Well, here’s a treat for you. This collection of 29 “Stunning Bridges From Around the World” has some real beauts, plus a few bummers thrown in to help you appreciate the beauts a little more. The group, from the website BabaMail.com, is entitled by its editor “These Stunning Bridges Are Where Strength Meets Beauty.”

Please let me quarrel just a tad with that. “Where strength meets beauty”? What does that actually mean? Many of the most beautiful bridges hark back to a time when the people who built bridges made them superstrong because they lacked the technological ability to measure precisely how much strength would be enough to keep them from collapsing. Nowadays, bridge engineers can determine that requirement with precision by computer, using the most aerodynamic of calculations. As a result, we can cut corners to save costs with supreme confidence that we are not stinting on necessary strength.

Or so they say. Sometimes bridges collapse anyway and we wish that the engineers had used the old-fashioned way: estimate the strength required, then multiplying it by two or three to make sure we have enough for any contingency. My engineer friends will know what I mean. And my architect friends will guess that I suspect the modernist bridges in this collection may not stack up, redundancy-of-strengthwise.

Still, by far most of these are lovely. Even a couple of the modernist ones are not so bad. Hats off to my wife Victoria for sending these spans to me from Facebook. It’s time for you to enjoy!