Another day's useless energy spent...

I've been sitting around watching history shows for a few hours now. The girlfriend and I watched another episode of Freaks and Geeks, and then I watched the last couple of outs of the baseball game I'd been watching earlier. After that, I watched the debut episode of Doing Da Vinci, where a group of engineers and such try to build weapons designed by Leonardo. This episode they built the giant round conical tank, and it seemed to work pretty well, although it certainly would have been loud. During their tests, firing one of the cannon in the tank generated a sound pressure level of 116 dB. I'm quite sure that any soldiers manning the vehicle without serious hearing protection would have certainly been deaf. But, aside from that, the vehicle did appear to be a viable war machine.

Following that show, I switched over and watched the debut episode of Patton 360, which details the battles of General George Patton during World War II. That show was interesting, and told me a lot of things that I didn't know before about Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of French North Africa during World War II. I haven't really ever seen something that just follows his career in the war that way, so I think it should be pretty interesting to watch the whole thing. Actually, now that I think about it, I think the movie The Big Red One might follow his unit through World War II, but it's a dramatized version, not a documentary. In any case, I'll keep watching it unless we decide to cancel our cable to save money...

After that, I watched a repeat show about the Battle of El Alamein, and now I'm watching a repeat show about Kublai Khan's failed invasion of Japan. Both interesting shows, even though I've seen them before. The girlfriend isn't tired, so she's making some chocolate chip cookies. I'm not sure when she's going to want to go to bed, but I'm getting pretty close to that time myself...

The baseball game I watched today was National League, so not all that important to my teams, but here are the results that do matter. Texas continued their losing streak, at the wrong end of a 10-9 result against visiting Baltimore. That drops them to 3-4. Toronto went to 6-2 with an 8-6 win in Minnesota. Toronto's in first place in the AL East, half a game ahead of Baltimore. And Oakland moved to a 3-4 tie with the Rangers by mauling the Red Sox 8-2 at home. Seattle and the Angels did not play today.

AL West Standings:
Seattle, 5-2 (.714 win %)
LA Angels, 3-3 (.500 win %, 1.5 games behind)
Oakland, 3-4 (.429 win %, 2 games behind)
Texas, 3-4 (.429 win %, 2 games behind)

Philadelphia, Part 1

It didn't take us very long at all to get to Philly. Despite the nasty looking traffic reports on the Weather Channel at the motel, there really wasn't any problem on the road again. Speaking of the motel, we did notice as we were leaving that right on the opposite side of the building from where we were staying, one of the columns holding up the second floor seems to have been hit by someone's car at quite high speed. The two rooms immediately adjacent were cordoned off, but we were both wondering just how safe the place actually was. And that's not even counting the neighborhood where it was located. Oh well, at least we made it out alive and no one broke into the car...

I took a few pictures as we made the short drive through Delaware. Here's the skyline of Wilmington, such as it is:


It seems like most of the area between Wilmington and Philadelphia is composed of a lot of industrial kind of buildings. For some reason, that kind of area sort of fascinates me:


And this time I also managed to get the Welcome sign:


For the most part, the skyline of Philly was on the wrong side of the car for me to get good shots, but I did get a few anyway:

(Oh, and there are more views of the industrial stuff in Delaware and the Philly skyline on my Flickr site, if you care... Just click any of the photos.)

We passed by a few ships on the way in. I'm not sure what this ship was, but I'm guessing from the visible superstructure that it's a warship of some sort:


There were also a big yacht-looking thing, the Spirit of Philadelphia, and a sailing ship moored next to it:






I think the sailing ship was actually a restaurant, but we didn't stop for a closer look.

We found a parking space fairly easily at around 9:30 local time, fed about an hour and a half's worth of quarters into the meter, and headed off to see where all the history happened. We were greeted by this building:




It's the Merchants' Exchange building. According to a little brochure we picked up a bit later, it was built in 1834 by William Strickland. It's the oldest stock exchange building in the U.S.

There were several other historic-looking buildings right in the neighborhood when we got out of the car. These don't appear to be on the map, so I'm not sure exactly what the buildings are:



Just another block or so, we were standing in front of the First Bank of the United States:


We stopped for a few minutes at the Independence Living History Center, which provided us with the map and brochure we used to find our way around. It's one of those working museums, where you can watch the people doing the work of putting together the pottery and cleaning the artifacts found in some of the digs they've done around Philadelphia. The people were quite nice and asked if we had any questions, but we just looked at some of the displays and watched for a few minutes before continuing on our way.

After we left the info center, we walked up Chestnut Street toward Independence Hall. I took a couple of pictures of different buildings along the way. Not sure what this one is:


First National Bank:


The National Library Museum:


I thought the cellar doors along the street were kind of interesting. Not the kind of thing that I've seen anywhere else, really:


One other thing I thought was kind of interesting, which I certainly don't see much down in Texas, is the people walking around the town in colonial outfits. Unfortunately, this lady was walking pretty quickly down the street, probably trying to get somewhere warm, so I didn't see her until she was already past:


I suppose I probably could have yelled something at her and got her to turn around, but I had plenty of other things to snap pictures of, anyway.

This is the New Hall Military Museum, which unfortunately appeared to be locked up when we walked by, or we might have wandered through it for a bit. In the background is Carpenters' Hall:


The Military Museum is a reproduction on the site of a building built by the Carpenters' Company in 1791 for their own use, but which was used by Henry Knox, the first Secretary of War. And the Carpenters' Hall itself was the building used for meetings of the Carpenters' Company. The Company itself was a guild dedicated to improving the skills of its members.

Here's a little closer shot of Carpenters' Hall:


And this is a closer shot of the windows, showing the very ornate architecture:


Here's a view of it from the side:


And the front, or back, perhaps. Anyway, the opposite side as the first shots:


More in the next post...