…even the airline pilots were lining up for a spot of noughts and crosses…

This was the view that greeted me when I drew back the curtains this morning….and great intro into what has been quite a painless day…an EKO which allowed me to wander along the river to the Iwo Jima Memorial…

This is only a klick or so from where we have been working and I had thought I might not get time to visit it – the memorial is in a great location in a park not far from the Potomac, lined up pretty much with Lincoln Memorial and the Mall across the river…

We went to a Kiwi work dinner tonight, Flying Fish in Old Alexandria, very nice but typical mega-sized US servings – even the appetiser would have done me for a meal…great beer too…something called Dogfish Head…I’ll try to bring some home but my last experiment with beer in the checked-in luggage was kinda messy at the other end…we drove past Arlington Cemetery on the way to Old Alexandria – if I had realised that it was so close to town I would have pushed on in that direction this afternoon….

This is my third visit to DC and each time I explore a little further and learn a little more…I think I am back here a couple more time this year so am planning on exploring further…hoping for another EKO tomorrow so that I can finish off domestic shopping obligations – already I have stocked up the library with a few books that I had been unable to find back home…and speaking of stocking up, I was unable to resist Heinkel Model’s latest work…

It is the Nautilus as she was envisaged by Jules Verne…I was unaware until the design thread for this version appeared on Paper Modelers that the most common and available version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea was not actually the complete novel as crafted by Verne in French…that “…the 23% of text that had been expurgated by the original translator for political, ideological and other reasons…” (a modern translation is available at Black Cat Studios) nor that the design known to most people from the Disney movie bears little resemblance to the Nautilus as described in the book…

Lastly, Dean @ Travels With Shiloh has put me onto a new intel-related tome to review as a possible guide to unraveling intelligence in the contemporary environment…it is a hundred + pages and again I find myself tempted to grab one of these new-fangled e-reader gadgets so that I can read on the move….Intelligence Analysis for Tomorrow: Advances from the Behavioral and Social Sciences can be found here…I am very interested to see what insights that another discipline might add to the analysis conundrum just as I found Beniot Mandelbrot’s The (mis)Behaviour of Markets last year…(yes, I will get to finishing my review of this…)