Photocosm

Christmas in the Bay Area

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Winter around the San Francisco Bay looks just like something out of Dickens, you almost expect Mr. Scrooge to cross your path. There's no snow, but it's cold and rainy and windy most of the days. Take today, for example, Christmas. Windy and rainy and cold, but then it all blew through and we enjoyed blue cold skies in the afternoon.

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Here's the Golden Gate Bridge at sunrise a few days ago. Doesn't look like the postcards, does it?

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Clouds crawl over the San Francisco Bay and San Francisco, as seen from safe and dry Marin County.

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Storm clouds invading the eastern shore of the Bay. 

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On another day, the San Rafael-Richmond Bridge from San Pablo Bay.

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Not every day was cold and wet and rainy. This day was sunny and cold and windy. A shaft of light, just a day before the Winter Solstice, reaches toward me from a photo gallery in Marin County. And I reached back with a snapshot.

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The clearing days after rain often bring rainbows, here's one in San Rafael. 

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Vehicles

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This post continues a post at my other blog, lightwaves.tv, where I also showed recent photos of Bay Area transportation.

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A Boeing 747 flies over Berkeley. When I was a kid, airliners flew so high in the dark blue sky, they seemed to be spacecraft. Turns out they're only a few miles high. 

Camera optics are so sharp these days, no doubt there's a long lens that can show us the faces in the windows. That would still be quite a feat, since an airliner would have to be far enough away to give us an angle which would show the windows. Now, we're talking about 20 or 30 miles. 

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Back on earth in Berkeley, an airport shuttle driver lies on his back, fixing some problem with his van. Shuttle companies aren't doing very well right now, and not just because of the economy. Lots of airliner passengers now take BART to SFO, that's what I did when I flew to Saint Louis. I've been told on good authority at least one shuttle company may cease operations after the new year. Hope this guy isn't ceased, he just installed a brand new flux capacitor.

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This is the Amtrak train in merry Emeryville. The train pulls out on its way to faraway okay Oakland. 

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Can't leave out the water traffic. Here's the ferry from Angel Island about to crash into the dock at Tiburon. He always aims for me, I don't know what I did. I guess you jump a turnstile for a free ride and they never forget it. The lesson is don't get caught.

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Here's one of the best license plates I've seen. You know I admire it because I rarely post photos of license plates. It's strange, some car owners get a provocative plate for the attention, such as SEXI, but then they don't want a photo taken. 

Anyway, the plate is MARY TOD.  Why is that creative? The car is a Lincoln Continental. Which gives us Mary Todd Lincoln. Smart, especially since I visited the Abraham Lincoln national museum in Springfield a couple of months ago. 

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It isn't every day you see an ogre behind the wheel with an alligator passenger, and a convertible no less. That's Berkeley. We were almost 100 percent in opposing the Iraq War, but that doesn't mean we're weak on defense. This amphibious assault craft will be combat ready soon as the ogre fixes the flat tire.

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And we close with some culture. Here's a van in Fairfax with a tribute to Van Gogh, his famous sunflower painting. The other side of the van is a tribute to the infamous x-rated movie, Ludwig Van Beethoven.

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