Lunch Hour

I'm done with the 1st Floor West Wing of the Smithsonian American History Museum, so I took the escalator up to the 2nd. There are some cool central exhibits in the Museum, including a huge floor map of all the states, showing what type(s) of voting apparatus are used in each county of America. The blue & red map from '00 was cooler, but this isn't bad, except in New England, where they refused to accommodate the town government structure, and instead labeled almost all the counties "mixed", an unhelpful designation. Upstairs hangs the Pentagon flag, which originally covered the destroyed west wall of the Pentagon after September 11, 2001. On the not-so-cool side is a sculpture of George Washington in a Zeus-like pose; classical revivalism has just gone too far when an American statesman is portrayed bare-chested and wearing a toga.