Photocosm

Guising And Souling

 

The world is a stage on Halloween, everybody is an actor. People turn into ghosts and goblins and vampires, or maybe Batman and Superman and Cinderella.

I took a walk through Berkeley today. There was a playful atmosphere here, made stronger by the low sun and blue skies of autumn. Colors were brighter, shadows were longer, and whimsy was the weather.

 

A pumpkin outside Anthropologie, on Hearst.

 

This skeleton was hanging around an outside break area on San Pablo Avenue. 

 

The good people of Photolab, my favorite photo lab, were offering free photographs of costumed kids and their parents.

 

Another shot of the Photolab tent. Owner Andrea McLaughlin is facing my camera as she makes sure the paperwork flows as smoothly as the photography. On a Halloween, nothing is scarier than having photographs without the right names and contact information.

 

California Halloween, cobwebs and bamboo.

 

And the closeup.

 

Some decorations on 4th street, a couple of doors down from the Apple store. There were lots of kids on 4th Street, some of the stores were letting them visit for Trick Or Treat this afternoon. Very sweet.

 

And the final shot comes from my home at sunset. A big spider has been living right outside my front door for months.  It's always welcome here, but the rainy season starts in a month or two.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sunshine Jovian

I was up early this morning, walking under the stars in Marin County. The constellation Orion was prominent and tilted.

 

But then I saw this. Appears simple enough. A lamp on a post next to a tree. But what is that small white dot on the upper right section?

 

Here's another view, adding the headlight of a car coming to a stop sign. And still that small white dot.

So, what is it?

 

That is this, the giant gas planet Jupiter.

A distant planet in our solar system, this photo was shot by the Cassini spacecraft, which has also returned astonishing photographs from Saturn and its moons. My favorite space photos aren't from Hubble, they're the Cassini photographs.

Anyway, back to the night this morning. These photos are amazing in a couple of ways. First, a handheld digital camera is able to photograph all this. For somebody who grew up in the film generation, this is astonishing. I would have needed a tripod to shoot this with a film camera, and the small dot of Jupiter might not have been bright enough to be recorded on the film. This morning, I used a regular Canon point-and-shoot model. I held it toward the gas planet and the Canon image stabilization system made sure my tiny movements didn't affect the photo.

Also amazing, the brightness of Jupiter. Think of it, this is light from the sun that has reached Jupiter and then mirrored back to us. That planet is about 400 million miles away, and yet it's the brightest light in the night sky right now.  Its magnitude is -2.9, brighter than everything else we can see at in the darkness.

What is Jupiter's brightness secret? Well, it's a gas planet, so the sunlight reflects easily. Only the planet Venus reflects more brightly.

Jupiter is also in opposition to the sun, its angle toward earth and sun means we are getting a direct reflection of sunlight. I've read this opposition effect peaked on the evening of the 27th, and I saw Jupiter this morning. Close enough to the maximum brightness.

 

A final look at the great planet -our biggest planet and our happiest planet- from a wider angle. Those lights on the bottom right are coming from a school in Marin County.

 

 

God Withdraws Judgment Day Support - Remembers Previously Scheduled Commitment

 

I was driving through beautiful Marin County last month, and what should I see but this license plate on a minivan, 2011 END.  

 

The lettering on the back of the van warned "The End Of The World Is Here!"

This message was no doubt related to the Harold Camping propaganda campaign about his self-proclaimed "Judgment Day."  Early this year, his ministry took out billboards throughout the Bay Area. They showed the silhouette of a man on a knee, no doubt repenting for all his sins. 

Just one problem, the date for that Judgment Day was the 21st of May, 2011.  

And it came and went. The originator of this fiasco, Harold Camping of Family Radio, had some explainin' to do. He would later assert there had been a judgment day on the 21st of May, but it was invisible and very quiet.

So, what did he do next? Harold Camping said May 21st was only the preliminary judgment day, the real date was now the 21st of October, 2011. That's what this minivan shows, Judgment Day will be the 21st of October.

Which leads us to today. It's the evening of the 21st of October, and another Judgment Day has come and gone.

It's sad, very sad, that so many people were suckered into this prediction. Think of the people who tossed money his way when they learned about Judgment Day. And the number of Family Radio listeners who feared the future because of his radio network's campaign.  But now we know he was wrong, and more than wrong.

Just one more thing. I saw that true believer's minvan on my birthay. What a wonderful plate it was, on my birthday.  Imagine the tingles.

Fortunately, I gave that license plate and that message on the window as much attention as I give presidential candidates, which means I spent the last month since then pretty happy. Why let somebody in the religion business spoil your life?

 

 

 

Twins ...and One More Thing

 

Here's a set of photo photographs here that have something in common in common with a single something else.

Two dogs wait inside a car for an owner to return. The fortunate ones. Their owner came back from a mine in Berkeley called Urban Ore. Very dangerous mine, people walk in and sometimes don't walk out for days.

Two vases and flower arrangements at the Apple Store in Emeryville, California.

I learned about the death of Steve Jobs on my Mac. Got an Apple Mail news alert from the Macworld website. When you think about the millions of people who got the news through a product made by Apple, it's a little surreal. A bit like turning on the old RCA tabletop radio decades ago and hearing about the death of Nikola Tesla, one of the inventors of radio. Tesla also gave us the American electrical power grid, which would have powered that RCA tabletop radio.

But Steve Jobs wasn't an electrical engineer or software programmer, and yet here we are surrounded by iPods and iPhones and Macs and Pixar movies.

Which brings us to the famous and infamous Steve Jobs "Reality Distortion Field."Are you familiar with it? His personal reality distortion field? I heard about RDF decades ago after I moved to California and settled in the Bay Area. It was a derisive term that suggested the real secret of Steve's success: he hypnotized bright people into believing oranges were diamonds, and blue sky was yellow with gold dust.

How else to explain the return of Steve Jobs to Apple after he had been fired ten years earlier? And what explained the amazing recovery of Apple in the late 1990s under CEO Steve, years before the first iPod was even sold?

The answer was obvious: RDF. Steve waved his hand and performed Jedi mind tricks upon unsuspecting executives, investors, customers, analysts, and reporters. They bought Apple because they couldn't help themselves. It wasn't their fault, Steve had waved his hand! They would have seen reality clearly if only Sith Lord Steve had kept his bad hand to himself.

But now we know it wasn't a reality distortion field at all.  It was a Reality Creation Field. Steve showed people the potential future and invited them to join the fun creating it. Designers and programmers and others with a wide array of talents climbed on board the Steve Jobs Ride, "designed in California." Starting from the 1990s, Apple and Pixar teams have brought us large and small revolutions in computers, telephones, music, and motion pictures.

If that's a reality distortion field, "Please, sir, I want some more."

A small storm front visited the Bay Area in early October. There's Mt Tam over Mill Valley in Marin County.

The soft storm left Marin County and crossed the San Francisco Bay and passed over towns such as Berkeley and Emeryville.  Birds sat or flew through showers as they waited above the pizza shop.

 

I recently admired this green sunflower in Albany, just around the corner from the Albany Twin theater. They were showing the Woody Allen movie, Midnight In Paris. I had seen it and thought it was the best Woody Allen in a decade. 

And the same flower a couple of weeks later.  Always nice to see them with a sun tan.

The flat exhausted rainbow of fighter jets.

The Blue Angels naval aviators were giving us a show Saturday over the San Francisco Bay, and their contrails floated across the water to Berkeley. Looks like Morse Code from the ancient telegraph days, doesn't it?

Turns out the Blue Angels were sending a secret message to all Red Rider radio fans: besuretodrinkyourovaltine.

Helium's Rainbow.

During the Blue Angels show, Grocery Outlet grocery in Berkeley was having some event, a sale or a salute to simple aviation. The balloon tether lines were rainbows that rose toward the sun.

And One More Thing....

 

 

 

1955-2011

Life Is What Happens While People Are Waiting For The End Of The World

 

I had a birthday recently, and it was filled with magical little moments. I won't go into details here, they involve the manipulation of spacetime and other silliness. And there were also plain Sunday mundane moments.

 

Here's something I shot on my birthday. Just when you think life is going well, here comes a minivan with the license plate 2011 END. And there it goes. The small print at the top of the back window reads, THE END OF THE WORLD IS HERE.

Rats. Well, at least I was able to buy movies and music with my birthday iTunes gift card. Better watch those movies and listen to that music before the 21st of October.

Why the 21st of October? The message on the window and the Family Radio bumper stickers suggest the minivan is connected to Family Radio Stations Incorporated. They spent a lot of money this year billboarding the Bay Area with warnings about Judgment Day, May 21st, 2011.

But nothing of Biblical proportions happened to the world on the 21st of May. Turns out the physical Judgment Day is coming on the 21st of October. I read it at their website. The 21st of May was a non-physical Judgment Day, which is why we didn't see it, but the 21st of October will be a physical Judgment Day.

What a surprise it will be if October 21st turns out to be a physical non-judgment day. Wiggle out of that one, Family Radio.

 

And this got my attention before the sun rose on my birthday. 

It's a common bumper sticker in the Bay Area, Dog is my co-pilot. What got my attention this time was the DOG decal above it. Cute.

And accurate. Dogs are famous for their navigational skills. You're always hearing about dogs that get left behind on a fishing trip and travel thousands of miles to reunite with their owners.

And there are the movies about dogs that navigate the world. There was the successful movie from 1943, Lassie Come Home. The studio almost made a sequel, Lassie Goes Home Using A Compass She Stole From A Boy Scout, but it suffered financing problems.

There was also the lesser-known movie, Lassie Flies Solo With GPS In A Cessna Skyhawk, followed by the Lassie biopic Nobody Is My Co-Pilot.

Finally, there's a NASA/IMAX movie to be released in 2013, Lassie Surveys Dwarf Planet Pluto.  That's a space adventure in 3-D, I gather. Might go see that one, Lassie in a spacesuit.

Oops, end of the world coming. Lassie won't be going to Pluto for NASA and IMAX.

 

The show CREATE closed recently at the University Of California art museum, it ran until September 25th. I got there too late to see it, but I did create a blackbird photograph from the Bancroft side. The other entrance is on Durant.

 

Here's another banner, BOX OFFICE. The Mill Valley Film Festival opens on the 6th of October.

Pictured here is musician/painter Sam Andrew. He's a real person, by the way, not a mannequin. Sam's just kidding for the camera. Sam's been photographed more times than anybody I've known.

If you ever heard of Janis Joplin, Sam was a founding member of the legendary rock band, Big Brother & The Holding Company. Sam and the other members of BBHC are still playing, each year they tour the world for their shows. The old joke is that you never lived through the 1960s if you remember them. People who lived through the 1960s and don't remember them nevertheless remember Sam Andrew's music.

He's also a painter, and while it's maybe unfair to show a painting early in its gestation, Sam just started this one. It's inchoate right now, maybe incoherent or imprecise, but it will be inspired and beautiful soon. He's had lots of solo shows, very talented.

 

Another nice moment from my birthday, a yellow car in a parking lot after an unusual shower. We're not even in our rainy season yet. Someday I'll show my favorite yellow car photos, but this was a Porsche I'd seen and never photographed.

 
Final photo of the birthday, a sunflower close to home. I skipped a lot of photos I shot but can't display yet.