Over at the Lifestyle blog, I have a really fascinating interview with frequent National Review contributor Thomas Hibbs about the latest version of his book, Shows About Nothing:

• How post-WWII Hollywood originally explicitly rejected Nietzsche and nihilism, before ultimately embracing him with open arms.
• Why horror movies eventually eradicated God for charming nihilists who fashion their morality as “beyond good and evil,” such as Dr. Hannibal Lecter.
• Seinfeld: the sunny side of nihilism.
• How man successfully threw off the encumbrances of authority and tradition only to find himself subject to new, more devious, and more intractable forms of tyranny.
• How aesthetics came to usurp morality.
• Mad Men’s Don Draper: the man in the gray nihilistic suit.
• Can Hollywood move beyond nihilism?

Click here to listen to the interview.

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Over at the PJ Lifestyle blog, I have a lengthy-ish review of the tiny Roku XS set-top box, which can stream videos from Netflix, Amazon, Hulu Plus, Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, Glenn Beck’s GBTV and numerous other sources. The Roku is a glimpse at the future of the television; click here to read.

And if you missed earlier this week, click here for my review of HBO’s Boardwalk Empire; the first season of which is now out on DVD.

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Boardwalk Empire is out on DVD, and I have a review over at the PJ Lifestyle blog. While I was away in November, first on the NR Cruise, and then visiting relatives in South Jersey, I found myself getting sucked into the recent HBO series, almost against my will. It seemed to be running in a continuous loop on the channel, which was available everywhere I was staying. And it didn’t hurt that I took plenty of trips to a far more clapped version of Atlantic City when I was kid, not to mention that in November, I was back in my old stomping grounds, an hour and a half away, while I was watching it. If you’ve seen the series yourself, or if you’re interested in the 1920s in general (or Hollywood’s often fanciful interpretation of the era at least), check out my review here.

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OK, the trusty ol’ Shure-58 microphone seems to be working, and now that I’ve recovered from the fast-paced world of Insta-blogging (thanks again, Professor!), I’ll be back here at the usual haunt, in just a bit.

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Back in early 1999 or so, I first had my cable modem installed, which was branded at the time with the logo of @Home, then later by AT&T, and now Comcast – and I may be forgetting an interim broadband provider or ten along the way. Web surfing immediately became fun, fast, cheap and with unlimited access, no longer a nasty, brutish, slow, and expensive Hobbesian proposition. I immediately started searching online for Websites that went against the grain of the MSM. You young kids on the Web today may not believe this, but back then, in those Paleolithic pre-Blogosphere days, there weren’t that many choices. If I’m remembering correctly, there was basically:

• Matt Drudge
• National Review
• Reason
• World Net Daily
• The Brothers Judd (back when it was solely a book review site)
• Townhall
• Free Republic
• And the Media Research Center

At least, that’s where I spent the bulk of my time surfing for political news and opinion, until I discovered someone calling himself an “Instapundit,” who had linked to an article I had written for National Review Online. That was in early September of 2001, only a few days before the world changed.  I have a lot of respect for those early Websites and organizations that were willing to buck the establishment. They were the first to “think different” – as a popular ad campaign advised us all to do back then, while espousing perfect conventional wisdom sorts of figures – in the period before Weblogs made publishing on the Internet available to everyone. (Including me; I didn’t start blogging until March of 2002, and up until about 1999 or so, I was writing almost exclusively for that quaint medium called “dead tree.”)

So, I’m certainly honored to both once again be included in Doug Ross’s “Fabulous 50” list for the second year in a row, this time winning “The Bozell Award for Best Media Pundit.” Brent Bozell’s Media Research Center and the even older Accuracy in Media were calling the MSM on their leftwing bias back when the World Wide Web was just a gleam in Al Gore’s eye.

Will I make it again for 2012? If not, it certainly won’t be for a lack of material, as the MSM promises to throw everything including the kitchen sink at whoever the GOP presidential candidate turns out to be. It’ll be a Dresden-like carpet bombing campaign by the media, to coin an MSNBC-approved metaphor.

And beyond that? Well, back in 1998, when actor Ving Rhames (from Pulp Fiction and the Mission: Impossible movie franchise) won a Golden Globe for playing Don King in a made-for-TV-movie, he immediately handed the award over to Jack Lemmon and said, “I feel that being an artist is about giving, and I’d like to give this to you.” The two immediately received a standing ovation from the audience. Maybe if I keep at this blogging thing for a few more decades, I’ll be able to hand over the Ed Driscoll Award for Best Media Pundit to Brent Bozell. In the meantime, a big thanks to Doug for the award, and for everyone for stopping by over the years – particularly since this coming March will mark our tenth anniversary in the Blogosphere.

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Just in time for Christmas, from Seinfeld and SNL to The World at War, I have a post at the PJ Lifestyle blog on some of the best DVD box sets from television’s last 45 years. It’s a very idiosyncratic list, along with my thoughts on how these shows impacted pop culture history. Definitely drop by and list your favorites in the comments.

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I started out on Photoshop in the early naughts, fumbling my through the program and using it for basic photo editing. A minor breakthrough came in 2005, when I submitted some Photoshopped images of Hugh Hewitt’s Blog book in various strange places. This was for a Fark-like Photoshop contest that Hugh’s producer Generalissimo Duane held, and I ended up placing Hugh’s book on Lawrence of Arabia’s desk, being bandied about by the pioneering multimedia journalists of the New York Inquirer, and being promoted by Capt. Kirk and Mr. Spock:

A few years later, when I began to produce my Silicon Graffiti videos, an unanticipated side benefit is that I found myself using Photoshop more and more to produce artwork to go into the videos, including on the monitors in the virtual set behind me. If you watch the shot that begins here of a mushroom cloud followed by photos of various dictators, everything behind me, including the virtual set, is a single Photoshop .PSD file, with various layers animated in Adobe’s Premiere Pro to appear in sequence, timed to an ancient British Cinesound explosion sound effect.)

However, producing artwork for PJM, including many of the 85X85 pixel thumbnails on the PJM homepage greatly accelerated my learning curve. Around Christmas of 2009, while visiting the now sadly closed Borders bookstore in Santana Row, I came across Art and Design in Photoshop: How to simulate just about anything from great works of art to urban graffiti. While a fair amount of political correctness and left-wing sucker punches (including a demonic Reagan Photoshop parody) mars the book, there’s a lot to be gleaned from it. As its subtitle implies, the book walks the reader through how to recreate everything from old movie posters to food and toy packaging to Mondrian, Roy Lichtenstein, and other pop art images.

I also found a slightly older title, Photoshop Classic Effects: The Essential Effects Every User Needs to Know, which I purchased later, to be an excellent learning guide. (The one thing I miss about the local Borders closing is being able to browse through books such as these to see which ones viscerally grab me. If it’s love at first sight, I’m much more likely to spend hours in the book, rather than a how-to guide I feel like I’m pulling teeth to learn from.)

And so from those books, and a lot of trial and error, here are some of the better images I’ve produced over the last few years.

This image of President Obama in his plus-fours, inspired by a quip by Mark Steyn, grew out of a shot of Donald Sutherland in Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H, and was bordered by a Polaroid Photoshop brush plug-in, which James Lileks referred me to:

This Salvador Dali parody was produced following the instructions in the aforementioned Art and Design in Photoshop. I just replaced the melting clocks with similarly dissipated Obama logos:

Last fall, when Obama became obsessed with his sippin’ Slurpees metaphor, this was a natural, which I used for a time as my Twitter avatar. It’s just the hat artwork that Stacy Tabb produced for my blog’s masthead back in 2004 on top of an existing 7-11 Slurpee ad, on top of a default Photoshop gradient layer. The shadows and reflection at the bottom were cribbed from the instructions in  Photoshop Classic Effects:

Having been one of those legendary 45,000 people who bought the Velvet Underground’s first album shortly before forming his own rock group, this parody for a Zombie blog post’s thumbnail, when former VU drummer Mo Tucker supported the Tea Party last year, was a natural:

I had lots of fun parodying MSNBC’s silly “Lean Forward” ads in the fall of 2010. This one, created when Olbermann was still earning a paycheck from General Electric proved to be strangely prophetic…

When it was obvious that their party was going to lose Congress last year, and a majority of Americans disapproved of the Ground Zero Mosque, the MSM really teed off on their customers. This was my response to a bitter and punitive Time magazine cover late in the summer of 2010:

In 2009 or so, I purchased some Photoshop templates from Digital Juice for use in both videos, and as stand-alone artwork. I spent a pleasant half an hour or so putting this one together one Saturday last year:

This one I think I did around Christmas of 2009. It took quite a while to copy and paste, and line-up the text to produce this Spinal Tap-inspired image, which appeared in a Silicon Graffiti video on media bias, and an item here and during a stint guest-hosting on Hot Air.com about studying the Washington Post (then Newsweek’s owners) Kremlinologist-style.

This image was for a thumbnail for a post last year by Richard Fernandez called “Gone with the Wind.” For most of these images, I start big, and then use Photoshop’s “Save To Web” feature to reduce the images down to an 80 or 85 pixels square jpeg. I always save the layers in their original size as a Photoshop file, since you never know when you’ll need a larger image, or want to modify the image into something else. For obvious reasons, I’m hoping to reuse this image right around this time next year:

This was for a Victor Davis Hanson post last year on Obama’s poll numbers going into freefall. I wonder how many people have looked at this, and assumed it was simply a skydiver promoting Obama in 2008? I took an existing photo of a skydiver, tilted his angle to make him appear more out of control, and then placed the Obama logo on top of his ‘chute. I cut the various colors of the Obama logo into different layers, and then set the blending options on each layer to different settings, and different degrees of transparency, to make it appear as if the whole thing was blended into the fabric of the parachute. A fair amount of work, but the end result was pretty effective, I thought:

Finally, another image for a VDH post, this one from last month on “The Coming Post-Obama Renaissance,” and really well received. (The lads on Trifecta even mentioned it on PJTV.) It’s a photo of Obama heading for Marine One, with the sky clipped out, and a glorious sunrise pasted in underneath. I tried to visually convey the message of VDH’s post: When BHO is no longer POTUS, it will be Morning in America once again:

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I have some initial impressions of Amazon’s Cloud-based MP3 player, some tips on how to relatively painlessly convert 200 albums worth of Windows Media files to MP3s, and some half-baked ruminations on both inherent nostalgia of recorded music and high-eighties pop culture at the PJ Lifestyle blog.

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At the Lifestyle blog, I have a fun interview with Rob Long of Ricochet, National Review, and numerous television sitcoms, including a little-known cult hit called Cheers, recorded while Rob was driving up to northern California this past weekend.

Among the topics discussed:

• The CEO of Starbucks has called for an end to partisan rancor. Given that the price of a monthly Ricochet membership is tied to the price of grande latte at the flagship Starbucks in Seattle, does this signal a moratorium on new podcasts?
• What is it like for a conservative working in Hollywood?
• Was Cheers a liberal TV show?
• Is Los Angeles now the most puritanical city on the earth?
• Is living — and dining well — the best revenge against the puritan left?
• Is TV’s small screen shrinking President Obama’s stature?
• And more!

30 minutes long, tune in here to listen.

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Over at the new PJM Lifestyle blog, I have an interview with Glenn Reynolds to discuss the state of the DIY culture that he explored in An Army of Davids, and why it’s progressing, while old media, in the form of Hollywood and the recording industry is regressing in quality. Plus a look at the British phone hacking scandal, the state of the 2012 election, and much more. Click here to listen.

Note: No puppies were blended in the making of this interview.

I think.

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Over at Pajamas’ newest blog, I have a lengthy interview with Ben Shapiro, the author of the brilliant new book, Primetime Propaganda: The True Hollywood Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV, which is both a well-researched history of the TV industry and how it began to tilt hard left in the late-1960s and early-1970s, and a series of interviews with key industry executives on the subject of its bias.

Click here to listen.

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Hi, I’m Ed Driscoll. You may remember me from such informational kiosks as Welcome to Nordstrom’s Casual Shoe Department, and The Inner Light: You and Your Proctologist.

And from sitting in at Instapundit this week. It was certainly fun sitting in the cockpit of the big 747; but it’s also nice to be back at the controls of our little P-51, ready to take to the skies look for bandits at 12:00 high.

Which we’ll do in just a bit, as soon as we get the propeller cranked, and approved for takeoff.

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Greetings from a secure, undisclosed location. But all I can say is that, wow, when you guest-blog at Instapundit, you really go first-class!

Actually, that photo was taken at the George H.W. Bush Library at Texas A&M in College Station, TX. We went down there last month, as my wife has a client who’s a regent of the college and a patron of the presidential library. I also finally got to meet Bryan Preston  in person during that same trip, to discuss video blogging war stories. While Bryan is now the impresario behind Pajamas’ new Tatler group-blog, as I’ve mentioned before, Bryan’s production skills at creating Michelle Malkin’s “Vent” videos for Hot Air in late 2006 and 2007 are what got me into producing my own “Silicon Graffiti” series of videos starting the following year.

And speaking of Hot Air, it was certainly fun to guest-blog there this past week while Ed Morrissey was visiting Europe. A big thanks to Ed and Allahpundit for inviting me to sit-in. They do their blogging out of the Batcave:

Actually, that’s Bronson Canyon, from a trip to PJM HQ in Los Angeles in March. I wonder how many people who watched the old Adam West Batman TV series in 1966 knew back then that every time Batman and Robin burned bat-rubber tear-assing out of the Batcave, that Gotham City was located so close to Los Angeles:

Between Hot Air, Instapundit, my work here at PJM, and my occasional blogging at John Hawkins’ Right Wing News, I feel like a cross between James Brown and Joey Bishop — but then, doesn’t every man from time to time? The hardest working man in the Blogosphere*, and at least at the moment, Guest-Host for hire. I’m hoping to work my way up to sitting in for Merv and Johnny Carson by the time the summer is out…

* At least it felt that way for a time on Friday, getting up to the speed that Instapundit churns out posts seemingly every ten minutes. No wonder it takes four of us to replace him when he’s on vacation!

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Back in 2007, I reviewed Robin Aitken’s then-new book, Can We Trust the BBC for Tech Central Station, now known as Ideas in Action.tv. As I noted back then:

Somewhat similar to conservative criticism of Reuters, complaints of bias in the BBC were given much more conclusive proof after 9/11. For Reuters, it was Stephen Jukes, their global news editor’s remarks immediately after 9/11 that “We all know that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” Aitken says that the BBC has a very similar worldview when it comes to the Palestinians.

“My view is that the Palestinians and the Palestinian leadership is the architect of its own misfortune in many ways. Whereas, what comes across from the BBC’s presentation of events in Palestine and the Middle East generally, is that in some ways, the Palestinians are a put-upon victim minority, and it’s the beastly Israelis who are doing the dirty to them.

“And you know, that is not a fair presentation of the position. Because the Israelis are militarily strong and successful, and the Palestinians aren’t, I think the BBC allows that too much to play at its judgment, so that what comes across is too much sympathy, if you will, for the Palestinians, too little appreciation of the rights of Israel, and also too little recognition of the fact that Israel is a functioning democracy in a way that Palestine isn’t, and nor is any Arab-dominated Middle Eastern state, and not enough credit is given for that in my view.”

Similarly, another BBC bias is obvious from their tone of Iraq War coverage. During the war’s early days, Aitken was still affiliated with the BBC, via its “Today” radio show. While Aitken viewed the Iraq War, at least in its early days of liberating Ba’athist Iraq, as a positive turn of events, his opinion was an outlier in the halls of the BBC. “Now, you can take whatever view you wish of the Iraq War. But it isn’t the BBC’s place to have a view in that sense of such a thing. Now, of course this view is never made explicit, I should hasten to add: the BBC doesn’t come out and say, ‘We think the Iraq War is Wrong.’ But the tone of the coverage, the negativity, of the coverage, the starting point for all the discussions about the war” tacitly demonstrates those biases. “I think it took a clear editorial view, from the very first, that the Iraq War was mad, bad, and dangerous,” and thus filtered that opinion to its millions of listeners, all the while, feigning objectivity.

Flash-forward to today; the London Daily Mail reports, “The BBC could be part of a ‘propaganda media network’ for al-Qeada, according  to U.S. files published by Wikileaks:”

A phone number of someone at the BBC was found in phone books and programmed  into the mobile phones of a number of militants seized by the Americans.

The number is believed to be based at Bush House, the headquarters of the BBC World Service.

‘The number is associated with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).’

To be fair, that puts the BBC one up on Reuters, where terrorists shoot motivational videos for the venerable “news” “service.”

Oh and speaking of Wikileaks, they red-line the irony meter with this quote:  “’Do not challenge leadership in times of crisis’ became Assange’s favorite slogan.”

George Orwell, call your office.

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If you were out having a life this weekend, you may have missed some of our posts from over the weekend. If so, click here for:

• ‘Obedience Through Terror’ Kills 11 in Afghanistan
• Let’s ask the New York Times: say, whatever happened to that “Piss Christ” guy?
• Video: When Bill Buckley met Saul Alinsky
• The Five O’Clock Follies
• NBC-Chicago reported on Wednesday that “3 ‘Strange’ Men Cause Flight Diversion — at least one man of ‘Middle Eastern descent’ got into a fight with an attendant, passengers say.”
• Scary-Ass Charts of the Day
• Go Midwest Young Man
• The Bookworm Turns
• Politico journalist tells Howard Kurtz, “We’re supposed to be openly skeptical…We will stipulate that [Obama is] the greatest orator of modern times, but now we’re looking beyond that in every speech for what he’s actually telling us.”
• In the Land of the Rococo Intellectuals
• Does America Have a De Facto State Religion?
• What a Half-Century of Reprimitivization Looks Like

Or just click here and start scrolling.

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Nick Kronos writes, “Obama’s Libyan adventure smacks of 1988 Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis:”

The comparisons of Obama to Carter have been numerous, but I don’t think Libya is a place Carter ever would have gone. Instead Obama’s Libyan adventure smacks of 1988 Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis. In an attempt to prove he was a tough leader and militarily capable, Dukakis infamously donned a helmet and climbed into a tank…where he proceeded to look ridiculous. Likewise, President Obama was pushed into this war–dragging America with him–by a feeling that not acting was leaving him looking weak and a second banana to the more bellicose Sarkozy. The wives of the two leaders seem to have a rivalry, so perhaps the competition has spilled into the affairs of the men as well.

In any case, he’s there now — and we with him — and it’s a fine mess indeed.

The Obama administration’s foreign policy as the second coming of Iron Mike Dukakis? Who could have expected such a thing?!

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After getting the Tatler, the new PJM group blog up and running, Bryan Preston is taking a well-deserved couple of days off, and has asked me to help hold down the fort there, which is why posting was light back here on good ol’ Ed Driscoll.com today. (That and having to fly back from L.A. this morning.) But if you missed any of my posts at the Tatler today, click here for:

• It’s Been Said Lawrence, That You Have a Funny Sense of Cynicism
• The Japan Syndrome
• How the White House Bullies the Media
• The Broken Window Fallacy

And that’s in addition to the posts that went up today by the fine cast that contributes to the Tatler every day.

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Back on February 5th, Howard Rotberg gave a sneak preview of “Obama’s 2015 State of the Union Address” at Pajamas, where he predicted:

“My move today is to recognize that Americans cannot roam the world imposing our particular notions of liberty and democracy on the world. The world is composed of many people who find their liberty depends on a religious supervision of all aspects of their daily lives. Although we in America have traditionally embraced a separation of church and state, it is time to acknowledge that our way is not the only way.

[Applause and standing ovation]

“To prove this to the world, we are modifying one of America’s most lasting symbols, the Statue of Liberty. We recognize that not all people in the world accept our notions of liberty. That is probably the underlying reason that the United States has been expelled from the United Nations. To demonstrate that we have learned that tolerance is the most important world value, and not a narrow definition of liberty, we are changing the name of the great statue just off the shore of New York from the Statue of Liberty to the Statue of Tolerance.

[applause, cheering and standing ovation]

“And to absolutely prove the seriousness of our tolerant new order, I have exercised my jurisdiction to order an alteration of the statue, so that instead of a crown on the statue’s head, there will be a hijab.

[applause]

“The site of the new Statue of Tolerance, with its hijab, will be a fitting symbol for what Time magazine has recently called the “Century of Islam” and our tolerance as a people. This will show the world true American greatness.

[Applause and standing ovation]

“May God, Allah, Jehovah, Waheguru, Yahweh, Akamba bless America.”

[applause and standing ovation]

I created an accompanying thumbnail of the Statue of Liberty wearing an hijab to illustrate the story:

Flashforward to this item at the Blaze, which notes that “‘Shariah4America’ Group Calls for Burkha on Statue of Liberty:”

According to the group’s website, the Statue of Liberty “elevates the command of man over the command of God” and public veneration of the statue amounts to idol worship strictly prohibited by Islam. “This has forced sincere Muslims to develop realistic plans that will aid in the removal of the Statue of Liberty.

“Due to the scale of the task at hand, it is highly likely that rigorous safety checks will need to be employed before the demolition of the Statue of Liberty can commence; thus as a temporary measure, it is proposed that a large burkha is used to cover the statue, thereby shielding this horrendous eye sore from public view as well as sending a strong message to its French creators,” the site reads.

Click over to the Blaze to see Shariah4America’s own statuesque Photoshoppery, about which Meredith Jessup asks, “Are They Serious?”

Reality? Satire? Who can tell these days, where it’s only a matter of time before real life outpaces even the most skilled satirist. (Trust me — it’s the law.) But to the extent that we set the (wrecking) ball rolling, I’d like to formally apologize for my role. It’s not so much thoughtcrime as Photoshop crime, but what the heck; I hear the rates for an extended stay at the Ministry of Love are quite reasonable this time of year. And the meals are now halal!

Update: Canadian blogger Kate McMillan of the great Small Dead Animals blog comments below that the Shariah4America Website is, not surprisingly, likely satire.

Well, at least for now…

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The Blogfather writes:

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: The administration’s pathetic, dithering response to the Arab uprisings has been both cynical and naive.

I think what we’re seeing is a sort of John Birmingham-lite scenario. In Birmingham’s page-turner books Without Warning and After America, the mysterious disappearance of most of the United States causes all sorts of economic and security chaos to unfold, once America is no longer there to keep the lid on things.

Whether deliberately or accidentally, the Obama Administration has substantially reduced the United States’ military and economic leverage over the past couple of years. The result is that we’re seeing a lot of stuff bust loose. America hasn’t vanished. We’ve just become, as Hitchens says, about as important as Switzerland.

18 Doughty Street is no longer on the Interwebs, but was sort of the Tory prototype for PJTV. I wrote a profile of the pioneering British Internet TV channel for Tech Central Station in mid-2007. In those early days of video, when just getting a video on YouTube seemed like a major accomplishment, they really seemed to put all the pieces together to create a virtual TV network; sadly it couldn’t sustain itself, however.

Back in 2007, 18 Doughty Street did a video that asked viewers to imagine “A World without America” — not knowing at the time how quickly our stature and presence would be diminished. At one point, the narrator intones, “A world without America would be a world without Israel” — which I imagine lots of people would listen to and think, “Ah–a twofer!”*

Fortunately, it’s still up at YouTube; click here to watch:

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* Speaking of twofers…

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Reprinted from November 9, 2005:

Back in September 2003, I toured the Reagan Library and was surprised to see a 707-sized aircraft wrapped in plastic protective sheathing, which happened to be Air Force One number 27000. As I wrote back then for Tech Central Station :

The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library & Museum in Simi Valley California hosts a 3.5 by ten foot segment of the Berlin Wall. If all goes according to schedule, in mid-2004 it will open a pavilion that houses the Air Force One that flew President Reagan into Berlin, where he gave his legendary “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” speech. The aircraft, sporting tail number 27000, was Reagan’s primary Air Force One, in which he logged 631,640 miles and 1,288 hours of flying time. It also flew Presidents Nixon, Ford and Carter to Cairo in 1981, to represent the US at the funeral of Anwar Sadat. In 1986, #27000 was used to take Reagan to Reykjavik for his summit meeting with Gorbachev, in which Reagan refused to bargain away SDI, and in so doing, began the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

When the two modified Boeing 707s that served as Air Force One were replaced by a pair of even more heavily modified 747s in 1989, the 707s eventually became backups, and used for jaunts to runways where the much larger 747 couldn’t land.

Eventually, #27000 was decommissioned in the summer of 2001. “In July of 2001, word got out that the US Air Force Museum was going to get the retired aircraft,” Melissa Giller, the library’s director of communication says. “The Air Force Museum already has #26000 on display, and they were looking to see if someone else might perhaps want #27000. They were looking at both us and the Smithsonian, and when we got word of that, we actively sought after it.

“The story goes that President Reagan once said that he wished that his library could have his main Air Force One. So with that, and since we had the room, and the Smithsonian didn’t, the US Air Force thought it would be a great fit for us.”

And it is.

It took a year longer than expected to complete, but the giant exhibit designed to house Air Force One finally opened in late October (with President Bush cutting the ribbon) at the library–a fitting final resting place for the Air Force One most used by President Reagan.

Here a few photos of the plane and the exhibit that houses it. (Full disclosure: It was terribly overcast yesterday. and the library doesn’t permit the use of flash. So to avoid uploading a bunch of dark muddy images, I’ve color-corrected and/or pushed the exposure on the photos.)

The entry hall to the “hangar”; only the nose of the plane is initially visible, in an impressive–and seductive–bit of stagecraft and composition.

(more…)

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