perpetual memory loss

The other day Colbert had Kissinger on and treated him with kid gloves. He lobbed a bunch of softballs at him and didn’t press him on his checkered history. What the video if you want to see something with very little substance at all or….

…you can head over to the Nixon Library’s new online exhibit. There you can learn about some of the truth behind Vietnam and the December Bombings without all the spin. It’s your call but only one place is going to give you the straight dope.

It has been almost 7 years since I’ve been in California and boy does it feel nice to be back. The weather is beautiful and compared with DC there is no humidity.

My day went pretty much as expected–both good and bad. Woke up balls ass early, crammed myself onto a flying sardine tin with a bunch of other assholes, and stood in lots of long lines throughout this epically long day. For the most part things went smoothly but of course there were some balls that were dropped–not by me of course–but I’ll let it slide today. Tomorrow is crunch time and hopefully everyone is on their A game because I’m looking for a day full of no drama.

Got to visit the Nixon Library today which was pretty cool. It was bigger and nicer than I imagined. While walking around I stumbled into the new exhibit that has Futurama storyboards and animations cells from episodes that feature Nixon’s head. So that was a bonus. Lastly, I got to meet some old school Nixonians and they pretty much talked shit to me from the get go (although they tried to be subtle about it). They didn’t wait to find out who I was or anything about me. I’m a gov worker so I’m shit and the enemy.

So now that my day is winding down I’m feeling nostalgic so I went and bought myself some 40′s. When I was a young pup I used to partake of the Old E or Mickey’s but now that I’m older and wiser I prefer the ol’ Colorado Kool-Aid. To finish this day off all I need is some tacos or In ‘N’ Out Burgers oooorrrrr both.

The analog side of an online exhibit

I’ve been super busy these last few months working on a project for work, but now that it’s done I am finding I have more time to blog, read, and play video games. To celebrate being done with my project (mostly) I figured I’d write about what has been occupying my time these last 7 months. Thankfully I got a new job in January with the Nixon Library. Immediately upon being hired I was told that my main focus for the first 6-7 months was to create an online exhibit. As someone who has never curated an exhibit before I was necessarily a bit worried. How the hell was I going to accomplish this? Where do I start? Will I be able to even complete this in the time frame that was allotted to me? Those are the types of questions that swirled and twittered around my brain for pretty much the entire 7 months. Some how I did complete it and somehow I managed to exceed expectations, even my own, and produce something that has now been deemed “The first of many”.

So what exactly goes into an online exhibit?

Well good thing you asked because here are the ingredients for this particular exhibit:

1. 15+ Books (monographs, memoirs, biographies, and US History)
2. Countless hours of reading and note taking.
3. Hundreds of post-its
4. Countless hours researching primary source documents
5. 15 page narrative
6. 10+ revisions to said narrative
7. 100+ hours of listening to the White House Tapes
8. A Darth Vaderesque “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!”
9. 30 pages of notes on the White House Tapes
10. 36 audio clips created
11. 32 primary source documents scanned
12. Researching photo negatives in cold storage
13. 36 photos scanned
14. 50+ hours of design, photo editing, entering metadata etc.
15. 8 videos digitized and then edited
16. Learning how to code a website
17. 8, 000+ lines of HTML & CSS code
18. Many hours of work at home at night and on the weekends
19. Checking
20. Rechecking
21. Obsessing
22. Rechecking again
23. Too many new gray hairs to count
24. Write a Tumblr teaser
25. Create a Tumblr graphic
26. Stress & wrinkles galore
27. One last revision
28. One more rechecking

And when you put that all together it comes out as an online exhibit that 5 people may click through–hopefully more though. Anyways stay tuned as Memoirs v. Tapes: President Nixon & the December Bombing goes live on Thursday.

If you can’t spell your candidates name perhaps you shouldn’t be voting.

(photo via NARA)