President Obama visits Denver, the Windy City (politics)

Today, Denver hosted President Barack Obama and his entourage to an afternoon of solar panel tours and signing bills that will inject almost $800 billion in job creation and tax cuts. Here in Denver! I live and work close to the Museum of Nature & Science, so it behooved me to see the motorcade authoritatively cruise in.


It was very very windy, so fitting for energy reform!


Colorado Blvd. would soon become a desolate street as the police blocked off the intersections for several blocks in each direction. The President landed at Buckley AFB (east Aurora), so I thought they'd take the most direct route, Colfax westbound, but silly me. They actually took 1-225 to 1-70 to Colorado Blvd. southbound. D'oy.

You can't see it in the pictures but it was VERY WINDY.

The Beast! About two hundred people are behind me cheering on the President. He's actually visited CO a handful of times (swing state), but not as President so it was refreshing to see the mobile army/government in full regalia. They don't kid around.

Obama signed the stimulus bill an hour later. An hour after that, GM and Chrysler asked for $21 billion in more bailout money. My friends, these are uncommon times. Uncharted waters. And it's just the beginning. Save up like your future depends on it. Cuz it does.

Which shade of white do you prefer? (art)

I wonder if anyone was taking a picture of me taking this picture. And if anyone was painting that person taking a picture of me taking this picture. And if anyone was taking a picture of....

Inauguration Sensation: Adventures in DC (Museums & Monuments)

The school districts in and around DC are so spoiled because they have the nation's most concentrated area of national museums and monuments! The National Mall is littered with field-trip opportunities. I was amazed. And DC is the ultimate place for single grown-ups because there are so many things to see and do. I'm starting to sound like a travel guide, but it's just overwhelming. I stayed in DC for 5 days and I had plans to see Georgetown, Dupont Circle, Embassy Row, maybe old town Alexandria if I had time. I didn't even get past the National Mall. So much to do.

The National Museum of Natural History::


The Museum has one of the largest gem and mineral collections in the world. That's an emerald! About 2" by 2", 858 carats. This museum is a zoologist's dream. It's separated into Worlds, like Ocean World and Africa. The attention to detail is mind-boggling. It's easy to get overwhelmed by the amount of knowledge that's concentrated here. Tax money put to good use, I say.


The National Archives houses the US Constitution and the Declaration of Independence (there's an ice rink right across the street, awesome!). You kinda have to wait in line with giggly school groups who talk about their cell phones while texting each other about what their cell phones can do. But it's worth it when you see these priceless documents up close::


It's kind of heartbreaking to find out just how faded the Declaration of Independence looks. Good thing it's backed up online::


Going monument-hopping along the Mall is best done on a bike because they are actually farther apart than you think, even when you're on the Mall itself. The height of the Washington Monument makes its apparent proximity very deceiving for some reason! Still a sight to see, from any angle:


The Jefferson Memorial, about two months before the famous Cherry Blossom Festival in March. I practically had the whole Tidal Basin trail to myself.


Coming from a city without a subway, I was in awe of how accessible a big city is with a quick, efficient Metro. Denver has an above-ground Light Rail, but its reach is limited. You have to live in key areas to get the most out of it. I guess I don't give enough respect to the bus system here. Really a shame. But I just love subways!


A couple Metro stops east the Capitol and National Mall, you are actually in residential-neighborhood DC and not the marble paradise that tourists are used to. Eastern Market is a cool area with a famous indoor marketplace that actually suffered a fire last year. Didn't completely destroy the place, but it's under renovation for a while. This side-annex continues some operations: butcher shops, fruits and vegetables, sweet shops, mmmmm::


The building that probably had the biggest impression on me was the Capitol. It just grows on you, how it exudes permanence, history, power, change, scandal, tolerance::


This view is from Pennsylvania Ave. I wanted to get the 'classic' shot of the rotunda and the Penn Ave. lights. I timed traffic so that I wouldn't get run over. Turns out my favorite was from the closest traffic light. A commuter on a Segway brushed past me as I took the shot. At that moment, it occurred to me the National Mall is the ultimate Segway track.

Earlier that day, I went on a walk with a friend of mine who lives within eyesight of this building and now works as a staffer in a Senate Office, and we talked about how on the surface, working here in DC politics must be a genuine thrill, but it remains a transient experience. New people, new laws, new expectations, every 2, 4, 6 or 8 years. Priorities and agendas in almost-constant rotation. I can definitely see how living in the nation's capitol tends to loses some of its gloss once the reality of down-and-dirty politics sets in.


I was just awed at how government works now that I saw it on a very present, physical level. And I mean levels upon levels upon levels of bureaucracy. My friend took me into a House building and I met some of his colleagues, and upon chance I met the Acting Deputy Department of State Ambassador to Senate Affairs or something, and it didn't take me long to become confused on how exactly that fits into this hierarchy that was all around me. I had so many questions. Who's your boss? Do you have a staff? How do you help get legislation passed? What career path did you take to get here? And so on and so on. It's just a different approach to getting things done compared to my free-market, small-business, entrepreneurial state of mind.

This was compounded when my uncle gave me an ad-hoc tour of the Pentagon (where he works). Imagine the biggest office building ever with miles and miles of hallways. Now put in all the branches of the US Armed Forces, staff them, now add in committees and sub-committees and staffers Chiefs of Staff officers and assistants and deputies and assistants to deputies and ambassadors and liaisons and defense planners and chairmen and janitors and a food court to feed all of them. Now tack on an alphabet soup of job titles and administration names. I love taxonomy but this is ridiculous!

And that's just the Department of Defense. Don't forget the Departments of State, Commerce, Labor, Energy, Interior, Homeland Security, and all the rest. Wow.

The Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument, and the Capitol were all built on the same line of latitude (that L'Enfant sure knew what he was doing!), so you have to literally lean off the Lincoln Memorial while hanging onto one of the marble columns to get this shot::


Imagine this scene on the Fourth of July. Fireworks blazing. Flags waving. Not so bone-chilling cold. Gotta go back! Much more to see.

867-530niieeeyine

Now if you're an 80s kid like me (and I know you are), then one of your first memories of popular culture was probably MTV. And you probably sang along to the Tommy Tutone song "Jenny", with its immemorable 867-5309 phone number.

Well, turns out that it's on Ebay. The phone number is being sold! I guess most area codes are out of service, but the owner of (201) number is letting go of his 867-5309. Last time I checked it was fetching $150,000 on Ebay. And that's just within the first day of a 7-day auction.

This hits home because I actually used this number in one of my college short stories as a joke. The main character calls his love interest, Jenny::

Good luck getting that song out of your head. I can't.

 

Inauguration Sensation: Adventures in DC (Inauguration Day)

I had the opportunity to go to DC for the Inauguration of Barack Obama a couple weeks ago, and here's what it looked like. I figure, if I was lucky enough to get 'community credentials' to the DNC speech at Invesco Field here in Denver last August, I might as well go for broke and sign up for ceremony tickets through my Congressperson.

A couple days after the election, I submitted my info online. Congresswoman Diana Degette got thousands of requests and within days, the form was taken down from her site. Each member of Congress received a mere handful of tickets to dole out to their constituents, and I got two! Luck of the Irish, I guess.

I gave my extra to the person who most deserved it, a friend of mine who had worked on the campaign since the primaries (if anyone can claim that they helped win a key county during the Indiana primary with any degree of credibility, it's her). 20-hour days, multi-state canvassing, registering people around the country with the power of her cell-phone, I was impressed and humbled by her commitment to Obama's campaign.

Day 1. I arrived the afternoon before, and the streets around the Capitol were INSANE. I had a front-porch view of the DNC in Denver last summer, but this took crowd control to the next level. Any street within five blocks of the Capitol or Pennsylvania Ave were barricaded with those metal gates so pedestrians and cars wouldn't run into each other. Key metro stations were clogged, traffic was clogged, people were excited. I was excited.

And it was cold.

After settling in my uncle's condo (he works at the Pentagon and lived oh so close to downtown, so lucky in that regard), I immediately booked it to the Rayburn House Building to get my tickets. Stood in line for an hour or so in the DC cold. People in Denver are so spoiled with the lack of humidity here. This was bone-chilling cold. After getting tix, I meandered through the House Building just to soak in the bureaucracy.


Tickets in hand, I checked out the seated parts of the ceremony (only 28,000 for 240,000 tickets). It was a sight. People from all around the country were taking their pictures in front of this rare scene. It was quickly growing dark but that didn't deter anybody from soaking it all in. Camera phones and pro-grade camcorders were blazin'. I walked down the Mall towards the Washington Monument in the bitter night cold, passing by thousands of people, street vendors selling their Obama gear, and the MSNBC ad-hoc headquarters, catching sight of CHRIS MATTHEWS! The crowds rivalled the DNC and it was awesome to mingle with like-minded people. Again, cold!

But I had to get back to base. 4:30am wakeup time the next morning because I had to be in this situation by 7am::


This is about a mile into the silver-ticket line, the very back of all the sections, behind the Reflecting Pool. As toe-numbing cold as it seemed, it could have been colder. I'd say this is about 25 degrees, but no wind, and no sign of snow. (Celebrity alert: I saw James Carville pass by while I was in line.) About an hour later, the sun started illuminating the Mall and we herded towards the Capitol::


The great irony is they didn't even check for my tickets at the gate. They did a quick patdown for security, they looked at camera, and I was in. I'm sure they checked for SOME tickets (and I'm sure they did so with the closer sections), but it was just humorous. Some of the lucky few to get in::


This is behind the Reflecting Pool. It was oddly quiet here. The size of the Mall is so large that we had no sense or view of the millions of people gathering there. Here, though, people didn't crunch together to get closer to the Capitol grounds, everyone was pretty chill (get it, chill); there was definitely a communal vibe. I guess each individual there had that common purpose of being at the ceremony in whatever capacity they could. Here was the view::


But even this was a little too far for me (pish-posh). See that fence that's made of plastic and very trampable? Yeah, about twenty minutes passed until we casually followed a couple miscreants and booked it to the front side of the Reflecting Pool (where those trees are), and got this view instead::


Much better! Dead center, just close enough to actually see Obama move. We were among the first to fill this unintended space, and some thin people actually squeezed through those barriers to get into the Capitol grounds before the police arrived on their bikes. I don't know why they didn't plan for this space to be filled for the ceremony; I guess crowds tend to find places on their own!

The police were very nice::


Certainly a momentous event. I still can't wrap my head around it. No matter what political stripes you wear, you had to be amazed at the sight of 1.8 million people from around the world gathering in one place to witness this inauguration. The crowd stretched from the Capitol steps all the way to the Washington Monument, with a pocket of people on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial beyond. The sound of various segments of the Mall cheering was very surreal. From where we stood, way up close, we had no chance of seeing these crowds for ourselves, but those distant roars painted the picture for us. You just had to soak it in.




Probably the most lively part of the ceremony was watching the footage on the jumbotron of Mr. and Mrs. Bush get into Marine One. Soon you could hear the helicopter blades from behind the Capitol. We all waved goodbye (or thanks? depends on who you are, I guess) as the helicopter approached us. The Bush Family passed right over us for one last tour of the Mall before gettin' the heck back to Texas.


A feast of color the whole day::


Ceremony over, next up was the Parade. Except I couldn't get tickets on Ticketmaster. Lines to get even into earshot of the Parade were so long, and the chilly wind grew soon after the ceremony, and the clouds gathered. So we were pretty well content to watch the Parade, the one that was happening like a couple blocks away, from within the warm smoky confines of a cigar bar in the Federal Triangle. Beer and spinach dip tastes so good after standing for seven hours in the DC cold...


Exhausted, I metroed it back to the condo and watched coverage of the Inaugural balls on MSNBC. Like I was going to go through all that after going through all this. So glad I went! Coming up next, images of my DC adventures museum-hopping and monument-visiting after everybody else left. Stay tuned...