Balloon Boy

This is just a picture, offered here to soothe your spirit and quiet your nerves:

Mmmmmmmm...

Just a nice photograph

Dreadful Photography - Lower Lake

It's Late Summer again, and so it's Fire Season in California again.  We sigh, and carry on.

This year, @Twitter has been publishing pictures from CalFire (California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection) all season, and they've gotten a new, and talented photographer on the payroll.

Hereunder, the shots I particularly admired of the destruction left by the Clayton Fire in the town of Lower Lake, south of Clearlake in Lake County:

Road congestion

"More money than brains" is a phrase often aptly applied in life. Our neighbor city of Lafayette has decided that a 3-way stop intersection at Olympic Boulevard and Pleasant Hill South will better serve its motorists as a roundabout. They must have hired a newly-minted traffic engineer whose professor came from England. My alternate solution:

 

So there!

Read It & Weep!

I really don't know what to say. But, please know that I do the weekly food shopping around here, and I'm very conscious of the prices.

These are from 1959, in the Washington D.C. area:

Gulp.

Optical Illusion

Once you see it, you can never again unsee it!

Give up?

Here's a strong hint:

Rail transit, then and now

I stumbled upon a transit map recently that showed rail transit in the Bay Area in 1937.  Think no Bay Bridge, trolleys, Key System, the Oakland mole, ferry boats. It was a pretty intricate system, and some of the rails led to places far outside the Bay Area.

Now this map, drawn in the style of today's BART map, is far too condensed for me to read carefully. It does reference a source and a date, however, that has piqued my interest. If I find out anything interesting to my piqueness, I'll post it here.

For now. . .

Hains Point, Washington D.C.

Here's an old aerial photograph of Southeast Washington D.C., featuring Hains Point and its (then)golf course in the center, and the National War College on the right. The Washington Monument is at the top.

The picture was taken in 1935, when I was a mere one year old. After World War II, when I was 11 years old, and my brother was about 9, our Dad, who was then teaching at the War College, would drop us both at the golf course to hack our way around for a few hours while he entertained the military students.

I fear I learned little about the finer points of golf, but I did find a few lost golf balls and enjoyed the nice river views.

Good times.

Smart Phone

This is the Radio Shack smart phone of 1991:

Effective, no doubt, but a bit pricey, and rather clumsy to tote around.

Visitor from Across the Pond

Welcome!

#30 goes for a long 3.

This man can do anything!

Oscar Awards on Sunday

Thanks to the U.K. Daily Mail, we have a puzzle:

Your task, should you accept it, is to find the gilded Oscar statue among all these C3PO's.

Good luck!

The Rich and the Poor

They both have always been with us. And they always will.

Gravitational Waves

(Smart Guy)

Extreme Multitasking

Now here's an ambitious driver hard at work. I'm guessing he's signed on with Uber and Lyft and has Waze running, but I have no possible thoughts about the other four screens.

Any guesses?
Ain't life wonderful?

Claremont Hotel Berkeley

Hey! Look at this:

The brown building with the hip roof used to be a firehouse! And now, those of us familiar with Berkeley and the Claremont Hotel understand why the streets are so crazy in this section of town.

(As always, click to enlarge.)

Nostalgia

DW#1 is busy unearthing memories from our archives.

Some hidden treasures have been noticed.

One from early days at St. Albans School for Boys, about 1950:

That's me, half hidden behind the left shoulder of the gent in the blue blazer. And yes, coats and ties were required.

Then we move to Waikiki's Nick's Fishmarket and an historic evening sometime about 1972:

This delightful scene of design and construction fellows was the first time one of my expense-account meals totaled over $100 and I remember it well. My accounting department accepted the expense, and the meal was good!

San Francisco's Trans-Bay Terminal

The old concrete San Francisco antiquity that used to house the terminus of the ACTransit buses from the East Bay was demolished a few years ago.

The new Trans-Bay Terminal is slowly rising from the site. It's slow because the site is severely restricted in size and working/storage/marshaling space.

Rudy walks by this area almost every morning. Today he captured a great image of rising construction.

 That white steel structure left of center will eventually support the glass roof in the Grand Hall of the new terminal.

Can't wait for future construction pics as this significant addition to the Bay Area transit infrastructure takes form.

Cold Weather Soup

Thanksgiving has ushered in some downright chilly nights in Saranap. DW#1 sometimes meets the cold weather by preparing her version of R. A. Winnacker's lentil soup, which I so dearly love.

Here's a shot of last night's version, a mere two spoon-fulls* away from extinction:

Mmm, mmm, good.

*interesting thoughts about "spoonfuls" or "spoonsful" on Google. I prefer spoons full.

Just because...

You're welcome.