World War 2 Memorial

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The World War II Memorial on the National Mall is open. I’m on my way there now. Pictures at 11.

Update, 10:56pm: Photos here.

Update, 11:40pm, some impressions: The National WWII Memorial sits at the Eastern end of the Reflecting Pool, where the Rainbow Pool used to be, between Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. It is large, wide, oval, and sunken six feet below grade, so that the Reflecting Pool cascades into the Memorial fountain. Two huge pillars flank the Memorial, representing the Atlantic and Pacific theaters of war, consisting of four columns, beneath which bronze eagles lift victory laurels.

Lining the oval are several smaller pillars, each one representing a state or territory which fought in the war. The ordering of the pillars was a source of confusion initially: the Philippines, for example, was on the side of the Atlantic pillar, and Florida on the Pacific side. A park ranger cleared up the issue, explaining that the pillars are arranged in the order that they joined the Union, starting with Delaware and Pennsylvania, then alternating between north and south through the sequence, with no connection to the position of the Atlantic and Pacific pillars. Binding the states and territories is a twist of bronze rope.

The south face of the Memorial is dominated by the Field of Stars, a huge wall covered with 4,000 gold stars, each representing 100 deaths in the war, before which is a plaque: “Here we mark the price of freedom.” (I’m a bit leery of the slightly impersonal “assembly line” coldness of assigning a hundred lives to a star, but when one realizes that Iraq from March 2003 till today would be just eight stars — eight in a year, compared to four thousand in five — well, that’s humbling.)

Bush-dislikers will really dislike this memorial stone, but don’t get into a tizzy over it. Chester Arthur’s name is on the Washington Monument, Warren G. Harding’s name is on Lincoln Memorial, and Nixon is on the Moon. We don’t note our memorials for the names that are on them; these memorials represent far bigger things than the incumbents at their construction.

Mga kapwa-Pinoy, ito’y para sa iyo. And any US Marines out there, this one is for you.

(And one more thing, any DC TV news junkies know who this guy is and what network he’s from? He looked familiar, but I couldn’t find him on any of tonight’s newscasts.)

RIP, Nick Joaquin

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Filipino author Nick Joaquin has died. We read excerpts from Occasional Notes On The Process Of Philippine Becoming in high school, and The Woman Who Had Two Navels in college, and got to see him speak once in Ateneo, on stage with his cooler of beer. Yet another national treasure passes on.

Non-Bombs and Pants

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Firetruck at Union StationI emerged from the Union Station Metro last night to flashing lights and milling, murmuring crowds, as security personnel called out, “the station is being evacuated.”

“There’s been a bomb threat, bomb threat,” said a homeless man at the doors, as others sighed, “a fire, a power outage, a bomb threat, now how will I catch my train…” A firetruck was parked out front, while crowds of people, hundreds thick, gathered below the pillars and arches. I snapped a couple of photos and headed home, wondering what the news would have to say. (There was nothing on the evening news, but it would later turn out to be a smoke alarm going off.)

I ran into Reggie, my local homeless guy, along the way, standing on E Street with a rag and a bucket to wash parked cars. He had only shorts, tennis shoes, and a t-shirt on, and had discarded his torn, dirty pants the day before. Sparing him a dollar, I told him it would be getting colder tonight, but I had a pair of pants that was a bit small for me, but might fit him. I brought the pants down from my apartment, and they did indeed fit perfectly. We talked a bit, about being homeless, about rats coming to eat his scraps, about how passing tourists would always give him food, but never thought to give him anything to drink, about feeding the hungry and clothing the naked, about Iraq. He thanked me for the pants, and I told him that they had been looking for someone to wear them, and here he was. I passed him another dollar for drinks, and headed home.

Then I fed the cat, watered the plants, ate dinner, talked to Amy, watched Enterprise, and slept.

Photolog Folly

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When I first started my photolog in July of 2002, I had a Ten Years of My Life kind of strategy in mind, limiting myself to just one photo a day. I’m not sure why, but I got it into my head to simply use a modified Movabletype template date tag to call the images, so all I would really have to do was post a caption and upload an image with the filename format “YYYYMMDD.jpg” or something, and that’s what would come out, without needing to type out a filename.

Bad move.

Somewhere along the way, I lost my archives, and now, rebuilding the old photolog entries one by one, I have a directory full of cryptically numbered images staring at me in the face, none of the filenames telling me anything about their content. I’m renaming them as I upload them, but this is going to be a long, slow process, during which I face a difficult abstinence from taking any more artsy photos to keep the photolog backlog to a minimum.

Use descriptive filenames, my child, or else take better care of your archives than I did. Your photolog will thank you for it.

background-repeat

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Add to the list of CSS syntax bits I never knew about because I wasn’t paying close enough attention to the documentation: the background-repeat property. I knew about the repeat and no-repeat values, but repeat-x and repeat-y are new to me, and should be quite useful for making Faux Columns and other image-backgrounded layouts without needing ridiculuously wide background images.

“Blood, I’m Afraid.”

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The Slacktivist has some excellent running commentary on Left Behind and its implications for Christianity and faith with its pulp treatment of eschatology, doctrine, and fiction. It’s not just bad writing or rapture-obsessed dispensational premillenialism that’s the issue here: there’s something wrong with LaHaye and Jenkins’ characters, the manner in which they conduct themselves, the manner in which the fictional world behaves around them, which betrays a worldview which is, at best, barely Christian. Of special note: mention of Captain Findiesen (that notorious American Airlines pilot who used the cabin PA to point out “crazy” Christians, and the only reporter on board the plane who got the story right); “don’t look in first class”; “his fully loaded 747 on autopilot”; miracles, exploding warheads, Russia, Ethiopia, and implausibility.

Glorious Appearing is out, and you can read the first chapter. Better hurry, before the sequel and the prequel come out. Myself, I’ll stick to my copy of Right Behind.

On Unitarian Ground

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Saturday night, Amy and I watched La Fenice play early baroque music — that’s the best kind of music — at Baltimore First Unitarian. Wonderful polyphonies from Monteverdi, Rossi, and others, all played on authentic instruments like the cornetto and the viola da gamba.

Various religious icons and a Last Supper mosaicIt was also our first time inside a Unitarian church. We nosed about a bit during the intermission, noting the multiple icons for various religious traditions — Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, and Taoism — flanking the Christian cross below a huge “Last Supper” mosaic behind the altar, the humanistic “creeds” on the walls listing the brotherhood of man above the leadership (not Lordship) of Jesus, the rainbow banner hanging from the balcony pipe organ, and the “sanitized” lyrics in the hymnbook — where anything that was too worshipful of Christ, or too brimming with religious conviction, was replaced with something praising peace, fellowship, and a more ambiguous, less offensive Divinity. Unitarian hymnal(For example, this particular hymnal’s version of “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” has Stanzas 2 and 3 rewritten. Amy lamented the lack of any mention of Ebenezers. Ironically, the song’s own writer fell in with Unitarians later on in life, though it’s not confirmed that he became one himself.)

Sunday was the historic March for the Right to Kill Children, so I steered clear of The Mall after church and did little domestic things: groceries, laundry, vacuuming, strategizing a new photolog, that sort of thing.

Station Lighting

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One of many globe lamps lining the walls of the Baltimore Penn Station concourse.

Photo taken with a Palm Zire 71.

Meat

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“They’re made out of meat.”

Remember: if we ever meet extraterrestrials, they may turn out to be weirder than anything we carbon-based meat units could ever imagine. I have no idea what kind of aliens are talking here, but I like to think that they’re Blue Hooloovoos.

Speaking of which, John Malkovich will have a role in the upcoming HHGTTG film, as “Humma Kavula.” There’s no such character in the book, though; apparently the late Douglas Adams penned a screenplay which is significantly different from the book in many ways.