Category Archives: open post

Open post: White House 6-11

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Becky sent along this photo from oldpicture.com (the source of some good WH photos in the past) with the caption “White House at night, 6/11”. I’m not sure if the bright glare is from fireworks or just from a streetlamp due to the long exposure or what.

UPDATE: Robert Martin sent a better image that he found in the LOC which includes the full date: 6/14/11, prepping for the Tafts’ silver wedding anniversary party on June 19, 1911, which we know was lit up with search lights.

Two score electricians are now at work in the White House grounds, as thousands of electric lights will be placed among the trees and festooned across the lawns and terraces. The White House itself will be outlined completely by electric lights. No cornice, angle, or gable will be overlooked. On the west lawn of the White house an electric flag will wave. This will be a wonderful sight, the red, white, and blue colors flashing into the night.

The French…

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Times Online is reporting that President of France Nicolas Sarkozy has secretly married supermodel Carla Bruni in the Elysee last week. It’s hard to imagine such a thing happening in the White House (except maybe back in the days of President Hefner), but then there is a little church just across the park from the White House, where such things could be taken care of discreetly. One imagines the Elysee is surrounded by cheese shops and topless beaches.

Open post: Lincoln on ice

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ABC chose the statue of Lincoln outside the Lincoln Museum in Springfield, IL to illustrate the nasty weather in the Midwest. I wonder sometimes if George Washington had weather in mind when he chose the site for DC: a nice mix of four seasons without too much snow in the winter. The heat might have been more than he counted on tho, altho it can’t be much different at Mount Vernon.

UPDATE: my own photo of an icy branch.

The White House is missing! Ogling Dana Perino

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WhiteHouse.gov seems to be giving me a 404 – File Not Found error today…. Wait, spoke too soon. I guess I caught them in the middle of a change.

Anyway, the Prime Minister of Japan visited the other day. It’s amazing how they sneak these guys in and out. It’s like you’ve got to watch the news to catch it or something. Maybe I get more of my news from The Daily Show than I’d like to admit.

On a side note, there still is no new WH video for the renovated Press Briefing Room, and we’re two press secretaries behind now. Nor do we have any new pictures of the press secretary’s office, even just during a press gaggle.

Open post: Nothing new

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I went looking for new things to add to the site or to blog about and got off track looking at a political blog which distracted me with an old speech by Bill Clinton where he uses the phrase “Yore Kippur,” so I went searching for it and found a small number of reliable sources that also used it but no explanation, so I put a note on the talk page of “Yom Kippur” article in Wikipedia.

Sometimes I hate the Internet.

OOPDATE: It’s apparently just a typo, altho why it appeared in a presidential speech in multiple places, I don’t know. You know who’s responsible for this? Some schmendrick, I bet. Possibly a fakakta schmendrick.

Open post: Nothing new

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I went looking for new things to add to the site or to blog about and got off track looking at a political blog which distracted me with an old speech by Bill Clinton where he uses the phrase “Yore Kippur,” so I went searching for it and found a small number of reliable sources that also used it but no explanation, so I put a note on the talk page of “Yom Kippur” article in Wikipedia.

Sometimes I hate the Internet.

OOPDATE: It’s apparently just a typo, altho why it appeared in a presidential speech in multiple places, I don’t know. You know who’s responsible for this? Some schmendrick, I bet. Possibly a fakakta schmendrick.

WH in HD

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Stephen M writes:
I have been watching C-Span’s Presidential Libraries series. Tonight on the segment from President Truman’s library, the moderator and Richard Norton Smith were discussing Mr. Truman’s renovation and it was announced that a new White House program will be released in the Spring.

They are supposedly filming in HD at the White House currently, according to the moderator. They also said it would “show the White House like you’ve never seen before.” We’ll see about that I guess.

They said to keep watch for future information releases on the video, that it should be sometime after the primaries in the Spring.

White House wedding?

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CNN is reporting that Jenna Bush plans to marry Henry Hagar Hager, heir to the Hagar Slacks fortune.* Chances are that the wedding will take place at the family compound in Kennebunkport, Maine or maybe the Crawford ranch (especially if Wonkette is right), but there is the outside chance that we could see another wedding in the White House.

* I may have that wrong. Actually, he was Karl Rove’s aide.

Open post: Abe Lincoln, mystery writer

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Stumbled across this story by Abe Lincoln called “The Trailor Murder Mystery,” which appeared in The Illinois Whig (the magazine of Whigs, by Whigs, and for Whigs) in 1846. As a murder mystery, it’s no “Telltale Heart,” but as a case-study of the actual Trailor case, for which Lincoln acted as defending attorney, it’s pretty interesting.

Reading between the lines, I find a coerced confession (“They still plied him in every conceivable way…”) and some sloppy police work (the search for the dead man did not include the man’s own home). But I find it very interesting that in the old days town postmasters played an important role in law enforcement.