Because I stayed in downtown for a good chunk of my Denver trip, I was in convenient walking distance to many tourist attractions, one of which was the Colorado State Capitol. I’ve come to enjoy looking at restored historical architecture, and I like seeing the different ways that different cities and states run their governments, so I squeezed in a quick visit to the Capitol shortly before they closed. I was too late for a guided tour, but I was able to wander around on my own for a self-guided tour, and it seems like the only thing I missed out on was access to the dome (apart from the docent’s commentary, obviously).
Here are some photographs I took in and around the building:
I considered slotting in a visit to the Denver Art Museum while I was in town, but because of timing constraints, I opted to go to the smaller Clyfford Still Museum next door instead. As you probably already concluded from the name, the Clyfford Still Museum is dedicated to showcasing the works of artist Clyfford Still.
I’ve been to a decent number of art museums before, and I imagine that my impressions might be derived from the fact that I don’t particularly have a creative or artistic eye, but I always found abstract art to be a bit funny, in that I’m never really able to distinguish what was drawn by a famous artist and what was drawn by a kindergartner.
What I found amusing about this artist was that he seemed to have the same opinions. According to some of the plaques describing his art, Still also challenged where the line is between art and a canvas merely being dunked in paint, i.e., at what point art becomes art. What I found especially interesting was the fact that Still seemed to have started with drawing distinguishable art, but as he grew older, his art got more and more abstract to the point where some of his latest works are just a single solid color.
Here are some photographs of the exhibits:
The museum also had some displays that gave background on Clyfford Still. Because the entire building was dedicated to showcasting Still’s work, I think these informative, text-heavy sections actually served a good purpose tying everything together and telling a cohesive story of his life.
Although I wasn’t able to see it directly, I snapped a picture through some glass of a storage area where they keep Still’s work that is not in the current public rotation.
Conforming to the theme of challenging what makes art art, there was a small section on the upper floor where museum guests could create their own art using any of the tools and materials provided. I liked this because this encouraged people to have a more hands-on exploratory experience and immediately apply into practice what they observed on the exhibition floor.
Some people left behind their creations to share with future museum attendees. My favorite was this kid’s poem: A very fat chicken that has ate to much corn. necklace
The museum had two outdoor sections that, if I remember correctly, were designed by the architect of the actual building. The gardens on display were a bit dead, which is reasonable, considering that it is winter in Denver.
Here is a view of the outside of the museum. There were some nice lights strewn across the trees as holiday decorations.
I enjoyed my time visiting this museum. It felt small enough that it was easily digestible by someone who might not be an art enthusiast. I usually leave art museums feeling like I just looked at a ton of different paintings and sculptures of all different kinds, but I left the Clyfford Still Museum feeling like I got told a complete and thorough story about an artist.
I’ve had a good time checking out aviation museums in the past, so when I found out that there was one in Denver, Colorado called the Wings Over the Rockies Air and Space Museum, I figured I would visit it while I was in town. I’m still not too knowledgeable about aircraft, but it was nice reading the plaques in front of each display—some were new to me, while others I recognized seeing variants of at other aviation museums.
Wings Over the Rockies was a good mixture between displaying aircraft and having sections that resembled traditional museums. It also had a wider breadth of material covered, which makes sense considering that it is called the Air and Space Museum—there was a lot of information about space travel and the future of space exploration, in addition to information about historical aircraft like you’d expect at a museum.
I arrived only a couple hours before closing time because I saw that the museum was contained in what appeared to be a single hangar, but I underestimated just how large the hangar actually was. I didn’t have to leave immediately at closing time because there seemed to be a private event taking place at the museum after regular business hours, so I got to stick around for a bit of extra time to finish checking out all the exhibits, but I still definitely should’ve arrived sooner.
General admission was US$19.95, which I thought was a good deal considering how much stuff there was to see. Enthusiasts who patiently go through to read everything and try out all the interactive experiences in the space section of the museum could easily spend 4+ hours here.
When I was younger, and before I got involved with the esports and video gaming work that led to and evolved into what I do today, I used to work in law enforcement. My Bachelor’s degree from university is in a field adjacent to the investigative aspect of law enforcement, and I was originally planning on becoming a prosecutor before deciding that becoming a lawyer would be too boring. More specifically, I worked at my local police department in the Chicagoland suburbs while I was still living with my parents.
It’s always a running joke that police and firefighters are rivals. This existed in my department as well—the police would always tease the firefighters about how we would always have to actively be running around on patrol, while the firefighters just relax at the fire station until they get called. Of course, this doesn’t account for the fact that the nature of the work of both professions is different, but we conveniently ignored that part.
Although there is the occasional memorial for fallen first responders, there aren’t too many full-blown museums dedicated to police officers and firefighters, so when I saw that there was one in Denver, Colorado—the Denver Firefighters Museum—I decided to check it out while I was in town.
Here are some photographs from my visit:
They had a collection of framed patches from each state, so of course, I had to scroll to Nevada. I was happy to find that they had patches from my fire departments back at home, Las Vegas Fire & Rescue and the Clark County Fire Department.
I thought this was a display of what the bathroom looked like at the old Denver Fire Department, but upon closer inspection, I found out that this was actually a functional bathroom, and the bathroom that was intended to be used by museum guests.
It seemed like a good chunk of the Denver Firefighters Museum was dedicated to teaching children about fire safety, which obviously wasn’t of particular interest to me, but was still a good use of resources to help educate the youth. Beyond that, there was also plenty of firefighting-related artifacts and relics on display that were interesting to look at. General admission was only US$9.00, which I think was a good deal for an hour and a half of exploration.
I’m in Seattle again for a convention coming up this weekend, but I flew in a few days early to spend time with my friend Dani while I’m in town. One of the things we decided to do was get a guided tour of the Smith Tower in Pioneer Square.
Unfortunately, our timing was unlucky and the tower was closed for a private event shortly after our guided tour, so we didn’t have an opportunity to spend additional time after our tour walking around the exhibits. (They invited us for complementary general admission for a self-guided tour to finish exploring the tower on a later date to make up for it, though.)
Here are some photos I took during our tour:
On the observation floor, there was a chair that is said by legends to cause young, single women who sit in it to soon find and marry their future husband. Dani insisted I sit in it so she could take a picture of me.
Here are some photos of Seattle from the wrap-around observation balcony:
Before we left, we used the photo station on the observation floor to take a few souvenir pictures. As usual, I am ecstatic to be there, as you can tell.
I enjoyed our guided tour. Dani and I were the only ones who attended for that time slot, so we got a very personalized experience.
Dani loves the architecture of the building, so our tour guide focused on the history of the construction of the Smith Tower, the unique elements and components of its construction, and its various structural improvements implemented throughout the years. He also took us to areas outside of where the museum signs were pointing, so I suspect that we might have gotten access to some exclusive areas that are not usually shown to regular visitors.
With my background in law enforcement and interest in criminology, our tour guide also focused on the crimes that used to take place in the offices of Smith Tower and their impact in current wiretapping technology. I’ve always found the concept of double agents, re-doubled agents, and triple agents to be very interesting, and I found those aspects of the crimes to be particularly intriguing. I was also impressed at the ciphers used to transmit information over radio signals disguised as nightly bedtime stories.
On top of the topics being aligned with our interests, I think we also rolled a good tour guide who excelled at storytelling, as he was able to relay all that information in a compelling and captivating manner.
Last week, on Monday, October 21, I had an opportunity to attend Michelle Khare’s red carpet premiere event for her first feature-length episode of Challenge Accepted, “90-Day Black Belt,” at a movie theater in Hollywood, California.
I was already familiar with Michelle Khare from seeing her past Challenge Accepted episodes where she tried various different academies for the San Diego Police Department, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Secret Service. Having a professional background in criminal justice and law enforcement, I enjoyed watching her training and thought she portrayed her experience as well as she could in those half-hour episodes. Thus, as you’d expect, when I had a chance to screen her latest episode, I was eager to join in for it to find out what she did next.
I was pleasantly surprised when I found out that the most recent challenge she tackled was to get a taekwondo black belt in 90 days. I’ve trained martial arts and combat sports on-and-off for two and a half decades now, and my very first black belt was awarded to me in taekwondo by Kukkiwon, the South Korean government’s taekwondo governing organization, when I was 8 years old. It took me two years to earn it, and even that was considered to be pretty quick, so I was looking forward to seeing whether she was able to do it in three months.
I didn’t publish this blog post right away after the event because I didn’t want to leak anything too early, but the episode is out now on Michelle Khare’s YouTube channel as of this morning. I’m going to share some of my thoughts about it, so if you don’t want me to spoil anything, don’t scroll past the five photographs until you’ve watched the episode.
Here are some photos I took from the theater—of Michelle doing her introduction before the premiere, and a Q&A session after the viewing:
I ended up liking the show more than I expected. I thought the editing was done well, the story was told in a captivating manner, and the build-up to the final result made me get invested in her success.
From the beginning, I was wondering if her master would actually assess her ability seriously, or if he had gone into this knowing that it was “impossible” but just wanted to entertain her for the challenge. A lot of martial arts schools like to “gatekeep” black belts in a sense because they don’t want to make it seem like it is achievable in such a short period of time, and I wondered if Michelle would be victimized by that notion. And sure, that is gatekeeping is reasonable for a majority of people—most taekwondo students start as true beginners and are only able to attend a few classes a week, so requiring a few years to achieve any level close to mastery makes sense. However, it seems like, not only did Michelle have a strong fitness and combat sport background already, but she was fairly dedicated and spent far more time training than the average new student.
In exchange for giving her the opportunity to take promotion tests in such rapid succession, it seems like her master ramped up the difficulty of the exams to ensure that she absolutely did deserve it every time she passed. Her color belt tests were noticeably more intensive than what I remember from my own taekwondo journey, and her black belt test was orders of magnitude more difficult than what I had to do for my black belt.
I think the way she failed her black belt test was very gimmicky. Yes, I too had to break a brick to earn my black belt, and yes, there is validity in requiring that as a component of the exam—it demonstrates strength, but there is also a material mental aspect of it where you are overcoming the hurdle of using your body to break an extremely hard object. However, there is far too much variability in brick-breaking to be able to consider it as any sort of reliable indicator of any metric.
There are different kinds of bricks, and for taekwondo, you often use cement slabs of controlled density—these are the rectangular gray blocks that you’ll see if you search online for taekwondo breaking demonstrations. The thickness of these slabs can also be controlled, and they are usually made in half-inch increments, with lighter-mass testers (like Michelle) getting thinner slabs, while higher-mass testers would either get two-inch-thick slabs or have to break multiple thinner slabs at once.
Note that I said earlier that a big aspect about brick breaking is the mental component of it. Your body will naturally not go full-force if you are about to throw your hand into an object that it knows is extremely hard, and part of the brick-breaking test is to determine whether you are able to overcome that obstacle in your mind. Having the strength to actually break the brick in half is of secondary importance, so when you have custom-made cement slabs designed for taekwondo usage, they’re not going to be as strong as landscaping bricks you buy from the hardware store. I used to coach martial arts and have handled many of these cement slabs before, and on more than one occasion, I have accidentally broken them in half because I wasn’t gentle enough with them.
I’m going to put on my tin foil hat here, and this is obviously entering conspiracy levels of speculation, but I wonder whether Michelle ended up with the thickest possible landscaping brick because they wanted her to fail. She was clearly extremely good at everything else, but I think there would have still been a lot of backlash from the taekwondo community if she had actually been awarded a black belt, especially from those who spent years working on their own black belts but are unable to view things from a more neutral and objective perspective for others in different circumstances. So, although it is unlikely, I think it is technically not impossible that her training school did this to her to have an excuse to fail her and save their reputation.
During her post-screening Q&A, Michelle said that it’s been over three months since filming concluded and she still had not earned her black belt yet. I think there is still a lot of room for improvement in her brick-breaking technique. During her black belt test, she was trying to break the brick with just her arm, as opposed to angling her body in a way that the mass of her torso drives her hand into the brick. That kind of adjustment can make a huge difference simply due to the basic laws of physics, so if she refines her strategy in that way, I have faith that she’ll pass her black belt re-test.
