For me, downtown Silver Spring is really kind of boring. It's mostly just the movie theater, some restaurants, and a couple of stores. Really it's just a place to go with your friends, but you'd rather be somewhere else because there's nothing to do. Although maybe I don't know the right places or something. Anyway, I live really close to a metro station, and so for me, Washington, D.C. is a lot more interesting than Silver Spring. There's soooo much more to do in D.C., and in general it's just way more interesting. I go to D.C. more often, and it's a lot easier to go to D.C. without other people than it is to go to Silver Spring by yourself. And my friends don't always like going places. Sooo this weekend I went to the National Gallery of Art, and took a lot of video of art, but my camera died before I got the impressionist section or the only Da Vinci in the U.S. or all the weird Renaissance art. So it goes. But I still had a fun time, and there was an unfinished Michelangelo statue, the David-Apollo which is so named because it is either David or Apollo. That was really awesome, but again, dead camera so you don't get to see it unless you use Google.

(I think the video might be private but YouTube won't let me sign in so I can't do anything about it sorryy)

The paintings and two sculptures featured in this video are, in order of appearance:

The Return of Rip Van Winkle by John Quidor
Mrs. Richard Brinsley Sheridan by Thomas Gainsborough
Shaw Memorial by Augustus Saint-Gaudens
Lake Lucerne by Albert Bierstadt
The Abduction of Europa by Jean François De Troy
Señora Sabasa Garcia by Franciso de Goya
The Washington Family by Edward Savage
A Young Man in a Large Hat by Frans Hals
Captain Patrick Miller by Sir Henry Raeburn
The Mill by Rembrandt Van Rijn
Miss Beatrix Lister by Sir Joshua Reynolds
The Skater (Portrait of William Grant) by Gilbert Stuart
Sir Joshua Reynolds by Gilbert Stuart
The Voyage of Life by Thomas Cole
The Emperor Napoleon in His Study at the Tuileries by Jacques-Louis David
Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight by Joseph Mallord William Turner
David In The Lion's Den by Sir Peter Paul Rubens
Young Girl Reading by Jean Honoré Fragonard
Voltaire by Jean-Antoine Houdon
The Fall of Phaeton by Sir Peter Paul Rubens
Madame Moitessier by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

Yaaaay it's a new year, we get to write 2013 on our papers now. Alright, well, it was also Christmas too, and so this post is kind of Christmas-y I guess. See, my neighbors across the street have this fantastic lights and inflatable Christmas display, and they also play the best music! It's so wonderful (that was all sarcasm)! But their displays bring up some questions. See, I mentioned that they have Christmas inflatables (they have inflatables for every season). And they're also really into hunting. Sooo.....

I know it's really blurry, but that right there is a snowman with a gun. Also Santa in what I am told is a deer blind. Santa also has a gun, and he's joined in his cheery deer blind by a penguin, and there's a deer down below who looks really terrified (it has bugged out eyed. Santa's seems pretty happy though, and the snowman is smiling). It used to be just the snowman, but they got the deer blind Santa this year. Whenever anyone drives by their house, they slow down and stare because why wouldn't you (some neighborhood gossip: apparently the guy once had a dead deer hanging up in his back yard and it was dripping blooood, because I guess that's what you do to dead deer)?

Anyway, (that was an introduction) I thought I would write about this because it's a freedom of speech issue. Where I live, it's pretty liberal, and these Christmas inflatables seem offensive to us. I mean, Santa Claus is going hunting. And yet we're granted the freedom of speech in the Constitution, and we've come to interpret that as everything but hate speech. But then what's hate speech? Usually, in the law at least, it's defined as any form of words that incite violence or prejudicial actions. So in that context, deer blind Santa doesn't seem like hate speech. Maybe if he were actually killing the deer, and there were blood and guts and stuff. But deer blind Santa is kind of sweet looking and cartoony, and so is the shooting snowman (who isn't actually shooting that's just what we call him). So it seems kind of weird and offensive to my liberal sensibilities, but it's really not that bad.

Of course, I had planned to write this before Sandy Hook happened. After that having happened, it seems a lot worse. The neighbors have had them up since long before the shooting, and haven't taken them down yet. I still don't think it qualifies as hate speech, since it wasn't in retaliation to the shootings, and it doesn't really have anything to do with the shooting beside the guns. Seeing as I had basically written everything before the shootings, but this post deals with guns, I wanted to make sure I addressed if anything changed after the Sandy Hook shootings.