For our postcard team, today turned out to be a total contrast to the healthy, balmy days earlier this week: The photographer got sick with the flu, and the fog rolled in.

So we gamely took the digital camera to Venice Beach this afternoon, having been thoroughly coached on where the shutter button was located.

Except it wasn't really a beach day, because fog had crept in under the cover of darkness last night and had the gall to stick around. Finally, after a monumental meteorological battle, the sun burned off enough gray stuff to extend your vision beyond the breakers on Venice Beach, where we headed at 4:00 or so. Lots of Wisconsin fans were there, walking over sand, listening to the lapping of beach water, and watching shorebirds do a dance with the incoming-outgoing-incoming waves. After all, the enchantment of land meeting ocean doesn't depend on the presence of the sun.

And then there's the commercial side of Venice Beach, a very long strip of vendors that included one who showed tourists, for a couple of bucks each, just what it feels like to have a python wrapped around their necks. You also could buy a little airplane made out of a beer can as well as your choice of several thousand T-shirts. There were bodybuilders pumping iron for the crowd, a rock guitarist roller skating as he played, and a one-man band imitating Stevie Wonder. It shows what yeasty cultural ale can be brewed when you mix certain Californians with the ocean.

Tomorrow will show what happens when you mix Badgers with Bruins in the Rose Bowl, and what happens when you mix flowers with floats in the Rose Parade. It's a day that will start at 4 a.m. for us, so gotta sign off before we drop off . . .

(From top to bottom: Gulls on Venice Beach; tourist who paid to handle a large snake along the Venice Beach boardwalk; Palm trees silhouetted against the setting sun; an anti-smoking message seen in central L.A.; and flu-stricken photographer Jeff Miller.)

More postcards:
Dec. 28: Westard ho!
Dec. 28: Thawing out
Dec. 28: LA scene
Dec. 29: Old Pasadena
Dec. 29: Roses HQ
Dec. 29: Petal pushers
Dec. 30: 90210
Dec. 30: 90210, cont'd
Dec. 30: A sea of red
Dec. 31: Venice Beach
Jan. 1: Rose Parade
Jan. 1: The Game
Jan. 1: The Game, cont'd
Jan. 2: P.S.

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Photos by Jeff Miller, text by Jeff Iseminger.