Road of Peas

I photographed this snake at the trailhead of the Woodpecker Loop Trail at the William L. Finley National Wildlife Refuge, but it really gets around. The Running Men went out into the (what passes for) wilderness (in the San Francisco Bay Area) and stumbled upon many unusual things, including a snake. It could have been a gopher snake, also known as a bull snake. Its main habitat is in the southeast deserts, but it lives in the foothills on the coast as well. Finley is similar to the hills around the SF Bay, rolling hills and grasslands with deciduous copses scattered about.

A Big Thanks to The Running Man Ben Richards for showing off my cool picture!

Here’s another crushed up hotlink, this time hailing from Harry and the poetry, and uses this picture to illustrate a poem by Rainer Rilke Maria. I ran the page through Babelfish to see what exactly I have the honor of illustrating. This is a translation from German to Italian, and then to English. The first probably done by someone with an ear for both languages and an affinity for the poet. The second one is a machine translation:

Autumn - Rainer Rilke Maria

the leaves fall from far away, nearly
garden remote grazed in skies;
with a gesture that it denies the leaves fall.

and every heavy night the earth
it falls from the stars in the solitudine.

all we fall falls this hand,
and therefore every other hand that you see.

but all these things that fall, Someone
with infinite dolcezza it holds to them for hand.

Here’s an English version:

Autumn

The leaves are falling, falling as if from far up,
as if orchards were dying high in space.
Each leaf falls as if it were motioning “no.”

And tonight the heavy earth is falling
away from all other stars in the loneliness.

We’re all falling. This hand here is falling.
And look at the other one. It’s in them all.

And yet there is Someone, whose hands
infinitely calm, holding up all this falling.

There’s merit in the both. I like most of the machine translation - it makes me study the meanings of the words more closely, and thus I find a variety of meanings.

The picture is rather severely crushed, but illustrating a cool poem that set me pondering awhile is ample compensation.

Thank you, Harry!

UPDATE 13 June 2006: This picture was originally hotlinked from rT World. This page is some kind of Chinese, and true to form for East Asian hotlinks, on a very long page full of photos. My maple’s leaves are right up front, though, that’s kind of nice.

Thanks rT World!

This picture has finally bobbled up close enough to the event horizon at google images for early adopters to begin hotlinking to it, thus doing their part in averting the heat death of the universe. Good show, that.

Well, skankies’ page at nexopia.com carries water for the antidisestablishmentarian agenda, giving new meaning to establishmentarianism, by implying some relevance to physics, and a big tip of the hat to skankies for providing the context to actually use that word, until present circumstances known only for its misattribution as the longest English word.

Thanks, skankies!

Something has happened in Thailand in regards to access to my pictures on google images. Here is another hotlink, this one at dark-side’s diary at my.dek-d.com. The poor maple tree has been squashed thinner, it looks painful to me, but I look at the model everyday. Perhaps this helps it to a better fit with the other pictures - I suspect instead the proverbial view of technology as covering your eyes and poking a sharp stick into a dark room.

In any event, thanks, dark-side!