I was in Washington, D.C., recently to pick up a little something, and while I was there I decided to take in some sights. Washington is stuffed with history, groaning with landmarks and seriously infested with points of interest, but there's a bit of a problem: Most of the landmarks are outdoors. This makes sense for attractions like the People Who Love to Sweat Monument and the Friends of Flying Insects Memorial, but less so for other tourist destinations.
And it turns out you're even discouraged from swimming in the Reflecting Pool, which is just silly. I can't think of a better place for a water slide.
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Anyhow, I've seen enough movies where important plot points happen at presidential monuments for no important reason, so I didn't feel the need to schlep over to get a personal look at Lincoln's giant marble crotch. As it turned out, my hotel was just two blocks from one of the Great Geek Foci, a place as fascinating as it is air-conditioned, the Smithsonian National Air and Space and Dehydrated Ice Cream Museum.
If you plan on visiting this museum yourself, I would recommend setting aside at least a month. There are so many awe-inspiring things therein that after an hour or so I was suffering from a serious case of awe fatigue.
My reaction to the Mercury Friendship 7 spacecraft that held John Glenn as he orbited the Earth: "My God, to enter the vastness of space in this tiny craft, this bead of metal, alone as any human can be. To gain a unique perspective on the world at the risk of death in the fatal grip of nothingness. What a beautiful, terrifying achievement." Later, my reaction to the Spirit of Saint Louis: "Man, that's a lot of time to spend in a plane, especially over water." Still later, my reaction to the Wright Flyer: "I wonder what kind of wood that is?" (It is spruce.)
My point here is that the best way to enjoy the Air and Space Museum would be to enter, drop a buck in the donations box, become completely flabbergasted by one particular bit of history, then head out to get something to eat. Take 24 hours to let the brain settle, then repeat. If you had a year or two to devote to this, I expect you could get over 500 flabbergasts from this approach, where as I got maybe two flabbergasts, five agogs, eight bafflements and a lot of semi-curious glances at plaques.
Another effect of the visit is that I now understand the allure of speculative fiction set in a technologically advanced Victorian era. There were some antique sextants and other navigational devices, and they were gorgeous, with all sorts of lovely decorations and filigree, as if they were to double as a fan at a Regency-era cricket tournament.
In contrast, every object associated with the space race looked as if NASA engineers were only allowed to acquire goods by visiting garage sales and stealing materials from office-building construction sites. I'm sure that all sorts of advanced materials were used to put the Apollo lunar module together, but if I didn't know that I'd have guessed "staple gun."
In essence, the better something works, the worse it looks. Leonardo da Vinci's sketches for air vehicles are lovely to look at, but they're about as practical as leaping from the roof with a red towel tied around your neck. At the other end of the scale, SpaceShipOne, the first private vehicle to reach space, looks like a dollar-store space toy, the kind that's merely disappointing if you find it in your Christmas stocking, but that leads to tears and bad high school poetry if it's your real present.
My hope is that sometime in the future this trend will reverse, that space travel will become so commonplace that designers will start putting brass railings and etched pictures of dolphins on their spaceships just because they look pretty. The way things are going, though, we're more likely to see ads for Nike and M&Ms.
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Born helpless, nude and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjöberg eventually overcame these handicaps to receive the National Press Club's Angele Gingras Humor Award for Body of Work (Honorable Mention).
