License Plate Watch 30

Seen today on a Ford F150: "TROUT 4D".

My first thought was "Trout 4-dimensional? That doesn't make sense." Then it occurred to me the "D" was likely an initial.

So much fun, I could hardly contain myself

The scene: Yesterday, on the way home from work. Took my usual freeway off-ramp, and as I was just starting to brake, saw an object in the road ahead of me that appeared to be some sort of box. Had to make a pretty much instantaneous decision: swerve around it or drive over it. Drove over it. Big mistake.

WHAM! BANG! Felt and heard what seemed to be strong two impacts on the undercarriage.

Pulled into a parking lot as quickly as possible and did an eyeball examination. Nothing appeared damaged; not seeing any leaks. Phew. Continued on and for several seconds of driving all seemed fine, but then I could feel something obviously wrong with the right rear tire. Pull over, walk around to it. Yep, that's what we call a flat.

I recalled there was a Discount Tire store nearby, so after putting on the spare, drove directly to it and purchased the remedy.

I almost started to type that the result of this is a lesson that in future unless something I come upon sitting in the road is obviously harmless I will drive around it. But that's clearly stupid; there's too many variables to say that flatly. One has to take into consideration how much space would be available for going around something in the road, other traffic, weather considerations, and so on and so forth.

At any rate, the car had no problems at all today, so I'll just conclude by saying I was fortunate the only trouble that resulted was one flat tire.

Group day

I visited Balboa Park earlier today to walk around and look for photo opportunities, and found myself noticing several distinct groups.

There were two separate groups of what I assumed were art students.

• One, at the foot of the park's lily pond, that was comprised of younger people, all doing sketches:

• ...and one, on one side of the lily pond, that was comprised of older people, all doing oil paintings:

And there were two separate groups of people with dogs.

• One that was training service dogs:

• ...and one of greyhound owners:

Quotation marks oddness

Bad punctuation tends to bother me, including bizarre uses of quotation marks.

A prime example of that here in San Diego is:



This is a neon sign that has been hanging in a window of a local sandwich shop for years. I have viewed it with much bewilderment every time I stop at the barber shop that is next door to this sandwich shop. I finally remembered today to get a photo of it.

While preparing to write this post, I was pleased to discover a blog that is devoted to just this subject. (I've sent this photo as a submission for the site to the person who runs it. If it is used I'll add a link here. And here is that link.)

Webcomic amazingness

As a follower of several webcomics, I am truly amazed by this.

Ryan Estrada, a webcomic artist and world traveler, not only convinced the creators of almost 50 webcomics to let him do guest strips for them, but he somehow also convinced all of them to show his guest strips on the same day: September 17, 2007.

For whatever reasons, he is not showing on his own site a single list of all the webcomics he did guest strips for, but is instead putting up the actual strips, one at a time, at 5-hour intervals.

But other sites have been attempting to gather the list of all the guest strips he did. The best of these (still incomplete) I've seen so far is here.

This must have taken Estrada a long time to prepare for. Consider it: not only doing that much art and trying to stay in the spirit of each of the comics, but also coordinating with that many sites to ensure they all put his guest strips up on the same day. Truly amazing.

Found Lily

Here's a photo of my own that I'm particularly pleased with:















The story on this - Last week while out for a walk a splash of color on the ground caught my eye as I passed. I stopped and looked at it; there was this (at the time) mostly still fresh lily laying among lots of dead leaves. The contrast between the colors of the flower, the dead leaves, and the concrete really struck me.

I had my camera with me, so I took several pictures, and this is the one I thought came out best.

I am planning to get it commercially printed and mounted on a display board in order to enter it in next year's photo contest at the San Diego County Fair, aka Del Mar Fair. (The original exposure out of the camera is twice the size of what you see in the linked page. I set the camera to give me it's maximum exposure for the lily pictures, as it did occur to me at the time I might want to get a real good print made.)

License Plate Watch 29

Seen today on a Ford F250: "BOLTS 56". The obvious assumption is the reference is to the San Diego Chargers' current #56, Shawne Merriman. (I tried searching for previous holders of #56 for the Chargers, but am not coming up with proper word combinations to get that result.)