Photocosm

Santa Wore A Raincoat To California

 

 

Christmas means one thing to Californians -rain. The rainy season always seems so far away in September, and October usually sets records for the daily high temperature. Frequently, November and December won't bring much rain to speak of. That means we expect the harsh cold rains from Alaska to swoop down around January. 

So, what does that movie theater have to do with our winter rains? Not much, but it's fun to talk first about my contribution to the lights of Christmas.

That's the way a movie theater should look after dark, right? The light show before the light show inside. But the lights were out recently. 

 

I was in the parking lot and took a photograph of the marquee well after dark. Actually, I was photographing the license plate POPE. I erased it here, since who would believe I actually photographed the Pope during Christmas? Would have to be a Photoshop creation, right?

But the lights were off at the movie theater. That license plate was brighter than the marquee. Was the power cut off in connection with a construction project nearby? Maybe. A company is building apartments next door. Correction, luxury apartments. They never put up a sign that reads, "Coming In 2014, Ordinary Apartments." 

I visited the theater ticket window and asked the fellow behind the glass about the dark theater marquee and facade. He told me the lights were turned on automatically by computer, so I could expect them around 6:45 pm. That seemed late, but we had changed from Daylight Savings Time recently. Maybe the computers were stuck in the past. My backup camera is stuck in the past, too, but that's because I haven't dialed in the change.

 

A couple of days later, the lights were on bright. Very nice. I can't take sole credit here, maybe I was the 20th customer to mention it, but they obviously dialed in the change to turn them on sooner.  Now, on to the rain.

 

Walnut Creek is wet again.

So, far, we seem to be getting the normal winter pattern of rain. A couple of days of rain, and then a day or two of clearing and walking-around weather. The satellite weather maps in winter often show a line of storm fronts reaching across the Pacific toward Alaska. You can see the one that will arrive Friday, the one that's ready for Monday, the Thursday storm, and so forth. Can't complain, though, the Bay Area gets its water from the Sierra Nevada snow.

 

 

The rains stripped the autumn leaves away for good, and color photographs now look like black and white.

 

 

As anemic as winter skies can look, you can still find color on the streets. 

 

 

Looks as if somebody poured a few boxes of  Trix into the puddle.

 

 

A construction crew's power cords on the pavement of a driveway.

 

 

Nobody waits outside for the train today.

 

 

The Amtrak brings a little color to the station.

 

But there was color in the air after three days of cold showers. Forgot I had the flash setting on, so that white blob is a raindrop.

 

A passing family saw me photographing the rainbow, so mom got some photos. When I said that was actually a double rainbow, the kids were delighted. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The rainbow touched down on the other side of the railroad tracks and the train signals.

 

Almost seems you can climb that laddder and catch a ride on the light. 

This was the best rainbow I've photographed in years. Not the best setting -this is what you'd like to photograph with the Golden Gate Bridge or Half Dome in Yosemite- but it was the longest-lasting and richest-looking, and it had no gaps for several minutes.  

That was the 22nd of December. Glad we weren't all destroyed by that asteroid/Planet X/earthquake/solar kill shot/nuclear attack after the Mayan calendar ended. The rain came back and stayed with us all day on Christmas. For shoppers on the 22nd, though, they got to see some Christmas lights early.

 

 

 

 

 

Between Rainfall And Skyfall

 

 

Today has a once-in-a-century number, 12-12-12.  

There are dozens and dozens of news articles about this special day. Many people have been planning to do something special at 12:12:12 on this 12th day of the 12th month of the 12th year. After all, they won't ever get to see this sequence of numbers again. What did I do? I was as the computer and saw 12:12:12 on the computer clock between websites.

For me, the better sequence was last year, 11-11-11, and not just because it allowed all 1's to line up at 11:11:11 on 11-11-11. There was also the historical reference. When World War One was wrapping up, there was a peace armistice signed to stop hostilities. It went into effect at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, 1918, which was then observed in the United States as Armistice Day. We now call it Veterans Day. I recall 11-11-11 of last year fondly, I photographed the license plate PEACE that day.

 

 

Today I visited Walnut Creek. Here's a photo of distant Mt Diablo, one of the most prominent mountains of the Bay Area. The line down the middle is a radio or cell phone tower. The weather was a mix of cool sunshine and short showers. 

 

 

The reason for my visit was to see a popular movie at the Century, but some interesting moments occurred along the way.

 

 

We start with this beautiful vintage car.

That's a 1965 Ford Mustang. Furthermore, the license plate mentions it's a 1965 car. Since this is a vintage car, the driver had a Club attached to the steering wheel. So, it's enough here just to say the plate was maybe "MY 1965," or perhaps "A REAL 65" is the plate. And the plate frame mentions 1965 again. 

Why does it matter if it's a 1965 car and the plate reminds us it's 1965? Because the parking spot is 1965.

By the way, the Mustang was introduced in 1964 and featured in that year's 007 movie, Goldfinger. The woman driving the Mustang tried to pass 007 on a narrow Swiss road in the Alps. Bad move, she had just tried to shoot down the man 007 was following, Auric Goldfinger. She never passed 007's Aston Martin. Double blowout of her tires on the right side.  As James Bond told the driver, Tilly Masterson, he had never seen a double blowout. Some kind of manufacturing defect, he suggested.

 

But back to this 1965 car in a 1965 parking space. What are the odds? Something tells me the owner looks for parking spots with 1965. It's a game, and it certainly makes it easy to remember the parking space.

I've never seen a car with a plate that matched the parking spot, however, so maybe this was the day's second once-in-a-century moment. 

 

 

And then I went to the Century at Walnut Creek.  I've liked the director Sam Mendes ever since American Beauty. He hired Conrad Hall to do the camera work, which won Hall his second Oscar for cinematography. The movie won Best Picture.

 

I can't say Skyfall is my favorite James Bond movie, but that's only because I grew up with Sean Connery as 007. He won the trifecta with Goldfinger and Thunderball and You Only Live Twice. It was a different age back then, secret agents smoked unfiltered cigarettes.

But the Sam Mendes 007 movie is easily the most beautiful. Roger Deakins did the camera work, and he is responsible for filming my favorite Coen Brothers movies. My favorite shot in Skyfall is solitary and Scottish, James Bond is driving M to the Bond ancestral home. We get a wide shot of the small Aston Martin DB 5 motoring in the vast moor country near Glencoe. Few movie directors would "waste" the time and the machinery for this, but the results are almost breathtaking. Furthermore, the seconds spent giving us this "painting" serve the story, because Bond and M are driving far away from London and MI-6. They're on their own. David Lean did something like this with his wide desert shots in Lawrence Of Arabia.

As for Daniel Craig, here with Sam Mendes, he is the best Bond since Connery. The Bond novels were written by Ian Fleming, and I always saw Sean Connery as part-Bond and part-Fleming, muscles and martinis. In fact, some of the movie illustrations for posters and music albums made him look like Fleming. It's only a guess how Sean Connery with his 1965 looks would have been used in a modern Bond film -I think  he would have done just fine- but Daniel Craig is the right actor for 007 in 2012.

Before the movie, I took a photo of the ticket. A visual souvenir, since tickets get lost in the laundry or forgotten in a drawer. But on a 3 terrabyte hard drive, the photo can be lost instantly and forever.

 

 

Back home, I noticed something funny about the information for the photo. The ticket time was 3:31, fine, since the movie was the 3:35 show.

But cameras and ticket machines have their own clocks. Back here, I discovered the camera clock time for that ticket photo was 12/12/12 3:31:31, and there was 3:31 on the ticket. What are the odds of 31 appearing 3 times? Sort of fits my email name, too, camera31. And I thought 1965-plus-1965 in the parking lot was something. And before that, I thought 12-12-12 was something. Long time ago.

 

 

Finally, there were a couple of rainbows before I saw the movie. This was shot from the roof of the parking garage near the Century.

 

 

And now we're looking at Mt Diablo again, a bit higher in the parking lot, but this time in color between the rainfall and Skyfall.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Is That A Velodyne 64?

 

 

Have you ever seen this on a car? I hadn't.

 

 

Is this dog on a bumper pointing toward whatever that thing is?

 

 

Actually, the owner of the dog emblem was being creative. The dog is pointing to the second emblem on the car. Could be an eagle or a falcon, maybe a thunderbird.

 

 

That contraption is atop the Google self-driving car. This could be the future of driving. Google's cars have driven over 300,000 miles without an accident.

 

 

These are the eyes of the self-driving car.  

Spinning infrared lasers are able to see everything around the car, and they kept spinning when the human was inside Peet's on a break. There's a radar unit, also, and the computer inside the Lexus uses the data to create a complete picture of its surroundings. Using the map data in the computer, the car drives safely around the Bay Area.

 

 

What if cars in America were converted to self-driving? Seems it's bound to happen someday. Technology has a way of turning the possible into the mandatory. If cars were converted to self-driving, Google people say that traffic backups and gridlock would be a thing of the past. Cars would communicate and arrange their driving so that congestion disappeared. 

 

When I read science fiction decades ago, the books mentioned cars that drove themselves. They also mentioned voice-operated typewriters that could hear a voice and turn the words into printed text. Inconceivable.

 

 

But there were hints over the years.

Well, the future is here today: Google has a self-driving car, and I just typed this sentence by speaking into Safari's dictation function.