I grew up in Berkeley, California. I’ve watched the Golden Gate Bay Bridge* in every season, in every weather. I have never seen anything like this. (Copyrighted photo at the link. Well worth a click, even if, horribile dictu,**it leads to the Daily Mail.)
Perhaps an open thread might gratify?
*I actually do know the difference. I could see the Bay Bridge, but not the Golden Gate, from the house in which I grew up in Claremont Canyon. But +3 (bourbon *2 plus Cotes du Rhone), one’s fingers can do the talking with no help from the brain. Apologies all….
**Absolve me, Magistra Small. The sins I’ve committed through crap Latiny are none of your doing, oh greatest of my high school teachers.)
Bonus pic:
Image: Yoshitsuya Ichieisai, The Lightning Bolt, c. 1865.
Robert
1. That’s the Bay Bridge, not the Golden Gate.
2. I had Mrs. Small, too.
Little Boots
it might.
Little Boots
I’m not sure people love this song, but they should.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWWMmxyKOR0&ob=av2e
Tom Levenson
@Robert: Fixt, and Mrs. Small is one of the few truly great teachers I’ve ever had. Good to know others remember her too.
Little Boots
goood, god, can we at least mock Doug?
or talk to omnes.
is nobody around?
jeffreyw
Food pic
Mike in NC
If I had a choice to live anywhere in the entire world, it would be San Francisco. I was stationed there 30 years ago and never got over it.
bemused senior
That storm was very scary. A long period of thunder/lightening and lots of wind. We live in the hills west of Belmont (on the Peninsula) and I was very afraid our tall Monterey Pine trees were going to be hit and fall on the house. Thanks to the FSM, it was all fine.
nellcote
Here’s a foto of lightening striking BOTH towers of the Golden Gate Bridge at the same time.
http://imgs.sfgate.com/c/pictures/2012/04/13/ba-bridgelightni_SFC0110210691.jpg
Shari
@nellcote:
Was that from the same storm?
JK
Growing up in Berkeley you should really know that was the Bay Bridge … you know the one that goes between SF and Berkeley/Oakland. The one that is not bright red … you know that one.
PurpleGirl
That is an amazing photo. And he took it through a window… wow.
In college it was suggested by a member of an academic standards committee that I take Latin or Ancient Greek to fulfill the foreign language requirement. He thought it might help if I took a language I wouldn’t have to speak in.
I had asked for a waiver of the requirement on the grounds that due to my stutter I found it difficult to continue trying to learn a foreign language. (I’d taken 2 years of French in HS and begun German in college and was experiencing the same obstacles in German as I had in French.) Luckily the committee chairman knew me from an academic program and over-ruled the committee and granted the waiver.
Elizabelle
Heading out.
Titanic on ABC TV is very well made. Allegedly by the folks who brought us “Downton Abbey”.
8 to 11 tonight. They’re loading the lifeboats.
Amanda in the South Bay
I live in the South Bay, and yeah, it was quite a storm Thursday night. I love taking Amtrak’s Capitol Corrior north through Berkeley and Emeryville and Oakland, you can see both the Bay Bridge and GG Bridge while travelling.
Litlebritdifrnt
This deserves a front page story, for every 1 soldier killed in the field in Iraq or Afghanistan 25 are committing suicide once they get home.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/opinion/sunday/kristof-a-veterans-death-the-nations-shame.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all?src=tp
JPL
@Elizabelle: Let me know when it sinks. The NYTimes Sunday puzzle is about the Titanic also,too and at some point the celebrations get old. In fact 100 years old.
JPL
@Litlebritdifrnt: this.. all the stories are tragic and I’m not sure how we can help. I do know that you shouldn’t deprive them of medical care no matter how they were discharged.
lamh35
Watching Indiana Jones and Crystal Skull. If Harrison Ford looked old in this one, how the hell old is he really then?
btw, no need to tell me how much of a stinker this movie is, I think Last Crusade is the best of the original triology, but I missed that showing, so I had to settle on Crystal Skull…which reminds me, I really need to get the original trilogy on DVD.
RossInDetroit
There are quite a lot of impressive lightning photos out there. Unlike this one, most appear to be long exposures capturing multiple bolts. But this shot of the bridge is just about perfect.
We dodged any bad weather today and had walkies with Doglius. Hope tomorrow’s good, as I have to drive across the whole state and back for Grandma’s 95th B-day party. Worth it in any weather.
Egg Berry
@RossInDetroit:
RossInDetroit
@Egg Berry:
Thanks for the correction. I missed that bit and read a different summary that referred to it as a ‘snapshot’. That would be an immense coincidence to catch 8 bolts in a short exposure.
lamh35
“Horrible Bosses” on HBO. that movie was way more funny they it should have been, but I remember laughing my ass off and just being happy my boss wasn’t tht bad!
Egg Berry
@RossInDetroit: Yeah, that would be “miracle” level coincidence, which was why I went back and read the story again. I just skimmed it the first time. :)
Mouse-Bear
That was a fantastic storm and I wish we had more of them. One of the lightening strikes was close enough that my brain initially thought it was a flash from a camera.
For those who have no desire to ever see anything from the Daily Mail, I recommend Kitten Block.
Tom Levenson
@JK: You know, writing something like this 20 minutes after someone has already corrected the error is the mark of…well, how to put it?…a tremendous richard.
Congrats.
gnomedad
@Litlebritdifrnt:
I had no idea it was this bad. “Support the troops”, my ass.
RossInDetroit
I’ve just scanned a bunch of Daily mail pages adjacent to the lightning shot and I won’t do that again. It’s just a celebrity/scandal sheet, right? Because if there’s anything there that’s not about famous people, skin or naughtiness it managed to elude me.
suzanne
@JK:
It’s not red. It’s International Orange.
Amir Khalid
@lamh35:
Per his IMDB entry, Harrison Ford turns 70 on July 13. How time flies: Mark Hamill is now 61, and Carrie Fisher is 56.
Robert
Tom: Yeah, Mrs. Small was exceptional. Jackie White, who recently passed, was also a great teacher. Yellowjackets of that era were pretty lucky. BTW, my elder brother was a classmate of Richard’s; my wife was a housemate of Leo’s.
Yutsano
@Amir Khalid: Even more interesting: Mark does mostly voicework now and Carrie is just as known for her authorship as her acting. How things change over the passage of years…
Tom Levenson
@Robert: I hadn’t known about Jackie White — that’s a loss.
And, to get into the details — hello from my family to yours.
It is a vanishingly small world on these intertubes, is it not?
lamh35
@Amir Khalid: Wow 71 so that makes him what, 55-60 in The Last Crusade? Which would out him at at least what…10-15 years than Sean Connery was at the time? If so, the wow Ford is def showing his age, in appearance & attitude from what I hear
nellcote
@Shari:
yes
Halteclere
Lightning occurs so infrequently along the west coast that I find it more costly to install lightning protection on electrical installations than just replace the devices if lightning were ever to strike.
Here’s an interesting NOAA 5-year flash density map that shows the west coast only averaging 0 to 0.25 lightning strikes per square kilometer per year.
On the other hand, when I installed electrical equipment in Miami – which has a average of 8 to 16 lightning strikes per square kilometer every year – everything metal including air conditioning registers had to be grounded!
mainmati
@PurpleGirl: I took four years of Latin (went to a parochial school) and it has long served me well from Scrabble to professional writing not to mention, at the time,feverously trying to translate Ovid’s Metamorphoses from the original. :)
But those photos of the Bay and Golden Gate bridges were so awesome if only so rare and especially because the subjects are so architecturally awesome.
catclub
I could have sworn that it was _Nature_ that favors the prepared mind. But I fear if I state it I will find out he knew that as well and was pulling my leg. Or I was just wrong and should stop swearing.
But nature works much better for this picture.
mainmati
@RossInDetroit: Daily Mail is like the British version of the NY Post: Conservative/low brow. Has been that way for, oh, maybe 150 years.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@Litlebritdifrnt:
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25:1? That’s heartbreaking.
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I have a wonderful son in the Nat’l Guard who is itching to be deployed. Please FSM get us out before it can happen. I don’t want a broken suicidal young man coming back.
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I can see it from his end, though. Who wants to train for a job for years and never get to do it? At some point you want to get in there and see how well you can perform.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@mainmati:
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Ahem.
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That’s awesome engineering, not architecture. Bridges aren’t buildings, they’re structures, designed by engineers, not architects. Pet peeve of mine.
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Which isn’t to say they aren’t artful or elegant, the best engineering should be. If you’re ever in So Cal, hit the ramp from WB Santa Monica freeway to SB San Diego. A stunning flyover, designed by the first woman PE in California.
Ken Pidcock
It’s chance favors the prepared mind. Dans les champs de l’observation le hasard ne favorise que les esprits préparés.
J. Michael Neal
@Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason:
25:1 is a misleading figure. From the story:
The vast majority of the battlefield deaths happened in previous years, and so aren’t figured in here. The correct figure is horrifying enough:
Keep in mind that this counts *all* veteran suicides, not just the excess produced by Iraq and Afghanistan. In any given population, there’s going to be a certain number of suicides. It looks to me from this study that the suicide rate among active duty military personnel has roughly doubled since 2001.
The suicide rate for the population in general is about 12 per 100,000 each year. The 2010 census indicated that there were about 21.9 million veterans in the US population. This would mean that, if they committed suicide at the same rate as the general population, we would expect about 2,700 suicides per year. The actual figure in recent years has been about 6,500.
That means that in any given year, there are a bit more than 1/2 as many excess suicides among vets as there were deaths in combat. So bad, but the NYT didn’t show itself very committed to the honest use of numbers here.
opie jeanne
@Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason: Do you know her name?
My husband designed a big chunk of the 60, the 15 and the 215.
Another Halocene Human
@Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason: I have a coworker who is super happy to be out of the military. He has a buddy who went AWOL. Twice. Finally got kicked out (as he wanted). Buddy went AWOL because he unit was not anywhere NEAR prepared to go into combat and they were about to be shipped out. Buddy was ab-so-fucking-lute-ly correct as almost the entire unit was wiped out in a few months.
Shit like that could certainly have an impact on the suicide rate, ya think?
Comradde PhysioProffe
I love how the commenters over there are arguing about whether the picture is “amazing” or not, and if so, exactly why. I looked at the picture and was all like “Holy fucknoly! That shitte is fucken cool!”
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@opie jeanne:
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Marilyn Reese.
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Check out the photo of her in the field at the bottom of the link.
Porlock Junior
@suzanne:
2 questions I’ve wondered about for some time:
Why is the International Orange of the Golden Gate Bridge (and I know it really is called that) completely different from the International Orange of, say, traffic cones? I know the bridge had precedence, at least over the really widespread use of the traffic-cone color, but that doesn’t explain much.
Also, why is the bridge’s color so different from what one would normally call orange, as in the color of the naranja fruit from which the name is derived?