{"id":1013,"date":"2009-02-08T18:15:04","date_gmt":"2009-02-09T02:15:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=1013"},"modified":"2009-02-08T18:21:11","modified_gmt":"2009-02-09T02:21:11","slug":"wild-cucumbers-random-reviews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2009\/02\/08\/wild-cucumbers-random-reviews\/","title":{"rendered":"Wild Cucumbers, Random Reviews"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Saturday, I took a walk up towards St. Joseph\u2019s Hill over Los Gatos, California. I\u2019ve been walking on this hill about once a week for some twenty years so I guess I\u2019ve been up there nearly a thousand times. It\u2019s always new to me, because Nature\u2019s a fractal.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s been raining this week, but the rain let up for a day, and I could enjoy how green everything is.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I took my new 100 mm macro lens along and shot mostly small stuff. This is the tip of a tendril of an early spring vine called wild cucumber <\/em>that we get out here. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I really love the shapes of the tendrils, they form conical helices, and latch onto lots of other plants.<\/p>\n

In a month or two, the wild cucumbers bear their fruits, which are spiky green pouches akin to scrotums, filled with a pair of big seeds and milky juice.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Here and there, I could even spot the vestiges of last year\u2019s wild cucumber crop. I see more details when I\u2019m carrying around a macro lens\u2014I\u2019m looking at the world in a special, detail-oriented way.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The sun hit these berries in just the right way to set three hanging water drops alight. Whoah.<\/p>\n

What else did I do this weekend? We saw Paula Poundstone do a stand-up comedy gig at the Rio Theater in Santa Cruz. She was pretty funny, with that edge of bitterness and misanthropy that so many stand-up comics have. But she showed up a frikkin\u2019 hour late, and kept telling us some boring B.S. story that she\u2019d slept through the plane\u2019s landing in San Jose, and had ridden it on to Portland. Right. Like the plane people aren\u2019t going to clear out the plane at ever stop?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t like that Paula thought she could stand there and lie to us. But, like I say, she made me laugh. She did a thing about a near-death experience and she didn\u2019t see any dead friends and relatives or any white light, and she\u2019s like, \u201cEven in the afterlife they\u2019re avoiding me! They\u2019re, like, \u201d\u02dcQuick, hide the light!\u2019\u201d\u009d The light is a water drop on a cucumber vine, you understand.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

We watched \u201cZack and Miri Make a Porno\u201d\u009d on DVD. It had a few laughs, but not quite as many as I\u2019d expected. Earlier this week we saw \u201cRevolutionary Road,\u201d\u009d which was somewhat better than I expected, I\u2019d thought it would just be lots of bitter yelling—there was a lot of that, but they had a good crazy mathematician.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I finished reading Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs\u2019s early work \u201cAnd the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks.\u201d\u009d It\u2019s amazing to me how weak their writing was at that early stage, considering how good they got later on. It\u2019s a complicated process. In some ways, their writing later on seemed better because by then each of them had built up a \u201cbrand\u201d\u009d and a personal legend.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I think Buddha means \u201cgrow.\u201d\u009d So this bud is Buddha. It\u2019s a chestnut tree. They\u2019re always in such a hurry to grow up, these chestnuts. They turn yellow and lose their leaves by August. \u201cLive fast, die young, leave a beautiful buckeye.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I totally zinged this shot—I saw it, this giant hilltop tree that I love, and a nice tasty cute single-unit cloud overhead, and I had the 100 mm lens and I was able to frame it just right. The hill was all in shadow in the original, but I ran the Photoshop Shadow\/Highlight adjustment and got the light back on the hill. The thing about digital photography\u2014a whole of information about the scene is present in your image file, and you can excavate things that you can\u2019t even see to start with.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve shot these vents before, but today I was able to get more of them into the picture thanks to the telephoto effect.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Up on the hill, I have this nice view of San Jose, it\u2019s an isolated whole, the downtown. And I always think of a story about a boy meeting up with an old hermit, and they\u2019re walking towards the actually rather poky little market town nearby, and from a hilltop they glimpse the city, and the hermit, who\u2019s a religious fanatic, starts railing against the town, \u201cYea the mighty shall be brought down, the walls of Babylon shall fall, woe unto the wicked.\u201d\u009d And, really, its just ordinary people living their lives down there, and the furious hermit is hopping up and down shaking his gnarled fist. The boy\u2014he\u2019s eager to get into the town. Like Mason Reynolds in The Hollow Eart<\/em>h.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

M. C. Escher made some nice etchings of things reflected in puddles. This shows a tree with some branches and leaves dandling over a muddy puddle near a spot where I usually crawl under a fence to get back down to my house. I miss having my dog Arf along for that part.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Saturday, I took a walk up towards St. Joseph\u2019s Hill over Los Gatos, California. I\u2019ve been walking on this hill about once a week for some twenty years so I guess I\u2019ve been up there nearly a thousand times. It\u2019s always new to me, because Nature\u2019s a fractal. It\u2019s been raining this week, but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1013","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1013","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1013"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1013\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1016,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1013\/revisions\/1016"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1013"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1013"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}