Trip to D.C.

Went down to D.C. today to do some sightseeing. After driving for a few hours, I got to a Metro station, and took the subway/train/whatever.

The Metro is an effective and reasonably low-cost means of getting around D.C. However, the worst of D.C. was on full display on the Metro today: what can be accurately described as “feral” children. While this pack of genetic defectives pretty much ignored me (it is sometimes good to be large), the same cannot be said for some random woman that one of these retards decided to focus on. The twit in question was a roughly spherical girl (took a while to conclude “female”) with a pinhead and a penchant for thumbsucking (yeah, that’ll make you look *real* badass) who seemed to have an extremely limited vocabulary and a minimal grasp of English grammer, much less proper social behavior. She got pissed that a woman, who had no where else to be, was standing in the aisle of the Metro blocking her view of one of her idiot comrades, and opened up a tirade of moronic and sexually explicit insults.

Now, I’m as big a fan of profanity as you’re likely to come across. Expletives are a fuckin’ dandy way of making a point. But when you use expletives the way normal humans use vowels…. you are likely to not become a valuable member of society.

Anyway, the woman and I got off at the same terminal (L’Enfant Plaza). Irritatingly, Dipshit And The Gang also got off at the same stop. They followed the woman at close range for some distance, continuing to heap ill-considered witticisms; I followed *them* at close range to see what would happen. When the woman looked around and saw me, I moved up to her and started chatting like I knew her; at that point the Moron Brigade decided to wander off, likely to go be a burden to society on some other train. The woman said that she wondered what their parents would think of their behavior; my response was to point out that I thought it unlikely that they actually *had* parents, from a practical point of view.

Bah. If the children are our future… get me the hell off this planet.

D.C. is a freakin’ embarassment. Much of this has been driven by the failed Great Society, which in D.C. (perhaps more than most other major American cities) has produced a sense of entitlement, a disincentive for fathers to stick around, and a lack of work ethic. Marry that with D.C.’s decades of ignoring the Constitution with regard to the right of the citizens to keep and bear arms, and the failed public edumacation system that makes no real effort to truly teach, and you wind up with a city that actually tolerates children who are living out a real-life version of Lord of the Flies.

Anyway, after the fun and excitement of the Metro, I visited the National Air and SpaceMuseum. I’ve been there several times in the past, but my last visit was in about 1998. I noted a number of changes… from the X-ray and bag check at the door (another 9-11 Islam Outreach Success Story), to the disappearance of a number of displays (such as the early rocketry and spaceflight stuff, which I’m hoping has been moved to the Udvar-Hazy center), to the replacement of the NASM cafeteria witha friggen’ McDonalds. I didn’t spend the whole day there, just sorta ran through, but I still took a number of pictures:

An early concept sketch of the Douglas AD-1 “Skyraider” from 1943. Note the inclusion of at least one turbojet on the underside.

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Took a bunch of photos of the Rockwell HiMAT unmanned research vehicle…

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A McDonnell -Douglas hypersonic transport “Orient Express” model…

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A large stainless-steel Dyna Soar wind tunnel model…

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The X-45 hanging in the unmanned aircraft section….

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The SpaceShip One hanging near the Bell X-1 and the Spirit of St. Louis …

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The full-scale Apollo-Soyuz Test Project…

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And the starship Enterprise model from the original TV series… on display in the basement store near the toys.

After the NASM, I wandered across the Mall to the Natural History Museum. I noticed a large gathering, with someone screeching on a loud PA system about some god or other… I’m guessing they were either Satan or Loki worshippers. The screacher on the screen was yellling about how the world will soon be trashed by his god, and that this was a particularly desirable thing; in the singalong that followed, there was a *lot* of calling for fire to come down. As I said, probably Satan or Loki worshippers. Takes someone really kinda special (in the sense of “ding fries are done” special) to actually want the Earth to get blasted with fire and humanity wiped out with some small fraction getting to live on as slaves of the demon what who trashed the planet. Shrug.

During the singalong, there was, as I said, a whole lot of repetition of “fire.” Made me wonder if maybe, just maybe, it was a Beavis convention.

While at the Natural History Museum, I wandered through the mineral and fossil exhibit, which pretty much are all I’m interested in in natural history museums (oooh, lookie! Stuffed muskrats! Eskimo clothes! Zzzzzz…..)

After that I went to old town Alexandria specifically to hunt down a store that I had visited before (a model/book shop packed to the gills with aircraft and sci-fi model kits stretching back to the ’50’s), only to discover that it ain’t there anymore. Feh.

Well, hey. At least I didn’t get stabbed.