Gyo Fujikawa is one of the great children's book illustrators.

The wind is insane down at Ocean Beach today.

The wind is insane down at Ocean Beach today. The Great Highway is closed at Lincoln because the dunes are trying to cross it. The internet tells me that wind speed is 32 mph with 38 mph gusts.

On my run today I made it all the way down there. I grabbed a cup of coffee from Trouble Coffee and Coconut Club and walked down Judah to the end. The coffee was blown cold in about five minutes. I feel like I have an ear infection coming on, or maybe it's just sand lodged down inside. The surf was ragged, and the beach virtually deserted, apart from a few lunatic runners (like myself) and their dogs. And the ravens.

The gulls too, but the ravens were amazing. Popping their wings just enough to kite on the steady blow charging up the sand. Playing helicopter, hovering just overhead, croaking their weird conversations back and forth, then folding shut to drop to the sand and gnaw at a ragged scrap of dead Herring Gull. They hung above me, five or six of them, twitching their flight feathers to keep stable. And they really seemed to be doing it just because they could.

Watching them it was easy to see why the folks who got here first venerated them as trickster gods, why Odin picked them as his wise sidekicks. They really do seem to know more than anything with a brain that small has any business knowing. And they seem to have a sense of humor about it.