Gentle Reader… You know that I have recently begun walking to and from the pool for my daily swim. And you’ve seen the results of my snapaholic tendencies with my phone/camera sur la route. It was just getting dark as I left the pool this evening, when a flash of red light caught my eye and drew me across the street to the Pacific Design Center. There’s a great fountain in the plaza there. The pool is dark and the jets glow with a deep red illumination. Sometimes the fountain dances, but tonight it was just a steady upwelling of molten lava-water.
There is a stepped, grassy amphitheater between the street and the plaza, and halfway down I got myself in a prone position to steady the camera on the concrete edge. There was a professional photographer in another corner of the plaza shooting pix of a model in some serious couture. As I risked laying down in god-knows-what to get the shot, I felt a kinship with my fellow fotog. Click, click, dozens of clicks. Instead of changing positions (I was lazy), I just fiddled with the various filters on the camera app, I’ll spare you most of the results, but here are a few fun ones.
The “aqua” filter is a blue-tinted sepia setting. I like the way it takes down the glare of the illumination and shows more of the structure of the individual water jets.
And then there is the “dots” filter. I am drawn to this pixelation effect like ants to a picnic. In fact, I think the first post I did in this series of #100happydays was a dots treatment of the full moon over another part of the PDC. If I’m repeating myself a bit, I hope it’s not boring!
How about a color negative? That’ll blow some sunshine up yer skirt, eh?! Turns dark/light contrast inside-out. Gives the palms – which are all but invisible in the positive mode – a ghostly presence. And funnily enough, the water turns… blue.
As I hauled my waterlogged (but happy) carcass back up the mountain – hey! it’s a +300-foot change in elevation, which is almost just exactly sort of the same as climbing a 30-story building thankyouverymuch – I felt satisfied in sharing my fountain fotos with you as today’s entry in the #100happydays death march series.
But having checked the interweb machine when I got home, I now can close this post with a much bigger slice of happy pie. I mean, fountains are nice and all… but the defeat of hate-filled bigoted ignoramuses trumps all the other news of the day. Here’s the headline from tonight’s breaking news:
(San Francisco, CA, February 24, 2014)—Today, the effort to repeal the School Success and Opportunity Act—California’s new law ensuring that all children have opportunities to do well in school—failed to qualify for the ballot.
Long story short: Last year the California Assembly passed and Governor Brown signed into law the School Success and Opportunity Act which was mostly a re-focusing of existing laws designed to protect transgender students and provide public school administrators and teachers with the tools needed to provide all kids with safety and fairness in schools. It’s the kind of law that makes me proud to call California home.
And like clockwork, they came crawling out of the woodwork like a biblical plague of insects: the professional hate mongers. Same folks who brought us Prop 8. They prey on the church folk, getting them all whipped into a frenzy 
with lies, innuendo, distortions and fear. Everything but the truth. And most of them do it just to fill their coffers and line their own pockets. It’s not new. It’s just surprising that people fall for it, every blessed time.
They once again tried to hijack California’s referendum process with a ballot measure to repeal this law. They vilified the very kids the law is designed to protect – and for that alone, I hope they all end up in their celestial woodchipper. They needed 500,000 signatures to put the repeal measure on the ballot this November. They turned in more than 600,000 signatures and started high-fiving each other from here to eternity.
Funny thing about all those signatures though… turns out 130,000 of them are invalid. Tsk tsk. Isn’t there something in their magik books about not lying or cheating or stealing? Hmmmmm. Or maybe they just can’t read? Or maybe they have been exposed, AGAIN, as the frauds they are. If they can’t win, they cheat. And when they get caught cheating they lie. And then they scurry back into the dark crevices until they find someone else to attack.
If you’d like to learn more about this law and the issues it addresses, you can start here:
http://www.supportallstudents.org/
So, Kind Intelligent Fair-minded Reader, I give you a beautiful fountain and a bunch of defeated fuckwads for today’s ray of sunshine. Day 049 #100happydays
The End 