, one more cool thing. Friday I walked along the incredibly windy beach at Molera, and I propped a stick on a rock to see it balance. I’ve been thinking that as well as photographing gnarl, it’s interesting to photograph native or created bits of order in the wild, as Andy Goldsworthy does.

And then, oh joy, the stick started rocking wildly in the wind. I made a 6 Meg movie of that. Click here to view movie.