Every week – ok, almost every week – Crystal at Aff the Fang posts a Manic Monday challenge with a personal, creative or blogging exercise for Mondays. Some are fun, some are profound, and some are just plain quirky.

This week, she and guest blogger Justin Ryan have added a challenge that’s very appropriate this Thanksgiving week: Padded Rooms, Paper Cuts and Your Mission for Monday. Go there, check it out!

Basically, the challenge is to give thanks to all those who keep us out of the funny farm, whoever they may be. The post implies a visual output, but I’d imagine an audio, video or written version would work as well. (Too bad I don’t do video, because it’d be fun to dress up, put on a tiara, and videotape a thanks to everyone acceptance speech for some wonderful award! I *won’t* be doing that.)

I want to pass along the Manic Monday challenge: who are you thankful for? Who helps you keep it together when the world is weighing heavily upon you? You can certainly answer in comments, but I suggest that this subject is worthy of its own blog post, in your venue.

I’ll see your sunset and raise you one!

This photo, taken last week, is of the sun setting over Kvellstad Pavilion at the Poulsbo Marina on Liberty Bay. It’s not as spectacular as some of the others posted this week, but I like the misty haze over the water and the shape of the pavilion in silhouette.

See:
Alaskan Sunset
Denver Sunset
Ohio Sunset
Savannah Sunset

After today’s wild ride on Wall Street, I thought an appropriate blog topic would be apocalyptic fiction.

Discover Magazine’s Science not Fiction blog has an interesting post about their top ten post apocalyptic worlds. Interestingly enough, although it’s a genre I enjoy, I agree with almost none of their choices.

My top picks – mixed film, television and print – would be:

• Lucifer’s Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle – the masterpiece in the genre, in my opinion.

• The Day After – the most haunting film vision of nuclear apocalypse I’ve seen
• The Road, by Cormac McCarthy – it’s book length poetry.
• The Road Warrior – Mmmmm Mel.
• Battlestar Galactica (21st century version) – this is some of the best television being made. If they’d get on with it!
• Dies the Fire – the trilogy declines a little in quality as it goes, but it’s very well thought out and characterized
• Kalki, by Gore Vidal – I remember this from my teens, although its vision may be dated and clunky now.
• The Zombie Survival Guide, by Max Brooks

• What are your favorite visions of the end of the world?

I’ve been meaning to take some Seattle photos on a day downtown because it’s a beautiful city – but the weather hasn’t cooperated up until last week. Some of these are lunch at the market – and some are the evening walk to the ferry.

Beautiful noon sunshine on Pike Place Market, from the back side.

I’m not sure why the market is billed as ‘sanitary’, but the pig is fairly famous.

The corner market is newer than the main market behind it. I like the overhead cables in this one – they are for the downtown electric buses.

Just a block away, 4 hours later. It was a beautiful evening.

My lens really fisheyed on this one, corner of 1st & Marion, but it makes the tall city buildings really loom.

This is from the ferry terminal – I liked the lines of the Alaskan Way Viaduct. Qwest Field is in the distance on the right hand side, just above the Viaduct. The elevated roadway is settling every year and is considered one of less stable bridge structures in the US, but officials can’t decide how to replace it.

Thursday I took my camera over to Seattle for the day and the weather cooperated, so I got a number of good shots. Like Eric, I find photoblogging a nice alternative to writing during NaNoWriMo. Today you get an interesting perspective on a skyscraper.

But – look closely, at the top third of the photo, at the edge of the tree branches. Is it an attacking special ops squad?

No, it’s a pack of crazed window washers! Suddenly I like my desk job an awful lot.