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Saturday, December 01, 2018

Antipodean Summer: When eagles are silent, parrots begin to chatter


"When eagles are silent, parrots begin to chatter."
~Winston Churchill



 "The Washington D.C. Underground Atlas"


“As many people who work in Washington, D.C. can tell you, the federal government’s taste in architecture has a special proclivity for underground tunnels. District residents navigate the tubes like human submarines, and rely on their services for basic needs like drinking water and central heat. Contributing factors include the city’s unique building height limit, extreme weather, and the security considerations of recent decades. As a result, Washington sits atop an interconnected layer cake of transportation, utility, and pedestrian tunnels extending three dimensionally beneath city streets.  Given their importance to daily life in the nation’s capital, it’s surprising to find that the full picture of Washington’s various tunnels remains unpainted. This project aims to complete that picture.


Tunnels in Washington run the gamut: from mundane to idiosyncratic, from heavily trafficked to the little known. Some tunnels are cavernous. WMATA’s standard issue 600-foot long Metro station could easily fit the Washington Monument laid down on its side, and anyone with a SmarTrip card is allowed to walk in. Others are claustrophobic, with searing temperatures and unbearable smells. Access to the General Service Administration’s steam tunnels, for example, is limited to a small gang of maintenance men and law enforcement officers. While many of the city’s tunnels are physically closed off to the public, you can now digitally explore the twisting underground architecture paid for with public tax dollars. (Exploring tunnels in person can be hazardous and illegal, don’t try it.)



The-Beatles 1968 - 2018

An idiom is like a musical phrase; a cliché is like an earworm. "If idioms help us think outside the box, clichés box us in" Eagles v 

 From Philip K. Howard, Try Common Sense: Replacing the Failed Ideologies of Right and Left.

 It takes two | About Last Night.
I’m as eager for Mrs. T to return home as she is, but so long as she’s in the hospital, there’s nowhere else I want to be. It took us long enough to find one another, and now that we’re together, our plan is to spend as much time together as we can, even if I have to eat hospital food, watch movies with commercials, and drive through blizzards. As far as I’m concerned, when it comes to happiness, it takes two.


 96-Year-Old Holocaust Survivor Is Now the Epic Frontwoman for a Death Metal Band.