Fabulous, Freaky Sentinels of the Desert

It's Round Robin time again! This week's topic, "Fabulous Freaks Of Nature," comes from Meg, author of the blog "In Quest Of."



Well, I don't know any six foot frogs, six-fingered friends, or dogs with no noses. But I do live in the Sonoran Desert, within easy driving distance of whole forests of a large, strange plant that most of you have never seen outside a Roadrunner cartoon: the Giant Saguaro cactus.

For a while now I've been feeling a need to get out of the city into the real desert, even if only for half an hour. From my part of town, the easiest way to do that is to drive up Tanque Verde, turn left on Catalina Highway, and head a little way up Mount Lemmon.


The first scenic vista, Babad Do'ag (which means Frog Mountain), is only about four or five miles up. Two years ago, I took some of my first digital sunset photos up there with the old Canon camera. So that's where I headed after work today.



Sunset comes a little earlier in the mountains than down in the city, and there were several couples waiting for it. But when it came, there was no color in the sky. Still, I got some interesting pictures. I especially like the backlit shots, which I did by lining up the sun behind the saguaro itself.



One freaky thing about saguaros, though, is the way people like to anthropomorphize them. They turn the arms and cavities into approximations of human features, and imagine funny things the saguaros seem to be saying. This one, for example, sort of has what looks like a face right in the middle: eye, bulbous nose, mustache and mouth. The arms could be a big green jester hat. But I've always hated that sort of thing. To me, a saguaro is a saguaro. It doesn't need to be a "funny animal" figure.



This shot is off in a different direction from the previous two; hence the different lighting effect.



But enough with the pictures for the sake of pretty pictures. Let me show you a few things about the saguaro life cycle. This little saguaro is probably over 75 years old. That's how long it takes for them to get from the size of a pinhead to the point of starting to grow arms. This one is a little unusual; they're usually a bit taller than this (around seven feet) before they start growing arms. Saguaros can live 175 years or longer, and grow to be 50 feet tall.



The saguaro flowers at night, and later produces these weird fruits at the top of each arm. The Tohono O'odham people (and the Hohokam before them) have traditionally harvested these, using poles to knock down the fruit and then making it into jam, syrup and wine. But humans are only one of the many creatures to feed on saguaro fruit and seeds. This white-winged dove was definitely having a nosh tonight.



The saguaro can also be a kind of apartment complex for birds. Gila woodpeckers and flickers often drill holes in the saguaro to form nests. The saguaro lines the hole with kind of a woody scab, forming what's called a saguaro boot. After the woodpeckers are done with the hole, other birds move in, especially owls. Bats and bugs may also live in saguaro boots.



Here are two views of what's inside a saguaro. The damaged one in the foreground is showing saguaro gall, and possibly saguaro boots, both of which are ways to heal the plant and seal itself off from damage. The brown sticks in the background are the remains of another saguaro. These are called saguaro ribs. They're the main structural support for the plant, and they and the boots are what's left after the cactus dies and rots away. The ribs are often used to build fences and ramadas and such.



That's it! Now go see what everyone else came up with for this topic! And remember, you're more than welcome to join in the fun!

Karen

Linking List

Meg - POSTED!
In Quest Of
http://journals.aol.com/inquestoftruth/InQuestOf

Carly - POSTED!
Ellipsis
http://ellipsissuddenlycarly.blogspot.com/

boliyou - POSTED!
Percolation
http://boliyou.blogspot.com/

Janet
Fond Of Photography
http://fondofphotography.blogspot.com/

Karen - POSTED!
Outpost Mâvarin
http://outmavarin.blogspot.com/

Gina - POSTED!
Gina's Space
http://journals.aol.com/rbrown6172/Ginasspace/

Marie - POSTED!
Photographs and Memories Too
http://journals.aol.co.uk/mariebm56/PhotographsMemoriestoo

Kerrin - POSTED!
Macro Capture
http://macrocapture.blogspot.com/

Suzanne R - POSTED!
Suzanne R's Life
http://newsuzannerslife.blogspot.com/

Julie - POSTED!
Julie's Web Journal
http://www.barrettmanor.com/julie/journal.aspx

Steven - POSTED!
(sometimes) photoblog
http://sepintx.blogspot.com

Tammie Jean
Long Drives To Nowhere
http://tammiejean.blogspot.com/

Gattina - POSTED!
Keyhole Pictures
http://gattina-keyholepictures.blogspot.com/

Teena - POSTED!
It's all about me!
http://purple4mee.blogspot.com/

Vicki - POSTED! ***Welcome New Member***
Maracas
http://mymaracas.blogspot.com/

Windish Day and the Blue Angels

Your Monday Photo Shoot: Capture something in flight. Birds, insects, planes, bats, whatever -- if it's getting around in the skies, it's fair game for this photo shoot.

It was a blustery day today (what my dad used to call "windish"), and on top of that, I live and work in a fairly domesticated part of Tucson. Neither of these conditions was conducive to getting a good picture of birds in flight today. Oh, I saw a fair number of them, mostly sparrows and doves, zipping along in the heavy wind. But they were far, and fast, and tiny, and the pictures weren't very good. Here's the only one from today's batch I'm even going to show you:

Can you spot the birdies? Me neither.

Yes, there are birds in that picture. I even cropped it quite a bit to make them more visible. But there were no hawks about, certainly no eagles or owls or ravens, and it's been years since I've seen a turkey vulture inside the city limits. If I had an hour to drive into the mountains, I could maybe have photographed a raven or a raptor or a vulture, but as it is the biggest thing I saw was a dove, or a far-off airplane. Yes, I admit that I did get a few pictures tonight with a recognizable airplane. But trust me, none of the shots had a decent-sized image of something in flight.

The Blue Angels, I'm pretty sure

But no matter, because back in March I took a bunch of pictures of an air show over our neighborhood, one of the perks of living within a couple miles of Davis-Monthan Air Base. I posted my best, edited photos at the time, but here are some of the nicer leftovers.

Keeping Calle Mumble safe...maybe

As you can see, it was a cloudy day that day, too. I like the way this nearby house ended up looking all dark and spooky when I darkened the sky.

flying high, right into the sun...

flying north in the spring

The clouds seem to be pointing the Blue Angels toward a rendezvous in the Santa Catalina Mountains.

Make a wish! Kind of a wishbone-shaped jet trail.

Ta-da! I'm done, and it's not even 1:30 AM yet! Good night!

Karen

Making a Scene

This is one of those nights when sleep is not optional, so this entry will be short. I figure I've earned it, having written and made images for a number of rather ambitious posts of late, none of which got comments. That's okay. I know you're out there. I can hear you reading.

I did accomplish something today, though. I wrote an entire scene for chapter 8 of Mages, beginning to end, 615 words. That's not a huge word count, but it's the first new scene I've completed for the trilogy in several years. I like it because it sets up a major plot thread without giving the game away. My hope is that readers will be puzzled by it and wonder what's going on, be further puzzled by another scene I started writing in Applebees tonight, start to get a clue around Chapter 11, and see it all click into place by Chapter 22.

There was something else I was going to tell you about, but I just wasted 40 minutes looking up a couple of favorite scenes in Mages, and now I'm too sleepy to remember the other thing I meant by "Making a Scene." Oh, well. You don't mind, do you? I'll tell you later if I think of it. Meanwhile, good night!

Karen

Tapping the Well

New Writer's Weekly Question #3: Do you have times when you just can't get to your imagination, or your imaginary places? How do you cope with this issue? How do you manage your reality with your imaginative process?

Hmm. I like the way this one is worded. It implies that the well of imagination does not itself run dry, but we sometimes have trouble operating the bucket. That strikes me as about right. I suspect that weird stuff going on in our heads all the time, but for the most part we're unaware of it. The trick for the writer (or artist of any sort, perhaps) is to dredge up some of our buried weirdness, impose order on it and thus turn it into art.


For myself specifically, it's almost never a case of feeling that I've entirely run dry, even when I'm being remarkably unproductive. My failures of imagination are nearly always task-specific. Just half an hour ago, I was looking at a Joshua Wander story I got stuck on almost exactly two years ago. The passage above is on page 28 of the handwritten draft of that part of the story. As you can see, it ends in the middle of a sentence, mostly because I didn't know what exactly Rachel does next. I still don't.


When I get stuck on something like that, I generally abandon it for a bit, and hope the answer will come to me later. This never works, by the way. I do better if I write some other scene from the same work, or make myself work on the stuck scene anyway.

The same sort of thing happens with this blog sometimes. I am determined to post an entry every night (night being defined as any time before I go to bed, even if it's 7 AM), but I don't always have an idea for an entry. This is often a major reason why I don't go to bed at a reasonable hour. Take this entry, for example. I started it around 9:30 this evening, which is unusually early for me. But after the words, "I still don't," I wasn't sure where I was going with this essay. So I watched Doctor Who and edited Wikipedia, and now it's 1:40 AM and I've made it through two more paragraphs. As with Rachel in the mirror shop, I made no progress on it during the time I was off doing other things, but the hope is that my subconscious is working in the background, and I'll eventually be able to draw on that.

How do I get to it, though? These are the three things that sometimes work for me:

1. Prime the pump. When I'm off reading or watching tv or writing something else, in theory I'm giving my subconscious new stuff to think about, raw material for new essays or storymaking. This can either be direct inspiration - watching Doctor Who and then writing about it, for example - or completely new, seemingly irrelevant stuff. That's at least as helpful as the other kind. There's a reason aspiring writers are advised to read widely. It gives the imagination something to work with, not just story elements but a sense of how they fit together, what works and what doesn't, and what might be applicable to the writer's own work.
2. Sleep deprivation. No, I'm not kidding about this. When I'm really, seriously tired, all sorts of daft nonsense surfaces in my brain. Catch me at just the right level of tiredness, in the right mood and with no other immediate obligations, and I can pour a bunch of reasonably interesting words onto a virtual page fairly quickly. This can backfire, though. Aside from health concerns and a huge upswing in typos, the time comes when the brain stops cooperating, and there isn't much I can do but go to bed. That's what happened last night, incidentally. I got to a certain point in my little narrative with Ariel, and then my tired brain stranded me there without a closing line. Since Ariel is essentially a function of my imagination, she couldn't help me. So I gave the entry a totally lame ending, went to bed, and slept for 10 hours.
3. Write it anyway. At some point I have to just start writing the thing, even if I don't know where it's going. I usually don't know where a story is going anyway, but I can get through it if I just keep writing - or resume writing. I think the problem with Rachel, aside from the fact that it's a mystery story and I've never plotted a mystery in my life, is that I had a neat idea that really, really won't work at that point in the story. I'll have to write something else, and hope I eventually write my way into a plot that works.

As for the underlying question behind the one posted above, I don't generally find real life stresses getting in the way of writing. Time constraints, yes. Distractions and obsessions, yes. But not stress at work, or family crises. If anything, writing is a welcome respite from Real Life. Isn't that what imagination is for?

Karen

P.S. The Writer's Weekly Question is open to writers, aspiring writers and non-writers alike. See "It's Creative, but Is It Art?" for details.

More Pictures from A Scrapbook of Impossible Travels

"So, Karen," said Ariel Allegra. "After all your whining last week about my not taking you to see the Beatles at the Cavern Club, I find out in your blog today that you've been much further than 1961 Liverpool. You've impersonated an alien and met a Dalek. I'm not so sure about that black hole, though. It could be a wormhole, maybe, but not a black hole per se."

"Oh, it's fake," I said. "It's all fake. The bald alien prosthetic was part of an attraction at Universal Studios over a decade ago. The Dalek belongs to a fan who was at the Gallifrey One convention in 2003. The vortex wormhole thing was a camera flash in a mirror."

"In other words, you lied," Ariel said. "You lied with pictures."

I have visited the Old West.

"Did you read the text at all?" I asked. "I didn't lie. Not exactly. The Weekend Assignment was to edit a photo into looking different and unusual. I tried to edit them into being illustrations for A Journal of Impossible Travels, or, failing that, photos in A Scrapbook of Impossible Travels. It's not a lie if you tell people you're being deceptive."

I am a Leaper - or possibly I'm immersed in the Time Vortex.

"I see you're doing more of the deceptive photo editing tonight," Ariel said. I'd already uploaded my pictures by that point, after several prior attempts ended in failure due to a Blogger glitch.

Walking on the Moon is much easier
with a force field than a space suit.

"That's right," I said. "I was up way too late last night, and I wanted more time to mess around with the topic."

"And these five pictures are the result," Ariel said. "You overused that cowgirl pose rather badly, don't you think?"

Thomas Jefferson and I relax during a three hour tour.

"Yes, I did, but it saved me a lot of time, and I don't have all that many pictures of myself to work with," I said. "What do you think otherwise?"

Walt Disney shows fourteen-year-old Karen
a maquette of an animatronic pirate.

"Oh, they're passable, I suppose," Ariel said. "But what you've done is more an exercise in wish fulfillment than in photo editing."

"It shows, huh?" I said. "But that's what I do. I can't really travel in time and space, so I invent ways to do it vicariously, with words and pictures."

"And fictional daughters of pandimensional wizards," Ariel said.

"If you like, yes," I said. "As far as this world knows, you exist only as a foil for my ideas."

"Flatterer. See if I take you to meet James Thurber after this."

"But you weren't going to do that anyway."

"Probably not."

"If I am your foil, how is that working out for you?" Ariel asked. "I turned up tonight without Kate, and now I can't help but notice you're stuck for an ending to this blog entry."

"Yes," I said. "I blame you."

"That's gratitude for you," Ariel said.

Karen (with Ariel)

Real sources:

• photo of Karen at Little Painted Desert County Park, 1986
• photo of an Old Tucson tour guide, 2005
• Little Painted Desert again, originally without Karen
• 1970 photo of Karen and her dad, with Thomas Jefferson portrait previously used in this old blog entry.
• 1971 photo of Karen by Joel R. pasted into a scene from the Disneyland 10th Anniversary‎ show.

A Scrapbook of Impossible Travels

Weekend Assignment #169: Do something creative with a photo to make it look different and unusual. For those of you with Photoshop or some other photo editor, you can use filters and other techniques to do this. If you don't have a photo editing program, you might look at some of these online photo editors out there, some of which allow you fiddle quite a bit with your photos. If you'd like you can also post the original, unaltered photo so people can compare and contrast. Extra Credit: How old were you when you got your first camera?

Okay, this is just the first installment of a series of entries, assuming I don't give up in frustration or distraction. It's taken me way past when I planned to go to bed, and it didn't come out as well as I'd hoped,largely because I couldn't find the effect I wanted to use.


I've probably mentioned A Journal of Impossible Things from the two recent Doctor Who episodes, in which John Smith records and draws what he remembers of his dreams of being the Doctor. It occurred to me tonight that I have my own such journal, the leather-bound notebook in which I've written about Jace and Joshua Wander and King Jor and a number of characters whose named don't start with J. I thought I'd edit in some photos, converted into drawings as an equivalent to Smith's charcoal sketches. But I couldn't find the effects filter I'm sure I've used before, so everything came out more photgraphic than drawn. So here instead is a two-page spread from my Scrapbook of Impossible Travels.

And here are some of the component pictures:

I escape a black hole.

I am an alien Preceptor.

I've befriended a Dalek.

I got my Dad's hand-me-down camera in seventh grade, I think. It was a light plastic thing. By then he had an Instamatic. My second camera was a Poloroid One Step.

More later....

Karen

More Pictures from A Scrapbook of Impossible Travels

An Escheriffic Story...and the rest of my Top 10

Earlier today I was thinking again about the question of whether "Human Nature"/"The Family of Blood" has become my favorite Doctor Who story ever. I still don't have the answer. It's far too soon to have the necessary perspective to make that determination, and anyway, I've had different favorites over the past 18 years,and even before this story aired I would have been hard pressed to choose a current #1. But I found myself compiling a top 10 lift on my way up the elevator after lunch. In chronological order, it goes something like this:

1. An Unearthly Child (also titled 100,000 BC) - the first story with the First Doctor sets up several of the show's enduring icons, and gives us a very alien, slightly sinister Doctor as seen through the eyes of two rather likable schoolteachers.


2. The Mind Robber - trapped in the Land of Fiction, the Second Doctor, Jamie and Zoe meet Rapunzel, Cyrano, Lemuel Gulliver and others. It makes for an interesting meditation on the nature of fiction and the creative process.


3. Spearhead from Space - I'm tempted to go with The Three Doctors (the first multi-Doctor crossover) or The Time Warrior (the first Sarah Jane story) to represent the Pertwee era, but really it's the Third Doctor's first story that remains the most memorable for me. It's padded and at times a little silly, but it's still good stuff, particularly the scenes with the Doctor establishing his new post-regeneration persona. The Nestene Consciousness and the Autons are a good enough alien threat that Russell T Davies used them to launch the Doctor Who revival series in "Rose" (2005).


4. City of Death - I'm not a big fan of the Fourth Doctor, he of the long scarf, curly hair and seven-year run; but there's no denying there were several truly great stories during his era. My favorite is City of Death, credited to the fictional "David Agnew" but largely written by Douglas Adams. I once read a comment in an article to the effect that choosing the best dialogue from the show's history could easily turn into quoting this one story. From "You're a beautiful woman, probably" to "It's the Jaggaroth that need the chickens?" it's witty and wonderful. Watch out for the six Mona Lisas, art critic John Cleese, and the space ship that Adams reused, more or less, in his novel Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency.


5. Castrovalva - the last ten minutes of Logopolis, which immediately preceded this story, were almost enough to get me hooked on Doctor Who back in 1988 or so. As I watched, Tom Baker fell off a tower and, surrounded by his young friends, turned into the white-faced, mummy-like Watcher, and then into Peter Davison! For the first time, I made a point of watching KUAT at 10 PM the next Saturday night.

What I saw that night was an amazing, freaky story. The new Doctor is in a bad way, impaired in memory and concentration, reverting sporadically to old personality traits from previous incarnations, and at one point forgetting he's the Doctor. With the help of Nyssa and Tegan, he manages to escape from one of the Master's traps only to fall into another, the town of Castrovalva.


Screenwriter Christopher H. Bidmead based Castrovalva on M.C. Escher's mindbending art, which I can't reproduce here because it's under copyright and its use is strictly controlled. (The link goes to the official Escher website, though. You can see the pictures there.) The story goes that script editor Bidmead and producer John Nathan-Turner used to sit in the office of a BBC executive who had an Escher on his wall. JN-T found it disturbing and distracting, so Bidmead would be the one who faced the piece of art. Result: Castrovalva, named for a cliffside Italian town that Escher drew in 1930. Starting from the central square in the Bidmead's Castrovalva and going down, the Doctor and friends nearly always arrive on a walkway that looks down on that same square. The spatial anomalies are a big part of the story, but the place is weird in other ways, too. For example, the town's library consist of the 30-volume history of Castrovalva, 500-year-old books which purport to chronicle the place's history from 1200 years earlier up to the present day.


Castrovalva came out this week as part of a DVD boxed set, along with the two stories that precede it, The Keeper of Traken and Logopolis. John picked up a copy after work tonight, so naturally I watched Castrovalva for the first time in years. It really holds up. My favorite bit is when the Portreeve tells the amnesiac Doctor that he will find the Doctor very soon - and calls him Doctor as he makes the prediction.

6. Remembrance of the Daleks - I'm skipping over the Sixth Doctor's era (although The Two Doctors is rather good) and moving on to one of my very favorite stories ever. The Doctor revisits key places from An Unearthly Child, charges up Ace's metal bat using an ancient, coffin-shaped Gallifreyan device, thus enabling Ace to destroy a Dalek single-handed, discusses the philosophy of decisions and consequences with a stranger over a late night cup of tea, hints to Ace and Davros that he is older and more powerful than other Time Lords, and eventually blows up the Daleks real good. What's not to love?

7. The Doctor Who tv movie (1996) - This is undoubtedly the most controversial entry on this list. It has a certain taint of American connections, apparently crams Gallifrey's Eye of Harmony (basically a solar engineered black hole) into the Doctor's TARDIS, and even has the Doctor claiming to be "half human on my mother's side," which is strongly disputed by many fans. But Paul McGann is fun to watch as the Doctor, as is the aging Sylvester McCoy. The "Who am I?" scene is atmospheric and beautifully shot, the ancillary characters are memorable, and the bit in which the Master casually peels a dead fingernail off his stolen body is suitably creepy. I'll happily explain away the major continuity flaws to get to the good stuff in the Eighth Doctor's only screen outing.

8. "Rose" - When Doctor Who first came back in 2005, I was seriously worried they'd mess it up by trying to make it contemporary. But the opening five minutes of "Rose" were enough to make it clear that the show would be breaking new ground without forgetting its past. Rose's ordinary day changes abruptly when she becomes trapped in a cellar with sinister, moving shop window dummies. Then a stranger takes her hand, and says, "Run!" The Doctor soon finds out that Rose isn't about to let him "swan off" without her. In a choice between folding shirts in a store or traveling by TARDIS, Rose is not going to settle for the safer option.

9. "Doctor Who: Children in Need" / "The Christmas Invasion" - one of these is seven minutes long, and leads directly into the other, so I'm counting them together. The newly-regenerated Tenth Doctor initially has some problems with health and mental stability, as pretty much always happens when the Doctor regenerates. Seldom has it been done this well, however. It's a treat to watch him examine his new body ("I have got a mole"), convince Rose he really is the Doctor, crash land the TARDIS, wish Jackie and Mickey a Merry Christmas just before collapsing into a coma, save Jackie from being killed by a Christmas tree, and emerge from his coma just in time to save the world with a big, threatening button, a sword and a piece of fruit.


10. "Human Nature" / "The Family of Blood‎" - boys' school teacher John Smith has no idea why his personal memories are so vague, while his dreams of another life are so vivid. It is not in his nature to question his own existence, or the conventional morals of his comfortable, pre-WWI world. The things of his dreams are "just stories," and journaling them is just a fun little hobby. But as he falls in love with the school nurse, events conspire to shake him from his complacency. When two people at the school are replaced by murderous aliens, Martha - a mere cleaning lady! - claims Smith is really a man from another world, and that he is needed. Why is one of his students waving around an alien pistol, calling him "Doctor", and threatening the lives of Martha and Joan? The answer, as it unfolds, shakes John Smith to his hollow core.

Dang, it's late. I've got to get to bed! Guess this wasn't the best idea for a quick entry, huh?

Karen