Via Kevin: This was too hilarious not to share. The KFC and Jollibee mascots dance off to the tune of a Korean girl group. With that girl group's dance moves. Ahh, the Philippines.

I don't understand red velvet cake. Why an arbitrary, otherwise extraneous coloring? It's not like it makes it taste better. Did they really need that point of differentiation? In any case, it tastes good.

The Lincoln Memorial is beautiful at night. After dinner with Jason, Maja, and Greg at Kramer & Afterwords (mmm, open source and education geekery - also the source of aforementioned red velvet cake), I decided to bike out and see it - I have not seen the memorials since my 8th grade class visited DC, and that hardly counts because we were on such a tightly chaperoned, rapidly choreographed tour (because 13-year-olds can't be trusted to independently explore) that I hardly got a chance to be present and soak up the space.

This time I did. There were a surprising number of tourists for so late at night, but everyone was quiet and subdued, and I just slowly walked around, reading the carvings. The speeches on the wall are beautiful; simple and direct. The statue is appropriately monumental, and lit to nice effect. Supposedly, Lincoln's hands are fingerspelling the letters "A" and "L" in honor of the sculptor's deaf son - and they do, more or less.

I biked through most of the other memorials (Korean War, WWII, Washington, etc) and then headed for Mt. Rainier. It started raining on the way, but it was a nice rain, not too cold or hard, and I didn't mind getting soaked through so much. When I got back, I tried to do some zikula stuff, but found that my brain was awake enough to comprehend and produce text, but too zonked to do anything useful with the information, meaning that I mostly stared aimlessly at tickets for a couple minutes before realizing it was fruitless and resolving to write out the stuff swimming around in my brain and then call it a night.

*a few minutes of rapid typing*

And... there. I've written that post (the other one tonight) now, so it's time to go to sleep.