Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Not the photos I hoped for

This morning, CNN had this link on its web site to an interactive satellite photo of the Mall taken at 11:19 am yesterday. It was used to estimate the crowd at that moment to be 1.5 million people.

We used it for something else: we could clearly see, in this image, that none of the other security checkpoints had anyone waiting except ours, the Purple checkpoint. And here we are, at about that time (click to enlarge):



This is the view from where we stood, taken just a few minutes later, at 11:34:



We already knew that we were not alone, but yesterday's web site statistics provided more of the story. We normally see perhaps 600 hits on this blog every day we post, but yesterday's post garnered over 1,200. When we drilled down, we discovered that all of the additional hits were referrals from search engines, with people searching on such phrases as "what happened at the purple gate," "purple gate security breach," and the like. Since click-throughs from such searches are only a tiny fraction of the number of times we display in the results, and since many similar searches would not put us in the results at all (or nowhere near the top, anyway), we can only surmise that thousands of people must have searched on such phrases yesterday.

Louise has added a photo to yesterday's post, taken at the start of our journey (before our no-show bus was due), and I will add another photo of happier times -- this is the good-natured crowd on our Metro car, just a few minutes before the whole car broke out into song:



At least we got a party invite out of the whole affair, and we had a nice time last night.



Dressed up for the inaugural ball.

I even won one of the door prizes -- a Barack Obama bobble-head doll. Long-time readers know we seldom accept door prizes and the like, but Barack now has a place of honor on our dash board, just in front of Hula Dog and Hunu, the hula guy, who have bobbled their way across the country with us for four years. And now I can say we drove all the way to DC, but did not come away empty-handed.

6 comments:

  1. You two look fantastic for the party. Too bad you missed the viewing of such an historic event, but you were there!

    ReplyDelete
  2. "Barack now has a place of honor on our dash board, just in front of Hula Dog and Hunu, the hula guy, who have bobbled their way across the country with us for four years."

    I just hope that is the only bobbling he will do! LOL! I sincerely hope that we are headed for better times and that people will work with him for a change for the better, rather than against him out of stupidity & hatred. BK

    ReplyDelete
  3. I was so sorry to hear that you and so many others were not able to get where you wanted to be. I know it's no consolation, but with everything else appearing to go so smoothly, it looks like you were caught up in the biggest snafu of the whole day.

    It's great that you were able to go to a ball and had a good time there.

    Mike Goad (at home in Arkansas) ;(
    Haw Creek Out 'n About

    ReplyDelete
  4. You guys looks supper snazzy! :) Glad you had fun despite the change in plans.

    ReplyDelete
  5. How did we miss that? We would have mentioned your party clothes when we saw you.
    What a handsome couple!

    ReplyDelete
  6. You are both absolutely gorgeous!

    ReplyDelete

Share your comments on this post! We currently allow anyone to comment without registering. If you choose to use the "anonymous" option, please add your name or nickname to the bottom of your comment, within the main comment box. Getting feedback signed simply "anonymous" is kind of like having strangers shout things at us on the street: a bit disconcerting. Thanks!