Another amazing bird Photo of the Day from the National Geographic site.
There is very little description with the photo, just that the photo is of crows and the shot was taken in Northern California.
Click photo for larger size and to be massively creeped out
Photo by Jamie Zarza.
Woke up early this morning after a terrible night’s sleep, or rather, lack of sleep. Rising out of the bed, I was keenly aware of a feeling of anxiousness deep in my stomach.
I had an 8:00 video conference with London, and I worried about being able to make the equipment work for this very important meeting.
I got to work early, and as I walked around the nearby lagoon to get to the videoconference building, I saw a single Coot paddling along the smooth as glass surface.
Feeling anything but optimistic and keen to cheer myself up, I started singing “Good Morning, good moooorning, to you!” (a la “Singing in the Rain”) to the confused Coot.
I laughed at myself, and laughing felt good.
Turns out I had nothing to worry about the videoconference. It went off without a hitch and when it was over, my mood had improved greatly.
To add to the day’s improvements, two meetings directly following the videoconference were cancelled. I was given a gift of my morning, and that’s valuable.
Back at my desk, I fired up the streaming radio and dug into work.
Tip tapping away at the keys, I heard my iPhone buzz.
A text message from The Good Man. “Did you see today’s SF Gate?” he asked. The SFGate is the local newspaper for San Francisco.
“Not yet, let me look,” I replied, figuring there was something interesting there to see.
The page opened and I scanned the headlines, but didn’t latch on to what The Good Man wanted me to see.
Then I gasped.
I saw the photo first. Then the headline. My friend and consummate Blues Man Johnny Nitro has died.
Over quite a few years of hard living he’d had a little trouble with his ticker. His heart as big as the world had a mechanical flaw.
I’d last seen Nitro in August at the book signing for Saloonatics, an amazing book of photos by my buddy Scott Palmer that honestly captures the thriving blues scene at The Saloon in San Francisco’s North Beach.
Even though I hadn’t seen Nitro for many years, he still wrapped me in a tight hug that lasted a long time. He was genuinely happy to see me, and I almost cried for joy at seeing him again. I introduced Nitro to The Good Man and as they shook hands, I felt at home.
Back in 1997 when I moved to the Bay Area, I knew how to get to exactly one place in San Francisco: North Beach. With trembling knees and shaking hands I’d force myself to drive to North Beach on the weekends. I’d have dinner and a couple fortifying drinks at Sodini’s, then I’d go to one or both of the blues clubs located on Grant Street.
It didn’t take long before I was considered a North Beach regular. I got to be friends with the people who worked in the restaurants and bars, the musicians, and other regulars.
The people of North Beach look out for each other. We take up for our own. I was welcomed into the family by a group of good, hardworking people.
Nitro was one of those people back in the early days who closed ranks around a little hayseed from New Mexico and let her know she was going to be all right.
And I was. With these seasoned city folks to help me learn, I turned out all right.
Nitro had a deep catalog of blues tunes ingrained in his DNA. Name a song, he could play it. He’d fire up that blue and white Strat and make it sing.
Nitro made me laugh and he made me cry. He played music that spoke to my soul. I owe Nitro a debt of gratitude that now I’m afraid I’ll never be able to repay.
Nitro’s best known quote is, “Keep drinking triples ’til you’re seeing double, feeling single and getting in trouble.”
But he had another quote that seems more fitting.
In the middle of a soaring blues riff that filled The Saloon with sound, Nitro would step up to the mike and holler “Riiiide!”
And for you, my friend, wherever you are: Riiiide!
Photo by Scott Palmer, taken at the 2000 Rumsey Blues festival. Yes, I was there…..
Going to jump tracks a bit from yesterday’s purple mountains majesty to marvels of human engineering.
A couple days after my return from New Mexico, I had to drive up to Sacramento for work stuff.
On the journey over highway 80, there are two major bridges to cross, the Bay Bridge, and the Carquinez Bridge.
Both are, in my mind, very Jekyll and Hyde. Both beautiful and ugly at the same time.
When riding over these bridges, I always have to wonder what the bridge builders around here have got against the east side of a perfectly nice bridge?
Here, let me show you.
This is the eastbound section of the Carquinez, headed toward Sacramento:
It’s got sort of an Erector Set toy feel about it, no? (assuming you are old enough to remember Erector Sets)
It’s very utilitarian and functional and not very aesthetically pleasing.
And then, for comparison, here’s the westbound section of the same bridge (headed toward San Francisco).
Lovely! Clean lines and very modern and stylish.
You can even see the less attractive side of the bridge off to the left.
I’d like to think that this two opposite halves approach is an anomaly to only the Carquinez, but no.
Let’s talk the Bay Bridge. It’s split into two sections, the eastern span (east of Treasure Island) and the Western Span (west of Treasure Island).
These photos are from the top deck, headed west, but look at the vast difference in the two halves of the bridge.
Eastern span:
Again with the construction by Erector Set! So not pretty. Utilitarian.
And then the elegant, iconic western span:
Rumor has it that they are doing new construction on the eastern span and when complete, it will be a much more attractive suspension bridge like the western span.
But given the pace of the Department of Transportation and CalTrans, I wonder if I’ll see it in my lifetime.
All photographs taken with an iPhone4 by Karen Fayeth and subject to the creative commons license as seen in the far right column of this page.
Last weekend, toward the end of my visit to New Mexico, my best friend and I decided we needed to go somewhere without much in the way of civilization.
A break from the every day is good for the soul.
This year my friend had drawn out a tag to hunt Oryx, and about a month ago, she and her husband went out to the empty land around Upham, New Mexico as Oryx are plentiful there.
While she didn’t manage to get an Oryx this year, while hiking around, she witnessed a vista so amazing that she wanted to share it with me.
So we loaded up and went bouncing down dirt roads, me riding in the passenger seat. My job was to open and close gates so that we could make our way past ranches without much in the way of fences to contain their hungry cattle.
Since the truck we rode in sounds a lot like a feed truck, they’d come a galloping along to greet us. It was kind of hard to let down all of our bovine friends as we only had a fried chicken picnic to eat, and that’s not really cow food.
The land we saw as we bumped along was empty, otherworldly and beautiful.
My New Mexico readers will also know a bit about Upham as that is where the New Mexico Spaceport is being built with taxpayers money.
By taking publicly accessible roads, we were able to get pretty gosh darn close to the construction site.
Here’s what it looks like (click photo for larger size):
The Spaceport website has quite a few construction photos as well. I was struck by the fantastically long tarmac, pure concrete rumored to be almost two miles long and three feet deep. How the heck they got that much water out there to create that much cement is absolutely beyond me.
The actual location of the Spaceport is quite a ways off the highway, almost an hour in the truck, and it’s a good thing my friend was familiar with the area. I would have been quite lost.
After ooh’ing and aah’ing along with cussing and discussing the merits (or lack of) of the spaceport, we headed up a long and somewhat winding trail to get to a certain spot my friend had in mind.
That’s when the ooh’ing and aah’ing really began.
This photo does no justice to the almost 180 degree sweeping view from Anthony to Truth or Consequences. It was absolutely breathtaking.
Other than the guy who lives in the small ranch at the top of the rise, and some Oryx hunters, I don’t imagine a lot of people have gotten the chance to see this amazing view.
It made me proud to be a New Mexican. This is who I am. This is where I come from.
(click for larger size)
All photographs by Karen Fayeth and subject to the creative commons license as seen in the far right column of this page.
In the era of the internet, when the bar to entry is low for artists, writers, and photographers, how does one know if what they are producing is any good?
Well, one quick way to tell comes when your stuff gets, uh, how shall I say…appropriated…by a respectable institution.
Recall back on November 3, 2010, I uploaded this photo from the San Francisco Giants World Series Parade:
This is Aubrey Huff and Pat Burrell celebrating on a trolley car on Market Street at Powell:
Note that I put a copyright on the photo because I had a feeling this was going to be a popular shot.
Last evening I was sitting on the couch looking through my Twitter timeline and saw that @SF_Giants (a Twitter account affiliated with the actual Giants organization) was posting some fun Valentines Cards.
That’s when I saw this tweet:
And when I clicked the link for the image, I saw this:
Then I gasped.
That’s my photo. My copyright watermark has been cropped off and the beer cans have been pixilated out, but that’s my photo.
So I was a little at a loss as to how I felt. Was I mad? Not really. I mean, in a way it’s kind of cool. Was I happy? Not really. I sure would have liked a photographer credit on a photo viewed by their almost 30,000 followers.
In the end, I decided I was just going to be sanguine about the whole deal. While it may not have my name on it, my image was blasted out from the Giants twitter account. I made a photo that was good enough for an MLB organization to borrow!
So…ok.
I Tweeted on my own account about how that was my photo and posted the original. Soon after, they sent me a direct message:
“Good shot! We found the picture on Google. Go Giants.”
Go Giants indeed.
I can’t stay mad at my favorite team.