Small World DC Style

We got to DC on Monday evening and while changing Metro lines the daughter of good friends in Anchorage came up to us to say hello.  I expect that sort of thing to happen in Anchorage, but not in DC.

Tonight, while walking J2's dog Kona, a man came up to me, looked at me closely, then said my name.  I haven't seen Joe Reum for many, many years.  We both worked at the Municipality of Anchorage in the early 80s and then he took a class from me at UAA.  And now he has his PhD and is Interim Dean of the School of Public Health and Health Services at the George Washington University.  He lives a short block from where my son lives.

Joe is someone I always enjoyed talking with and it was a real delight to see him again, albeit briefly.  

Book Browsing Fix at Reiter's

Dropping into a good bookstore and just checking out what's new (to me) is always enjoyable.  Today we did that at Reiter's  Scientific, Professional, and Technical Books.  I did get to look past the cover, but you'll have to go a local bookstore, probably, to do that with these books that looked interesting.

What does it mean to have English spoken around the world?

I'm not sure about these volumes, but just the attempt to catalog so much was exciting.

The issue of honor killings came up in Germany, so this might shed some light.

There were quite a few books about the brain and how it works. I

I did look at this one more closely.

Not sure this is that great, but it is always interesting to test oneself against such lists. Do I know all these ideas?

Since this is my daughter's field, a beginner's guide might be useful.

And I'm always interested in how people write about power.

Jetlagged in DC, We Go for a Walk

We woke up about 4am, but J went back to sleep.  Eventually we went off walking to Georgetown to pick up a bike part for J2.  We found our way down through Rock Creek Park which is a piece of fairly untamed looking water winding its way through the nation's capital.

There was even a heron sitting on a very unnatural looking log in the creek.

After we got what J2 needed we wandered vaguely toward 

the mall and ran into the C&O canal path.

They were even filling one of the locks for us.  

Then on past the Watergate.  

And I couldn't help but notice that this huge building situated between the State Department and the Mall was owned by the American Pharmacists Association.  The cynic in me can't help but think about the huge lobbying force pharmaceutical companies have and start wondering about the linkages between the pharmaceutical companies and the pharmacists.  OpenSecrets.org says the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) spent $6.3  million just in the last three months of 2009. (This doesn't include what individual drug companies spent.)

Here it is from the front on Constitution Avenue looking out onto the national mall and the Lincoln Memorial.  The APhA website offers some history:

Located between the Lincoln Memorial and the U.S. Department of State and adjacent to the National Academy of Sciences, the site for APhA headquarters was authorized by an act of Congress in 1932 and is the only privately owned building on the National Mall.

The original structure has become known as the Pope building, after the architect John Russell Pope, whose work includes some of the most famous structures in Washington, DC. Pope was the architect for the Jefferson Memorial, National Archives, National Gallery of Art, and Constitution Hall.

The dedication of APhA headquarters was held on May 9, 1934. Twenty-five years later, in 1959, APhA broke ground for an annex to the original structure. The annex was completed within a year and dedicated during the 1960 APhA Annual Meeting. More than 40 years later, plans were unveiled at the 2001 APhA Annual Meeting to purchase the land behind APhA headquarters and replace the annex with a new structure. On January 26, 2007, APhA broke ground on a project that would add more than 300,000 square feet of space and enhance the historic Pope building.

The renovation and expansion of APhA headquarters augments the vision of Henry A.B. Dunning, Chair of the APhA All-Pharmacy Headquarters Building Campaign, who predicted in the 1934 dedication that "immediately in the rear of this building, there will begin the erection of another building" that will provide a venue for pharmacists from all related associations to gather to explore new opportunities, foster partnerships, and demonstrate the importance of the profession to the public, media, and policy makers.

Wikipedia has a link to the original forms that officially nominated  this building to the National Historic Register.  (Beauchamp, Tanya. "National Register of Historic Places Inventory Nomination: The American Institute of Pharmacy Building". National Park Service. http://pdfhost.focus.nps.gov/docs/NRHP/Text/77001497.pdf.)  I couldn't find the date of the document, but the form says it is under an Act passed in 1966.  It gives lots of details about this building. 

Across the street is a building under construction.   The sign at the lower left says United States Institute of Peace.  The cynic pops up again, with George Orwell in mind, and wonders whether this is a weapons industry organization.   Their website suggests otherwise.  

The United States Institute of Peace is an independent, nonpartisan institution established and funded by Congress to increase the nation's capacity to manage international conflict without violence. Having passed our 25th anniversary milestone, we are now moving into our next period of growth.The United States Institute of Peace (USIP) is transforming approaches to international conflict. USIP draws on a variety of resources in fulfilling its congressional mandate: staff, grantees, fellows, research, education, training, innovation, outreach, publications, and national and international partnerships.

USIP’s Strategic Goals

• To help prevent, manage, and resolve violent international conflict both within and between states
• To promote post-conflict stability and development
• To increase peacebuilding capacity, tools, and intellectual capital worldwide
• To build and shape the field of international conflict prevention and management and to professionalize its practice
• To build knowledge and create innovative tools for peacebuilding
• To bridge research and practice in preventing, managing and resolving violent conflicts
• To teach, train, inform policymakers, practitioners, students and the public about the challenges of conflict prevention, management and resolution and how to respond to those challenges

It also says we missed a conference on how conflict affects gender today.  It's a good thing that there is an Institute of Peace since so many of the monuments are war related. 

Would this monument be here if not for his role in the Civil War?  

And just to the north east of Lincoln's temple is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.  There's the stunning black monument designed by Maia Lin that caused such a controversy when it won the design contest.  It's a powerful memorial for most people, but I would guess it particularly plays to those of us who think abstractly. 

The 50,000 names etched into the black marble between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument is truly a memorial to those who died in this war.

It doesn't exalt war, it doesn't glorify the dead.  It simply and elegantly remembers each one in the US military who died in Vietnam.  The Wall offers a lot of information on the memorial including seventeen pages of names on the wall who had birthdays yesterday when we were there beginning with

ROWLAND JOSEPH ADAMOLI

Marine Corps - CPL - E4

Age:	25
Race:	Caucasian
Sex:	Male
Date of Birth	May 18, 1940
From:	PHILADELPHIA, PA
Religion:	ROMAN CATHOLIC
Marital Status:	Married

who died of hostile small arms file, and ending with

AKIRA YAMASHITA

Army - SP5 - E5

Age:	38
Race:	Mongolian
Sex:	Male
Date of Birth	May 18, 1928
From:	SAN FRANCISCO, CA
Religion:	BUDDHISM
Marital Status:	Married

who died in a non-combat vehicle accident after a year in country.

But I learned as a teacher that students fall somewhere on a continuum between those who are mainly abstract thinkers and those who are mainly concrete thinkers.  For those at the concrete end of the continuum, a black slab just didn't do it and they wanted something more representational of soldiers.   So eventually this statue was added:

Or maybe it was people who wanted to glorify the soldiers as these super-real, super-buff figures seem to do.  These are John Wayne soldiers.  There's nothing left here for the viewer to imagine (except maybe how could these guys die and how could the US abandon Saigon in defeat?), while the wall leaves the viewer with lots and lots to think about. 

And finally, as we were almost back at J2's apartment, we passed this sign for a rather specialized museum, also war related.

Berlin-Paris-Washington DC

Getting around Berlin is familiar now and the metro to the bus to the airport was relaxed. 

Despite the rosy picture on the Tegel Airport website, they were canceling flights to Amsterdam and north and there was a line of people rebooking their flights.   Fortunately, we were flying through Paris.  But some of the people got rebooked to our flight which was pretty crowded. 

Leaving Berlin.

I don't remember an airport so huge.  And it seemed we taxied all the way around it including past this Concorde.  (Wikipedia doesn't tell us the size of the airport.  A Google search says that the largest airport is King Fahd International in Damman, Saudi Arabia at 780 square kilometers.  Most sites then list the busiest airports.)

And there was a lot of walking to catch the plane on to Washington DC.

There are flights going all over the world from Paris.  And planes were flying to some of those Northern locations that had been canceled earlier in Berlin. 

We had to go past all the duty free shops.

But eventually we found our terminal and flew out over Paris.  We did see the Eiffel Tower from the plane and I think it is in this picture (upper right), but it's just not clear at all. 

And Dulles Airport outside of DC was pretty socked in.  We had instructions to take a taxi or the public bus.  The bus turned out to be the right choice.  It was after traffic time and it only made a couple of stops before dropping us off at L'Enfant Plaza Metro station.

It was a good day.  We had breakfast with our daughter, who also went to the airport with us, and we got to see our son in the evening.  We also bumped into someone we know from Anchorage changing trains in the Metro!

US Senate Floor Has One Senator as Begich Presides

We took the Metro to Union Station today, then walked to the Russell Senate Building.
(#1 on the map below.)

We passed through lovely, tree filled park, for the three or four blocks from the station.

Security at the Russell Senate Office Building was like at the Federal Building in Anchorage.  Bothersome, but not that big a deal.  And then we were free to roam the halls of the building.

Senator Begich's office was where all those people were.  We were there to get tickets to get into the Senate Chambers.  It turned out we needed someone to take us there and that person turned out to be an intern from the University of Alaska Fairbanks named Adrian.   And they suggested we get him to take us on a tour, that he was the best guide.  So we did.

This the outer office in Senator Begich's office with some other Alaskans there talking to the staff.

Here's Adrian on the train from the Senate Office Building to the Senate itself.  I'd read already that you had to check in your cameras before going into the Senate Gallery.  We also had go through security again.  We'd seen on a C-Span screen that Sen. Begich was presiding in the Senate.  It turns out this was not despite his low rank in the Senate, but because of it.

There was only one Senator on the floor - Sen Sessions of Alabama - giving a speech about a new Judge candidate who he accused of taking her liberal agenda to the bench and making decisions based on politics not the law.  Sen. Begich checked his blackberry and read documents while Sen. Sessions talked to an empty chamber - except for those of us in the Gallery.  Then Sen. Sessions departed and Sen. Dodd of Connecticut began a similar speech about the Republicans forcing all 41 of their members to block a vote on the upcoming financial reform bill.  During this speech, another young Senator came to replace Sen. Begich on the podium.

I'd heard that this went on, but watching it brought home the absurdity of it all. People get to stand up and give their speeches to the C-Span audiences (which aren't shown the empty chambers) and get their words into the Congressional Record. On the bright side, not all the other Senators have to waste their time listening. For the record, I did not see this happen in Juneau. Since I couldn't take pictures in the Senate chambers, here's a picture of the OLD Senate Chambers we saw later.


Adrian and the other interns were meeting with Sen. Murkowski, but he had two other people to show around an hour later, so we went to lunch and rejoined them later on for the rest of the tour.

There were lots of domed ceilings and chandeliers.  I'm not sure what this one was.

Here's a bit of floor tile.

This is Albert Caswell, the Poet of the Senate.  You can read about him in this  Politico post.

Here's a brief excerpt from a poem posted in the Congressional Record April 27, 2009:

He cries .....
As half his face is gone, has died .....
In this face of courage we see .....
The true definition of beauty .....
Countless operations, courage's full measure .....
All in faith's affirmation .....
Both Beauty and The Beast .....
As his shot is heard around the world .....
As his courage is unfurled ..... beyond belief .....
A Beautiful Man .....
With every step, reloading .....
With the Height of Courage exploding .....
He takes command!

I'll let you make your own assessment of his poetry. 

This is the Senate Capitol Rotunda dome.

Our group in the Rotunda.

High on the Rotunda wall is a frieze depicting the history of the US from Columbus to the Forty Niners digging for gold in California.  

When we rode the underground train back to the Russell Senate Building, we shared the ride with Sen. McCain.

Then we got our Metro ride back to J1's place, walked Kona, then went out for dinner at Bombay Bistro in Rockville with an old friend and his family.  It's late so that's it.