The Newseum's main claim to fame is their exhibit of large intact pieces of the Berlin Wall and I'll posts photos of that in a little while. They also have an extensive display about many famous cases in FBI history. They have things about the Lindbergh kidnapping, the Soviet spy Robert Hanssen, and after coming around a corner you are greeted to his sign.
I enjoy taking photographs of odd signs and that one is going to be hard to beat.
Taking a step back, you realize you are standing next to a wooden shed that wasn't much bigger than a large living room.
You may have seen it before too if you have ever been the coverage of the Unabomber case and his capture in Montana. Here's the shed as it was during the time of Ted Kacysnski's capture in 1996.
The inside offered a lot of book shelf space and it makes me reconsider a little bit my love of our wall-to-wall bookshelves.
When we lived in Lawrence, Kansas, I worked as a federal contractor for a company called Vangent. They did a whole bunch of different things for the federal government from helping people fill out the federal financial aid application to answering the phone when someone called 1-800-MEDICARE. A couple years into working there, the company was purchased by defense contractor General Dynamics who was looking to expand their contracts with the Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services.
General Dynamics (along with being the inspiration for the evil company Massive Dynamic in the TV show Fringe) is best known for building the F-16 jet fighter made famous in the movie Top Gun. So during our recent visit to the National Air and Space Museum I wasn't too surprised to see General Dynamic painted on the side of one of the exhibits...
...I just wasn't expecting it to be on the side of a Tomahawk missile!
The Tomahawk was introduced in 1983 and continues to be made and used today. It has been used in the first and second Gulf War and has blown up such places as Serbia, Somalia, Libya, and Syria. Basically, if the U.S. decides to bomb someone, the Tomahawk missile is probably going to be used. Each missile costs about $1.5 million dollars and it is said that the Navy has about 3,500 missiles putting the value around $5.2 billion dollars.
Although the band Coldplay isn't exactly exactly known for their political songs, I've frequently thought about the lyrics of "Clocks" that asks the question "Am I a part of the cure? /Or am I part of the disease?" As an employee of General Dynamics, do I share in the moral and ethical issues surrounding the creation and use of a weapon of war? Do I have more culpability for the actions of General Dynamics than a regular U.S. citizen because I received a paycheck from them? These are the sort of questions you wrestle with at 2 a.m. when you ponder the question "am I a good person?"
But in the end, perhaps the Simpsons give me the answer as to how most people, including myself, deal with these deeper questions about themselves and the actions of our government.
As the Soviet Union would always get to say they sent Sputnik to space before the United States did, we reacted by listing a whole bunch of other things we did before them. One accomplishment that is typically listed is that we launched the first communication satellite, called Telstar, in 1962. The two Telstar satellites were owned by AT&T and they were the first attempt at providing satellite communication across the Atlantic Ocean.
The National Air and Space Museum here in Washington has the engineering model that is identical to the two Telstars that were launched. The satellite has a purple reflection to it from the circuit boards all over the surface of the satellite.
The first Telstar only lasted from 1962 to 1963 as solar radiation and high altitude nuclear bomb testing [yes, that's right, nukes exploded in the atmosphere] caused it to short out. However, the Telstar program continues even today as Telstar 18 was launched in 2004 and expected to be in service for 13 years.
I can't finish a Telstar post without sharing the song "Telstar" by The Tornados, the odd little sci-fi instrumental song titled in the satellite's honor. The song became a #1 hit in both American and the U.K. and gave the Tornados a career for 60's.
One of the newest memorials on the National Mall is the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial which was opened in 2011. It located between the Lincoln Memorial and Franklin Roosevelt's Memorial. As you approach the monument you walk through this impressive rock structure.
This leads you the impressive piece of sculpture that has King emerging from the huge slab of rock. Having lived in the Atlanta area for a few years and having seen King's birthplace and his famous church, Ebenezer Baptist Church, seeing his memorial was one of the top destinations I wanted to see in Washington.
It was a little difficult to get a grasp on the scale of the monument but just take a look at the tiny people walking at the bottom of the photo on the right and you'll get an idea of how large the monument is.
It is located on the tidal basin off of the Potomac River and sits across from the Jefferson Memorial.
In the gift shop I found this first day issue of King's stamp from 1979. I really don't understand how they had 37-year-old first day issues but I took advantage and picked one up. The stamp was originally 15 cents and features an illustration by Jerry Pinkney. It was cancelled on the first day the stamp was issued, January 13th, 1979 in King's home of Atlanta.
I live in the Glover Park neighborhood of Washington which is named after Charles Glover who was a philanthropist and founder of many of the largest parks in the district. We share the neighborhood with a famous resident, Vice President Joe Biden who has his residence at the Naval Observatory which is about five blocks away.
Vice Presidents have lived there since Walter Mondale during Jimmy Carter's administration but unfortunately you can't see his house from the streets outside the grounds. Here is what his house looks like behind the fence.
The observatory of course has a rather large telescope and you can make it out in between the trees on the left in this photo I took from the entrance to the observatory.
Here's a little restaurant I came upon in Washington around Du Pont Circle called The Little Beet. Any restaurant that lists cauliflower and broccoli on their front window must be part of some horrible nightmare fever dream for me but it would be right in my mother and sister's wheelhouse.
Here's what the front window says if you can't quite read it from the photograph:
When Laura and I lived in Kharkiv, Ukraine before the Russian invasion, we lived in the closest major city (Kharkiv has about 1.5 million people) to the Russian border. We joked before a Russian invasion was a realistic possibility that Kharkiv might be the first city they would take but having such a large population turned out to be a benefit as controlling a city that size would have required more military resource than Russia was willing to use.
Now that Laura and I are spending the summer in Washington DC, it turns out we are closer to Russia than we ever were in Kharkiv. I know Sarah Palin famously joked about seeing Russia from her doorstep but I can literally see it from my window was we live right across from the Embassy of the Russian Federation. That's the embassy compound behind the tan walls.
The compound, which includes an apartment building, school, and sports areas, was constructed in the late 70's and early 80's. It is built on a hill called Mount Alto and no one is easily jumping the fence and making it onto the grounds as there are several levels you need to climb to actually get to the building levels.
The famous Russian spy Robert Hanssen alerted the Soviets that the Americans were building a tunnel under the compound to better spy on the complex.
