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.

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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.”