We kicked off at the Air and Space Museum, home to a gazillion tourists, and also several important aircraft. But before I get to the pictures, I have a bone to pick with this place:
[BEGIN RANT]
How come we have an entire museum at the Smithsonian--one of just 6 on The Mall--and another satellite facility out by Dulles airport devoted to airplanes and spaceships, which have been around for less than a hundred years. Whereas if you ask them about ships, i.e. the whole reason we stumbled upon this continent in the first place, and the means by which more than 95% of goods enter our country to this very day, they just look at you blankly and say that there might be some fish at the National Aquarium in Baltimore?
This irks me. It also clearly relates to the unrelenting annoyance I get from watching endless news updates about 6 miners killed in a cave-in when fishing vessels go down without so much as a mention on a CNN crawl at the bottom of the screen. Or, on a broader scale, the fact that we have better maps of the surface of the moon and MARS than we do of the ocean floor RIGHT HERE ON EARTH!
[END RANT]
OK. Enough of that. Needless to say, there were plenty of things at the Air and Space Museum that are more massive than Anna's belly.
The Spirit of St. Louis (far left), the Chuck Yeager mobile (orange one in the back), and the large speedy looking blackish jet thing are clearly mas grande.
Also giganticer? These missiles. They're so damn violent and destructive, you can barely make out my family three stories below.
This astronaut's pretty gargantuan, too.
Having basked in enough avian glory, we decided to move outside where there were yet other items from the art world that made Anna's gut appear to belong to a tiny titmouse. Like this colossal... thing... outside the Hirshhorn:
Anna has always likened it to a cosmic-sized forkful of spaghetti, but I think Lichtenstein had something slightly less pasta-ish in mind.
The Hirshhorn also hosts a fantastic sculpture garden. We were especially hoping to see Picasso's "Pregnant Woman (First State)" but much to our chagrin, she was in storage. Anna offered to stand in her place for a small fee, but the guard wasn't biting. So much for college tuition money. Picasso's knocked-up chickie would have been smaller than Anna's belly anyway, and thus would have completely ruined the whole theme of this entry. Fortunately, there were several other huger objets d'art.
This dude is ripped, and clearly far enormouser than Puck's homestead:
If only he had legs and wasn't so far away from this Amazonian, bodacious babe, they'd be perfect for each other:
But of course our tour wouldn't be complete without photographic evidence of the single most astoundingly titanic thing in all of our great not-really-a-state: George W. Bush's ego, in evidence here, at the Department of Education. Who else would have the gall to christen a project "No Child Left Behind" and then completely fail to provide it with adequate funding. Maybe if we hadn't spent half the program's budget on these spiffy, evocative old-timey entrancways for DoE headquarters there would be three or four more children actually not getting left behind.
