Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, Washington D.C.

The Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, D.C., is located on the Tidal Basin. The memorial isn't really visible from the water and just barely from the walkway. Without the sign below, we might have walked right by it.

FDR Memorial sign

Compared to grander memorials like the Lincoln, Jefferson, and Washington, this one is decidedly low key. It's spread out over a long area with a lot of open space. The design maximizes accessibility and the ability to wander around, so it's a good spot for social distancing.

View of the gift shop

His name and years of service

At home, my kids were surprised to find out that FDR was in a wheel chair. They hadn't seen any pictures of him like that. He hid the fact during his presidency, fearing a public image of weakness. One life-sized statue of him at the memorial does show him in a wheelchair.

FDR as he really was

Another angle

The back of the chair shows how he designed it himself (also the fact that it was a repurposed simple kitchen chair).

Back of the chair, with diagram on the bottom

The plan of the chair

The memorial had a flood earlier in the year which, ironically enough, knocked out the waterfalls and pools.

Dry pool

The memorial also has lots of quotes all around. It seemed like they were in chronological order and we entered from the back of the memorial. So we started with World War II stuff and worked our way back to the Great Depression era when his presidency began.

FDR WWII quote

More words of FDR

Probably his most famous quote

Presidential seal from the start of his rule

None of the structures is taller than one story, leaving the memorial virtually invisible from outside. The area is quite shady, making it pleasant on a warm Saturday afternoon.

A big plaza

Another part of the memorial is dedicated to his Fireside Chats, a series of informal radio broadcasts where FDR promulgated his policies and kept the public directly informed throughout the Depression, the New Deal, and World War II.

Fireside Chat area

Listening to FDR on the radio

Nearby is a recreation of the bread lines from the Great Depression.

Poverty strikes

People in need of help and hope

Another area features various sculptures, some quite cryptic. Too bad no park rangers were nearby to help explain the plan of the memorial.

Pillars

Braille panels?

Another closed pool

The World War II area symbolizes the destructive character of war with a disheveled and scattered set of blocks.

WWII area

Another quote

More debris-like sculptures

His dog Fala is shown with the first statue commissioned for the memorial. This statue was controversial because it depicts how FDR hid his disability. A part of the disabled community was upset. The sculpture compromised by adding wheels...to the back of the statue. They are only visible by climbing around the back!

FDR and his dog

More of the memorial

Another fountain not running

The last part we saw has a statue of Eleanor Roosevelt, the only first lady depicted in a presidential memorial. She is shown with the United Nations symbol in the background.

Eleanor Roosevelt

Memorial Day 2020 Epic Bike Ride

For our Memorial Day celebration during the pandemical lockdown, we went on an epic bike ride. We rode from our house to The Mall in Columbia (and back again). The round trip is over twenty miles, so we packed some snacks and planned for breaks along the way.

At our first break, my youngest spotted some squirrels playing in the park.

Pointing to...

...squirrels!

Here's a close up if you couldn't spot them

Our next stop was by Savage Mill for a snack. Unfortunately we were too early to get a snack at the stores so we ate what we brought.

Enjoying a snack

The next leg of our journey took us along the Patuxent Branch Trail. This trail runs under I-95, far under it!

The highway bridge

We took another little break but not for too long since a spider was sharing our bench.

Bench with spider, pixels on screen (2020)

Here's a close up in case you weren't able to spot him (sorry if you didn't want a close up)

We walked down to the river (the Patuxent!) and threw some rocks in.

Enjoying the river

The trail soon turned to pavement which meant we made better time.

Moving faster

After about an hour, we made it to Lake Elkhorn where we had (you guessed it) another snack. We broke out our travel cups and shared a drink of juice.

The falls at Lake Elkhorn (sounds like an apartment complex)

We went further along the trails till we hit Owen Brown. Memorial Day weekend is when swimming pools open in our area. Sadly, with the corona virus lockdown, no public pools are opening. We saw one of the closed pools (along with a closed playground).

Pool and playground (sounds like a British pub)

Here's a close up in case you couldn't see how the swings were locked down by being locked up

Soon enough we were on the bridge going over Route 29, which meant our destination was not far at all.

This bridge looks more impressive from the road

Taking the above picture, my group (i.e. my family) got too far ahead of me and I lost them at the next turn. I figured my way to the mall and somehow managed to get there before they did! I went up a steep hill, which they probably avoided.

Across from the mall

We tried to get take out from Union Jack's, a British-pub-style restaurant just outside the mall. After perusing their menu on our phones and picking out what we wanted to eat (which took a while), we called to order. Then we found out that they would not open for business until 4 p.m.! Their excuse was Memorial Day. We looked around the map for other mall-perimeter restaurants that might be open (the food court being inside and closed for business). We found a pizza place not too far and put an order in. The food would be ready in twenty minutes which was plenty of time to get there. On the way, we spotted a Chick-fil-A tent set up for sales by the entrance to the food court. We would have ordered that if we knew it was an option. Too bad they didn't advertise better!

The pizza joint had some interesting art outside.

Sculptures by the restaurant

A dad came by with his kids (and some food from Shake Shack). They played on the flower in the picture, sliding down the petal into the center. I was surprised.

We ate our pizza which was very good.

Us eating

After finishing lunch, we rode through the mall's parking lot rather than around the outside. The lot was totally empty on Memorial Day Monday. The experience was surreal.

An empty lot

On the way back, my oldest had more energy and kept getting ahead of the rest of us. I caught up once and had him stop. We looked back and eventually the rest of our crew came into view.

Can you spot the approaching bikes?

Here's a close up in case it's too hard to spot them in the above picture

On our way back down the Patuxtent Trail, we stopped at another part of the river to throw more stones into the water. Our only problem was the lack of stones in the area.

Looking for a rock to throw

The bike ride was fun but exhausting. The next day we did very little! Except smile, of course.

Movie Review: Tremors (1990)

Tremors (1990) directed by Ron Underwood

Val (Kevin Bacon) and Earl (Fred Ward) are handymen in the town of Paradise, Nevada (population 14). They do a lot of odd jobs and have ambitions to move to the big city--Bixby, Nevada. They finally decide to leave. But they've decided too late! A student seismologist (Finn Carter) has taken over the earthquake equipment in Paradise Valley and has been picking up unusual underground activity. More unusual is one of the local who is up on a powerline tower with his Winchester rifle. He's died. Val and Earl run across him as they are leaving, so they bring his body back to town. The local doctor says he died of dehydration, which takes three or four days. What is so scary that it'd keep a guy with a rifle trapped for so long? Underground carnivorous worms, that's what. The worms attack a work crew that happens to be working on the only road out of the valley, leaving the residents of Paradise isolated with the increasingly menacing foes.

This classic b-movie hits all the right notes. The heroes are charming and and down to earth. Reba McEntire and Michael Gross are fun as a survivalist couple who have a fully-armed compound just outside of town. Some of the other residents are picked off to heighten the tension. The creatures are slowly revealed and pretty ugly, though in a PG-13 way (not too over the top with bad looks or gore). Even thirty years later, the effects look good. The film has a lot of POV shots of the creatures chasing the residents (even one or two "underground" shots that work surprisingly well), a classic technique in the horror genre. The movie also has plenty of humor (the best line is when Val describes their handyman work ethic--"We plan ahead, that way we don't have to do anything right now"). The plot is the standard "coming up with schemes to escape the monster" and is intelligent enough to be enjoyable. None of the ideas they used seemed dumb and the only unlikeable characters are the worms themselves.

Recommended--this is a top-tier b-movie like Deep Blue Sea.

Book Review: Mr. Higgins Comes Home by M. Mignola et al.

Mr. Higgins Comes Home story by Mike Mignola and art by Warwick Johnson-Cadwell

Two vampire hunters head to eastern Europe in hopes of cleaning out Castle Golga. A large group of vampires are gathering for Walpurgis Night; the hunters hope to get the drop on the vampires the morning after the big party. Their ace in the hole is Mr. Higgins, an old man who once visited Castle Golga by accident on his honeymoon with horrible consequences. They want Higgins to lead them to the castle's crypt. Higgins wants them to end his suffering. They strike a deal, but the plan goes awry when Countess Golga invites them to the festivities.

The story is a classic Mignola reimagining of another story. In this case, he retells a typical Hammer horror film plot. It's both fun and tragically melancholic. The art has elements of Mignola's style but is less dark and stark. The art is good but not as effective as Mignola's. The book is an enjoyable and quick read.

Recommended.

Book Review: The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem

The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem

This book is a series of short stories featuring two "constructors" named Trurl and Klapaucius. They are robots that build other machines for their own entertainment or at the requests of others. Often, those others are government officials or royal personages, the sort of beings who can pay handsomely for the work. The two robots have many comic misadventures as they try to satisfy customers and to make the customers pay for their services.

The stories are mostly satirical. Rulers want ultimate power (with which they might oppress their people and dodge paying the robots) or fantastic entertainment. Trurl is usually the one to deliver, being both more egotistical and more gullible than Klapaucius. They travel all over the galaxy, like Aeneas in The Aeneid (hence this book's title). They encounter strange worlds (like the square planet with a square sun) and even stranger requests. The comedy has the wit of Jonathan Swift and the whimsy of Douglas Adams and the intellectual bent of Umberto Eco. Lem satirizes ideas from science, philosophy, and literature.

I found the book entertaining, though sometimes Lem goes overboard in making up words or being extremely silly. I laughed out loud a few times and was surprised by the light and comic touch. After reading Solaris, this book gives a very different experience of what the author can do.

Recommended, especially for some Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy humor taken to an Umberto Eco level.

Sample text, a minor character explaining why it can't impose Universal Happiness on others:
"If I understand you correctly, you wish us to bestow happiness upon everyone. Well, we devoted over fifteen millennia to that project alone--that is, eudaemonic tectonics, of which there are basically two schools, the sudden and revolutionary, and the slow and evolutionary. Evolutionary eudaemonic tectonics consists essentially in not lifting a finger to help, confident that every civilization will eventually muddle through on its own. Revolutionary solutions, on the other hand, boil down to either the Carrot or the Stick. The Stick, or bestowing happiness by force, is found to produce from one to eight hundred times more grief than no interference whatever. As for the Carrot, the results--believe it or not--are exactly the same, whether you use an Ultradeifact, Hypergnostotron, or even an Infernal Machine and Gehennerator." [pp. 266-267]

Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial, Washington D.C.

The Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial in Washington D.C. is part of the cluster of memorials around the Tidal Basin, the Jefferson Memorial being the most famous. The MLK memorial is the most recent, dedicated in 2011. The plan to dedicate it on August 28, the anniversary of King's I Have a Dream speech, was postponed because of Hurricane Irene. The dedication moved to October 16, 2011, the anniversary of the Million Man March.

The entrance to the memorial from the National Mall is a bit cryptic--two large stones split in two. The view of the Tidal Basin in between does not give a clue to the honoree of the memorial (though the signs give it away).

Entrance to the memorial

The side of the rock

View from the other side

A few paces in is another stone block which has a larger-than-life figure of King looking out over the Tidal Basin.

The missing block!

Looking out over the waters

The sculpture is called "Stone of Hope" and was carved by Lei Yixin. The name is a reference to part of the I Have a Dream speech where King says, "Out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope."

See how it was taken out

The wall behind the statue has many famous quotes from King, who spent his life crusading for civil rights and fighting to end poverty.

1963 quote on justice

1961 quote on equality

The flowers were blooming nicely.

Flowers

King's statue seems to look straight across the Tidal Basin at another memorial.

Looking out at...

...the Jefferson Memorial

From here, we went to visit the FDR Memorial, which will show up on the blog soon!