Outside the NMAI

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I walked down to the new National Museum of the American Indian this afternoon, hoping to catch a short line in its last open hour, but no luck: while the museum remains popular, entry requires a timed pass, and it will probably be so for a long time, as with the Holocaust Museum and the Washington Monument. I took some pictures instead, then walked around the First Americans Festival to get some native corn soup with pork (slightly gamy) and iced mint tea (minty!).

The NMAI is a lovely structure, yellow stone and sweeping curves evoking native dwellings and the natural world, while simultaneously complementing the the neighboring Capitol Dome and the gravelly paths of the Mall. A fitting tribute to America’s native heritage, I think.

(Photos taken with an Aiptek Mini Pencam 1.3MP SD.)

False Alarm Again

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Fire alarms normally have that long, steady machine-gun ring which brings you right back to high school: persistent, alarming, as they are meant to be. The alarm I heard at 2:00 AM this morning was different: claaannnngggg, pause, claaannnngggg, pause, claaannnngggg, like a high-pitched church bell.

Not an uncommon occurrence in this apartment building; I had often heard the alarms ringing away on other floors in the past — but school-style, not this slow, steady tolling — and I simply assumed it was my floor’s turn tonight. I picked up the phone, dialed up building management (not in the building, unfortunately), and told the late-night emergency line operator that the alarms were going off again.

Pandora was not too happy about this.

About ten minutes later, the bells were still going, and there were agitated voices in the hallway. I opened my door (quite forgetting that in a real fire, one is supposed to feel the doorknob for heat and crouch first) and leaned out in time to see a neighbor fleeing down the stairs. From what I could hear, the bells were going off on all the floors now, and I gathered that I should probably err on the side of caution and get out as well.

After herding my iBook, power adapter, wallet, and other pocketable items into a backpack, I grabbed a protesting Pandora, stuffed her into her as-yet unused carrier, and headed down the stairs. There were neither flames nor smoke, but by the time I reached the front door, about thirty of my neighbors were milling on the sidewalk outside, and a fire engine had pulled up.

As expected, it turned out to be a false alarm. To everyone’s annoyance, the key to the alarm controls was with the landlady, who lived off-site. It was another hour before someone came to switch off the clanging bells so everyone in the building could get back to sleep.

This was not the first time. Nonetheless, the night served as a suitable drill, so now I know just how fast I can get me and the cat out of the building.

Jebus

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Lileks on Swaggart and atheists. “But I have no time for atheists who look at the good works of churches, and nevertheless feel superior because they don’t believe in a Magic Book.”

My gauge for an atheist’s intellect is the word “Jebus.” The moment someone uses that tired Simpsons gag, I regard him about as credible as those sophomoric types who equate God with the tooth fairy, call Microsoft “Micro$haft,” and spell “America” with a triple K. (Apologies to anyone who’s joked around me with “Jebus” and got a snippy remark.)

The real Jebus, of course, was an old name for Jerusalem, and the Jebusites were a Canaanite tribe who persisted in the area until King David sacked the city.

(Aside: that Simpsons episode was most notable to me for the PBS jokes at the start. “You’re a thief! A common thief!”)

That Burning Sensation

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Amy gifted me with a pot of fresh basil over the summer, and tonight I took the first leaf cuttings to a pan of chili basil chicken on rice. Instead of fresh chili, however, I picked up a jar of Thai chili-garlic paste at Da Hua Market in Chinatown, and unsure of what quantity of paste equalled a teaspoon of chopped chili, I went with three teaspoons. That turned out to be three times too much. It burns, (yum) it burns!

Rovers, Awake

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The Mars Rovers are back in contact with Earth after a two week comm blackout caused by Mars passing behind the sun. With lots of power and some extended funding from NASA, it looks like we’ll be getting much more science — and cool photos — from Mars for a while longer. For me, that means more photos to wiggle.

JPL has put out two graphics mapping the rovers’ routes through orbital imagery: Spirit and Opportunity. I’m wondering how long it’ll be before some woowoo starts raving about the New Face in the upper right corner of the Spirit travel map:

A New Face on Mars So who do you think that looks like?

Update: Hey, I know who that new Mars face looks like!

The New Mars Face looks like John Kerry!

I also posted this to the Bad Astronomy Message Board.

Photoshopped Future of the Past

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So, it turns out that the 1954 vision of the 2004 computer which Presurfer linked was a skillfully done Photoshop job of a nuclear submarine manuevering room console, posted to a Fark Photoshop thread. I got taken in, but it should have been obvious on a closer look, with the ragged feathering on the left edge of that pasted-in teletype machine, and the too-sharp RCA television box floating there like a Photoshop layer with a drop shadow under it. Still, brilliant graphic work, and equally brilliant spotting from these Metafilterites.

Sunset Down the Road

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I just leaned out the window to catch this lovely sunset shining down E Street. Note the patterns of light on the walls of the hotel at left: it’s sunlight reflected from nearby building windows.

Photo taken with an Aiptek Mini Pencam 1.3MP SD.

Hurricane Ivan and Memories of Typhoons

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The remnants of Hurricane Ivan (now just a tropical depression) are passing through the DC/VA/MD area, spawning tornadoes out in the suburbs and dumping rain on Washington.

News on TV is saying this is the most damaging hurricane to hit the US in five years. I’m trying to compare the destruction in the Southeast with some of the Signal Number Three typhoons we’ve had in the Philippines, and I can’t seem to remember any time that our roof got damaged, let alone blown off — but then, I lived the sheltered upper-class Filipino life. I do remember reading a typhoon safety pamphlet in grade school, advising people out in the probinsya to tie down the roofs of their nipa huts with stakes and rope, and to stock up on batteries for flashlights and transistor radios. Storm surge was rarely a concern, as houses were normally built elevated on stilts to begin with, and if the baha (flooding) got any higher, you just moved all your stuff upstairs till the water went down. (Which was what one of my coworkers in Manila actually did when the Pasig River submerged his entire first floor.) And if the water went still higher, eh bahala na. (Whatever.)

(Bahala na indeed.)

There was one instance of flooding while I lived in Westmont which indicated to me that I was probably in the worst typhoon I’d ever been in. I came down from my apartment that day to find the entire parking lot turned into a lake of muddy water from a canal behind the compound. I waded through the knee-deep deluge to say hi to a neighbor, but later that day it was up to my waist (by my estimates, anyway; the water was opaque brown, and I wasn’t wading anymore), and the flood took all day to subside. I would go down the stairs every hour or so and see the steps descend from the second floor and disappear into the murky depths.

Later that day, the flood receded, and I found that the wall around the swimming pool area had collapsed, allowing the water to flow back into the canal, but taking most of the swimming pool with it, leaving a huge opening in that side of the compound, facing out to the canal and the squatter colony beside it. The ruins of the swimming pool area stayed cordoned off from then on, and it was still like that when I left.

No Upo

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From Weez, a comfort recipe: tinolang manok, or chicken-ginger soup. Not having had that for a while, I thought of cooking some up with the chicken in my freezer, but the recipe lacks one ingredient which I’ve always had in my tinola since childhood: upo, or bottle gourd — which is fairly hard to find around DC. I’ve looked in Giant, Whole Foods, Eastern Market, and the Dupont Circle Farmer’s Market, without success. Probably a good thing, too; even a small upo would have difficulty fitting in my tiny refrigerator.

Can anyone suggest a suitable squash or gourd alternative? Note that I don’t like chayote.

(The chicken became a pot of adobo instead.)