The Capitol and Architecture in DC

So today i was in the Capitol trying to deliver a package to the majority whip's office and another senator's office. It is sooo confusing! The Capitol,



as seen above, looks all innocent and easy to maneuver, all in marble, right? The House office buildings are easy, with signs everywhere, so the Capitol building should be too. Wrong! (The part about the Capitol building being made of marble I am unsure of, but I think that will be a next blog post cause its fascinating of what I have read so far.) oh an update of the building material of the Capitol from http://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/wash/dc76.htm.

*The 20th century has seen even further changes for the Capitol. Under the direction of J. George Stewart, the appointed Architect of the Capitol, the East front extension added 102 more rooms from 1959 to 1960. The stonework was also changed from sandstone to Georgia marble during the process. After a public protest at further plans to expand in the 1970s, the plans were dismissed and the vote went to restore, rather than enlarge, the West Front. Since then, primary emphasis has been on strengthening, renovating and preserving the building.*

Anyways, It is EXTREMELY CONFUSING inside there. There are corridors that twist and turn, dead ends, small alcoves that end at dead ends, elevators, stairs, random hallways tucked in the back and side of a hallway on any given floor, lots of CLOSED doors, tiny elevators, huge stairs, the Rotundas, the Crypt, tiny winding stairways....it could go on. And there are no placards stating where to go. You have to look at the numbers posted above the door but that is not a sure-fire way either. And they're obviously not going to post copies of the floor plans of the Senate or the most up-to-date blueprints. I think that they made it real confusing so, a) people can't find senator's offices easily and thus, can't bother/shoot them up. A confusing floor plan makes it hard for a person to remember how they got places. Also it serves to intimidate people, like foreign dignitaries, possibly. (I'm not singling foreign dignitaries out. They just happened to be my example) I have read though that the WHite house is made to feel intimidating and imposing and reeking of power to the unwary.

Needless to say, I was constantly asking the guards how to get places, and to their credit, they were really nice and helpful. I bet they have to memorize the floor plan or something when they get hired, cause it wouldn't do if the security got lost in the event of an emergency.

I bet all new members/senators/staffers/interns probably feel a bit intimidated/lost of the first day of the job in the Capitol.

This Article from Mother Jones online is about BP's Secret Ticket Request Line.

I was shocked but not really, considering BP has its hands in a lot of cookie jars (Cough, lockerbie bomber,cough, Libya, cough)!

Tue Jul. 20, 2010 4:00 AM PDT

For more than a decade, BP has operated a hush-hush phone line that California lawmakers can call to request box seats to NBA games and concerts at the Sacramento stadium named after its West Coast subsidiary.

In the past five years, BP has given state officials more than 1,200 complimentary tickets to the Arco Arena, hosting them in its corporate suite to see Sacramento Kings games, World Extreme Cagefighting matches, and Britney Spears and Lil Wayne concerts. Getting the tickets is as easy as calling the BP ticket request line, an exclusive, unpublished phone number that appears to exist for the sole purpose of granting freebies to lawmakers, regulators, and their staffs.

"You make a request, leave it on the voicemail, and at some date the tickets either magically appear or they don't," says a legislative consultant who gave me the ticket line's number and spoke on condition of anonymity. "They don't talk to you; you just see 'em or you don't." The ticket line's message was taken down sometime in the past week, shortly after I began my reporting. You can still listen to the original recording below.

Advertise on MotherJones.com

BP has given away roughly $300,000 worth of tickets over the past 10 years, handing them out to everyone from lowly assembly clerks to top lawmakers. In March 2002, when the Sacramento Kings were locked in a playoff battle with the Los Angeles Lakers, 9 state senators and 12 state assembly members, including the speaker, pumped BP for the coveted seats. While serving as assembly speaker in 2006, Los Angeles Democrat Fabian Núñez and his family watched the Kings beat the Chicago Bulls on BP's dime. During Democrat Karen Bass' tenure as speaker between 2008 and 2010, 13 members of her staff tapped BP for tickets to see Disney on Ice, Tina Turner, and Madea's Big Happy Family. Núñez and Bass did not accept requests for interviews.

HOT TICKETS
Listen to BP's ticket request line message:



Shows and sporting events California pols and officials attended on BP's dime in 2009 and 2010:

Sacramento Kings
World Extreme Cagefighting
Britney Spears

Lil Wayne

Disney on Ice

Beyoncé

Valentine's Super Love Jam 

Kiss

Metallica

Star Wars in Concert
Jamie Foxx

So You Think You Can Dance
Keith Urban
Bon Jovi
Zac Brown Band
Tyler Perry's Madea's Big Happy Family

Ringling Brothers Circus

The Killers

The only official I contacted who would speak on the record about the ticket line was Assemblyman Bill Berryhill, a Republican from the Central Valley, who confirms that he asked for four passes to see Britney Spears last April. Her music is "tough to listen to," he concedes, but the show "was all about the kids, man. It was for my daughters." Berryhill says that he didn't realize that his secretary had gotten the tickets from BP. Even so, Berryhill's chief of staff, Evan Oneto, said his boss wouldn't rule out taking tickets from the company in the future. Whether BP's money is spent on free concert tickets or cleaning up the Gulf, he says, "is BP's decision to make, not Bill's."

"There is only one reason why BP is giving legislative officials or administrative officials free tickets, and that is trying to create goodwill," explains Bob Stern, the president of the Center for Governmental Studies, a political watchdog group in Los Angeles. "They are not giving them to the average Joe. It's an absolute business decision." In 2004, BP spokesman Dan Cummings told the Los Angeles Times that its Arco Arena suite seats 18, and that one-half to one-third of those seats are usually taken by company employees or guests. The rest are made available to state employees. "It's for them to come out and for them to enjoy themselves," he said. "We don't tend to talk business with them." BP did not respond to a request for comment on this story.

BP has handed out far more tickets to California lawmakers than have other oil companies or other companies with stadium-naming rights. Although Arco began the ticket giveaways before it merged with BP in 2000, the tickets remain a convenient political tool for BP, which uses them to curry favor with politicians while still technically complying with a proclamation in its corporate code that it "will make no political contributions, whether in cash or in-kind, anywhere in the world." (Free tickets aside, that claim is pretty shaky, as The Washington Post recently pointed out.)

In 2006, BP gave away 321 Arco Arena tickets, more than in any year since. That same year, California lawmakers were debating and voting on AB32, the sweeping climate law that will go into effect later this year. BP has dedicated a significant chunk of its $600,000 California lobbying budget over the past year to weighing in on the implementation of the law, which includes a cap-and-trade system. BP's California lobbyist, Ralph Moran, did not respond to requests for comment.

Some recipients of BP tickets are playing key roles in crafting the climate law's landmark environmental policies. In 2008 and 2009, BP gave NBA tickets to Virgil Welch, a top policy advisor to the chairwoman of the California Air Resources Board (CARB), the state air-quality agency. It also gave Kings tickets to Dan Pellissier, then the deputy secretary for energy policy at the state environmental protection agency; Pellissier is now a deputy cabinet secretary advising Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger on energy and environmental policy.

This March, Schwarzenegger sent a letter to CARB urging it to embrace carbon offsets and to give polluting industries free emissions permits under AB32's cap-and-trade system—approaches opposed by environmental groups but backed by BP's lobbyists. Rachel Arrezola, a spokeswoman for the governor, would not say whether Pellissier had helped the governor draft the letter. She responded to a question about his basketball tickets in a short email. "The Governor has a very strict no gift policy that he expects his staff to follow," she wrote. "Before Mr. Pellissier joined the governor's office, he attended a Kings game in February 2009 paid for by BP. He followed all [state ethics] rules regarding the gift."

BP has also given tickets to a consultant for the California Senate's Transportation and Housing Committee, which is currently holding hearings on the state's low-carbon fuel standard. Tickets also went to staffers for state Sen. Roderick Wright, a Democrat from Los Angeles, who sits on the Senate's Energy, Utilities, and Communications Committee.

Such freebies are illegal at the national level; the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007 prohibits federal lawmakers and their staffers from accepting tickets and other gifts from lobbyists or companies that hire lobbyists. But they're completely legal in many states, including California. The BP ticket line's three-minute recorded message included detailed instructions on how to accept tickets without violating limits on political gifts. "Before making your request," it says, "please be aware that…all tickets provided to a reportable individual and their families or friends...will count towards a reportable individual's annual gift limit." California caps the value of a donor's gifts to an individual government official and their relatives at $420 annually.

Stern says the ticket giveaways illustrate why California's ethics rules need to be tightened. "These tickets, in a sense, are worth more than their face value," Stern says. The third-smallest stadium in the NBA, the Arco Arena has some of the basketball league's highest ticket prices and sells out nearly every game. It's also unclear whether the face value of the free tickets, which BP has reported as being as much as $170 for Kings games, reflect their actual cost to the company. Arco Arena would not disclose the price of a corporate suite.

Now that the BP ticket request line isn't picking up, lawmakers may have to find a new way to score free tix from the world's most-hated oil company. But the persistent can always give it a try: (916) 444-7968.

Oh I forgot to mention Cinnamon Raisin Bread. I went to the store this morning to get a thing of soymilk and TWO bags of Pepperidge Farm's Cinnamon Raisin Bread. The Thing of Soymilk is actually a half gallon. Oh and its chocolate. Vanilla is nasty, although I hear the very Vanilla is good.



The small one is the regular chocolate soymilk that comes in the small bottle. They have them in the Longworth cafeteria for $2.00. Idk if its a rip-off yet as I like my soymilk in the morning so I am willing to pay.




But this stuff does taste like Silk going down. (shameless plug I know buts its true) I wish all liquids tasted like Silk going down. Oh And I like the light flavor now because the regular chocolate can be quite intense in the chocolate department (and thats coming from me who puts half the bottle of chocolate syrup in the milk when making chocolate milk.)



My pictures of this yummy bread. And the thing is its good hot toasted with butter or cold from the fridge.My ideal food.

Hot Cheetos aka Flaming Hots

So a lot of people here in the program eat Flaming Hot Cheetos also known as Flaming Hots. I had never heard of them before, but then again, I don't make it a priority to keep up the different Cheetos flavors anyways. So my one of my friends had a bag and I asked for one, because I do like the regular Cheetos to snack on. This is what they look like:

The ingredients:


My picture of a Flaming Hot.


the Bag


Here is an even better picture of Flaming Hots which truly show off their unnatural red color. I mean the very fact that they are that red should set off a warning signal in your head to NOT eat them. It's like how poisonous berries are red to warn people/birds from eating them.


According to this one blog I found, The End Zone, Flaming Hots are just..: "I'm so behind the times: I didn't even know what Hot Cheetos were until I served an order of them last night. They look horrifying. Worse, the damage they do to a human body must be immense - and concession "cheese" only makes it worse. You'd have to be age 16 to have the metabolism to burn it off."
So while we're on the topic of junk food, Goldfish are up next!

The ingredients: Whole Grain Wheat Flour, Unbleached Enriched Wheat Flour [Flour, Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamin Mononitrate (Vitamin B1)Riboflavin (Vitamin B2)Folic Acid]Cheddar Cheese [Pasteurized Cultured Milk, Salt, Enzymes)Annatto]Vegetable Oils (Canola, Sunflower and/or Soybean)2 Percent or Less of: Salt, Yeast, Autolyzed Yeast, Spices, Leavening (Baking Soda, Monocalcium Phosphate)Onion Powder.





The diff flavors. I personally only like the plain flavor, the regular cheese flavor.


I Swear, these goldfish have CRACK!! in them! Every time I start eating them, I can't stop. It's like eating popcorn except goldfish are better; you crunch one, then a next and a next and a next...
They are like CRACK-CRUNCHIES!

Crack crunchies are our name for the CAT crunchies that purina makes as shown above. I swear my cats will do ANYTHING for those crack crunchies, including backflips and meowing at 5:30 in the morning really loudly. (that's you Gutsy!) Actually, Zach and I ate them when we were little, hiding behind the Kitchen door to eat them. Hey, the cats liked them so we thought it was a good idea. And truthfully, they're a bit salty with not a bad taste and they're crunchy. I think that's the main attraction of junk food, its crunchy and Salty, which is better then Sweet and Soft a lot of the times.

Oh, they have also come out with pretzel M&M's. I haven't seen them in the store yet in LHOB, but soon I hope.

Questionable much?



Why o why?

Ben's Chili Bowl

So last Saturday, we were suppose to have a tri-caucus barbecue but we were rained out, so it was cancelled.That was fine by me just because I totally forgot that the barbecue was even happening. So the rain cleared up around the time I left the apartment which was around 12. So i was going to go to the Textile museum in DC but then my friend Heidi called me. So I decided to go to Howard to hang out with her. Also when it rains, or other "extreme" weather, the Metro tends to single track. Single tracking is when the Metro makes inbound and outbound trains to take turns sharing one track on portions of the rail system. This means the Metro can be EXTREMELY SLOW!!!!!! ahhhh! But anyways, so I get to Howard, we hang out and after a while, we decided to go to Ben's Chili Bowl on U Street. This is the place where Obama has been, a place where there is a sign that says that only Bill Cosby and the Obama family are unconditionally free.









So It was crowded but I only waited in line for about 15 minutes and It was pretty cheap. I got a thing of fries, a chili dog and a veggie burger with chili for about 16 dollars. (the veggie burger was for Heidi, just for a FYI. I am not a pig. ;0 ) So I really liked the chili dog, because usually I don't like other people's chili. And I had gotten regular fries, but then I asked for some Chili and my server, I think her name was Vanessa, was extremely nice and gave me the chili on my fries for free! I made sure I tipped her good. The picture second from the bottom are what the fries look like. I saved mine and warmed them up the next day. They were good for the next day. =;)

We were going to take a picture in front of it, but we forgot because we were distracted by an ambulance coming into the restaurant.

So new developments are happening. In the best interests of me, I have decided to add some ads in the sidebar of my blog, because lets face it, I am a broke college student living in the middle of an economic depression. I hope this won't detract negatively to your blog experience but just wanted to give you guys a heads up.