After a long and irritating bus trip south from NYC on Monday, I am in Washington DC. I missed this city a lot, not to mention all of my friends here, so it’s great to be back. Yesterday I decided to go down to the Mall and play tourist.
(click on images for bigger versions)
I walked down along Madison Avenue, stopping at the skating rink behind the National Archives to snap this photograph:
I made a quick stop at the Museum of Natural History–long enough to see the elephant in the lobby and check out what IMAX movies were showing–but quickly made my way over to the Museum of American History, where I saw a lot of cool stuff.
For example, a topless George Washington. And the hanging effigy of a tax collector. And the enormous flag from Fort McHenry that inspired the Star-Spangled Banner, assiduously restored late last millenium and preserved in a glass-walled morgue (no photography allowed). And a steam-engine powered machine shop from the middle-nineteenth century, apparently disassembled and transported from somewhere in the northeast and reconstructed within the museum (no photograph taken, but you should go and marvel at the precision of the 1840s industrial lathe). And another steam-engine, this one about 25 feet tall and putting out 70 horsepower to power a locomotive manufacturing plant (no photograph here, either, but it was super awesome).
There’s also a whole section about The Information Age. Unfortunately, the area dedicated to the internet was closed for renovations, but there was a lot of cool stuff on display nearby, like this array of early PCs:
And then there’s this creepy model of a geek at the Homebrew Computer Club, which defies description and is my favorite thing at any museum I’ve ever been to. There’s also an old tape of an interview with Steve Wozniak in which he talks about how in the early days the computer hobbyist scene was split between nerds who liked technology and anarchists who presumably hoped to explode modern civilization. Good times!
For more pics from my magical museum trip, click here.
After bettering myself at the museums, I helped my old roommate install high def on his awesome television. We stared into its opalescent depths for something between 5 minutes and a million years, transfixed by wonder and awe.
Then two of my old roommates and another good friend and I all went to a bar for trivia night! After a couple of rounds tested our dominance in the subjects of cover songs and events of the year 1999, we held a commanding lead. The last round was a perfunctory formality, and at the end of the game we were in first place by a sizeable margin. So we got free pitchers of beer and felt smarter than the extremely drunk morons who kept yelling dumb crap that wasn’t funny about “hate crimes” and Paris Hilton. After we won, the losing teams all hated us–probably because we are still young and might grow up to a life more satisfying than theirs, although that’s just my theory. The important thing is: free beer.
So it was a fun day. I sure do miss this place.
Oh, and here’s a photograph I took last week of a sunset off the Gulf Coast of Florida:
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