Hills and deer

I run along a 10 mile path along the lake. Outside the lake you have the hills, and the hills are steep and beautiful. I rode past a local who was walking to the spring and after the traditional "Merry Christmas," he said "You got it, almost to the top." It was a wicked, steep hill. And then I saw the whole City and the river they call the lake and you would not know there is any bustle or hustle. I was soon lost in the hills. I asked a man in dread locks, walking with his family, how to get back. Of course, they asked me what I wanted to see. In my life, when lost, people always assume I am on a journey. "You can take the green belt, or you can head back to the spring," he said. The point was  don't miss anything.

I made it back across down the hills and past the river and over the bridge.

They came to the town for the energy, for the hills and the spring. The birds smile, and the deer are well-fed.

Roger Ebert and First Blood

"What we can't buy in this movie is the message. It's handled in too heavy-handed a way. Stallone plays a returned Vietnam veteran, a Green Beret skilled in the art of jungle survival and fighting, and after a small-town police force sadistically mishandles him, he declares war on the cops. All of this is set up in scenes of great physical power and strength and the central sections of the movie, with Stallone and the cops stalking each other through the forests of the Pacific Northwest, have a lot of authority. But then the movie comes down to a face-off between Stallone and his old Green Beret commander (Richard Crenna), and the screenplay gives Stallone a long, impassioned speech to deliver, a speech in which he cries out against the injustices done to him and against the hippies who demonstrated at the airport when he returned from the war, etc. This is all old, familiar material from a dozen other films clichés recycled as formula. Bruce Dern did it in “Coming Home” and William Devanein “Rolling Thunder”. Stallone is made to say things that would have much better been implied; Robert De Niro, in “Taxi Driver”, also plays a violent character who was obviously scarred by Vietnam, but the movie wisely never makes him talk about what happened to him. Some things are scarier and more emotionally moving when they're left unsaid. 

So the ending doesn't work in “First Blood”. It doesn't necessarily work as action, either. By the end of the film, Stallone has taken on a whole town and has become a one-man army, laying siege to the police station and the hardware store and exploding the pumps at the gas station. This sort of spectacular conclusion has become so commonplace in action movies that I kind of wonder, sometimes, what it would be like to see one end with a whimper rather than a bang. 

Until the last twenty or thirty minutes, however, “First Blood” is a very good movie, well-paced, and well-acted not only by Stallone (who invests an unlikely character with great authority) but also by Crenna and Brian Dennehy, as the police chief. The best scenes come as Stallone's on the run in the forest, using a hunting knife with a compass in the handle, and living off the land. At one point he's trapped on a cliffside by a police helicopter, and we really feel for this character who has been hunted down through no real fault of his own. We feel more deeply for him then, in fact, than we do later when he puts his grievances into words. Stallone creates the character and sells the situation with his presence itself. The screenplay should have stopped while it was ahead."

The Rambo Apple

"According to author David Morrell, the apple provided the name for the hero of his novel, First Blood, which gave rise to the Rambo film franchise. The novelist's wife brought home a supply of the fruit as he was trying to come up with a suitable name for the protagonist.^[6] It is uncertain whether David Morrell's wife brought home Rambos or Summer Rambos. Summer Rambos would have been much more common, but since his wife bought the apples at a roadside stand, either is possible.

James Whitcomb Riley, the Hoosier Poet, sentimentalized the Rambo in his poem, The Rambo-Tree which appeared in his 1902 collection The Book of Joyous Children.^[7] The poem includes the repeating chorus:
For just two truant lads like we,When Autumn shakes the rambo-tree
There's enough for you and enough for me
It's a long, sweet way across the orchard.

A similar sentiment was expressed by "Uncle Silas" in his column for the September 1907 issue of The American Thresherman: "What has become of the good old apples we used to eat in the long ago down on the farm? The Rambo, the best apple that ever grew in an orchard, is fruit vouchsafed only in memory. [In Missouri,] no apple was ever enjoyed like the Rambo.... A boy would go farther to swipe Rambo apples, and subject his pantaloons to greater exposure from ugly dogs than he would for any other kind, and boys know on which tree the best apples grow. A drink of cider without any fixin', made of Rambo apples, will go farther down and awake the molecules of mankind in a greater degree than any other kind of cider. The world is growing wiser, but not in raising Rambo apples."

The claim that the Rambo was the favorite apple of Johnny Appleseed is false. Johnny Appleseed did not grow or sell any grafted varieties, and for the Rambo or any other variety to be perpetuated, it must be grafted. As Michael Pollan indicates in his chapter on the apple in Botany of Desire, John Chapman (1774–1845), for religious reasons related to the doctrines of Emanuel Swedenborg, believed grafting was an unnatural practice. Chapman was given the nickname "Appleseed" pejoratively for his highly unusual practice of planting trees from seed. The apples grown from seed are almost all small and poorly flavored, so with very rare exceptions, his trees would have been good for making hard cider only. Back when the frontier only extended as far west as the state of Indiana, that worked fine for Johnny Appleseed, since cider was a staple and the pioneers didn't have any other choice in suppliers. The apple tree in Nova, Ohio, that is more than 175 years old, can either be the last surviving apple tree that Johnny Appleseed planted or it can be a Rambo tree. It cannot be both, despite any marketing claims."

Intelligence

The smart guys don't know what to do with themselves. They are so smart, they play with the world like a piece of used gum.

I'm happy now that I've concluded I'm only average. I took a test for law school and the result was that I'm OK, but not great.

I then took a test for accounting and the result, statistically shows, again, that I'm OK. But they are nice guys and open the gates.

For me this is great because I tried to do the great Black Diamond ski run of philosophy and it was like a kid in Junior High getting knocked into the stands at an NBA game.

Let those fucked-up philosophers gnaw on each other.

What I learned about other cultures is that the lay-out of the earth is incredibly different. It is a beautiful planet to see and smell. I highly recommend Earth.

Past that, I won't say anything else. See all of Earth when you're alive, if you can. If not, then you get to know the part that the explorer never got to see better than anyone else.

Beer, wine, and cognac along the way.

Cheers.