That was a joke… get it… art in the bay area… and my name is Arthur… and I am going to show you pictures of art… in the bay area… so… anyway…

In keeping with my idea of setting the mood, as it were, by showing how the normal rules of decoration and taste and style are not the same in the San Francisco Bay Area as they might be in other places, I have a few more pictures taken on my new Father’s Day camera. If you have been following along, you will remember that I have been showcasing some houses with interesting paint jobs and/or works of art put on display. I do not want you to think that only houses get such special treatment…

This car has been around for a while.

I call it the pumpkin car…

I could call it the car with the strange paint job, or the car with a lot of little plastic toys glued to it, but I went with the pumpkin.

It isn’t a real pumpkin, because that would have ended up being messy and smelly. But once again, just for the record, I only had to drive about a mile from my mom’s house to take this picture.

I don’t want you to think that I put no effort into this. I drove around quite a bit to take pictures for your entertainment. And I had my friends drive me around also. In fact, one day I drove all the way across the Oakland bridge toSan Francisco to take some pictures… okay, I had to go to the city to pick Mollie’s youth group up, to take them back across the bay, but I did get up early soI could walk and drive around a little and see what I could find. It was early enough that I could actually park the car to jump out and take some of these, like this statue I found on a street right near the center of the city…

And I walked around by the bay, right under the end of the Oakland Bay Bridge, where I remembered they had this little rocket…

I hope you can see the rocket. I could have gotten closer or used the zoom, but I was trying to cover a lot of ground. Just to the left of where I stood to take the picture of the rocket, there is this little bit of abstract art…

It isn’t really little. In fact, it is rather large. And it has been there for quite a while…

That’s right, it is a giant bow and arrow. We put it there because we could. I don’t think it symbolizes anything at all. That is just the way we roll.

On the way to San Francisco, I stopped off on Treasure Island, which is actually under the center of the Oakland Bay Bridge. That is where they film the Myth Busters TV show, in case you were wondering. I will have some more pictures of the island in later posts, when I go back to talking about fog, but because it is no longer an active Navy base, you can drive around the island. There are even a few wine tasting shops and a bar there now. And on a little grass field in front of a shut down barracks, I found this statue…

This thing is about 30 or 40 feet tall, and I know it wasn’t there when I did a brief tour of duty on Treasure Island when I was in the Navy back in the 1970’s.

I feel fairly sure I would remember…

I will leave you with pictures of a statue which is near and dear to my heart…

This statue dates back to the 80’s. I like it so much because I helped make it. Yeah, you heard me. A girl I was dating met this artist who traveled all over asia, taking pictures of temple art, and then doing things based on them when he got back. This girl and I helped the guy, whose name I don’t remember, build this out of rebar, chicken wire, and dyed cement. It is a good luck god from somewhere near China, shooting an arrow as he rides on a lion-like beast. We put a drain in its mouth, leading to a pipe that leads to the lion’s… privates… so that when it rains, it looks like the lion is going pee…

I guess my friend Andy didn’t believe me about the drain either. But really, why would I lie about a thing like that. There is a fantastically funny story about how the artist got the city of Berkeley to put this right in front of the Berkeley marina, but it is too long, so remind me to tell it later.

For now, rest assured that this statue is guarding the bay against any invasion by the forces of bad luck…