day 13, August 19th, Washington

wow - slept in till 830am and only just feeling awake now (writing this Friday morning).

Okay, the latest and final instalment in the bath saga. Today I went to have a shower and all the water gushes out of the bath tap. Could it be that the hotel staff are following my blog? Great. But I still can't get the drain plug to block the sinkhole. So I try to turn the water back to coming out of the shower. And I can't!

So I have no alternative to getting the hotel engineer to come up because "I can't run a bath"!!!

Anyway nice man arrives and pokes the pluggy thing with a steel pokey thing and gets it to go in. He was nice but I imagine he thought I was a moron. Anyway the long and short of it is - I had a bath!!!!!!!!

Yesterday I went to the Newseum. I expected to be there for two hours - was there four and a half - so long in fact that I ran out of time to do anything else. This is a museum about journalism and the first amendment which among other things protects the freedom of the press. In a way it was just as much about history as the media, but it was all done very very well, and very interactive. There is even a sort of game where you can discover whether you'd make a good journalist - I scored very badlly - "I think you could have done much better", the video machine scolded me. There was an interesting exhibition on the Oklahoma bomber, Timothy McVeigh, who took to writing letters to reporters before being executed. And a very moving film on 9-11 - I had tears in the eyes. Front pages from around the world... I loved it and don''t regret spending so much time there.

In the evening I had dinner with my Washington chat friends Flo and Bill. We were at a fondue restaurant where the food was cooked at the table. I hadn't realised until now that this is a very gay part of town, lots of same sex couples up and about. There was a nice yoing waiter with an interesting hairdo. The closest thing I can describe it as is like Marge Simpson's - it sort of went up in the air like a plump sausage. I wish I had enouugh hair for that... Anyway meal was great and it was very nice to catch up with Flo and Bill.

Today I am making a very late start - I want to try the Portrait Gallery and after that I might try and find a bookstore to browse in - I will need some books for the next tranche of my holiday.

Front page of USA Today - the number of reality TV stars who are running for Congress. Of couse they all say their reality TV fame won't matter to the voter, teehee. And the article didn't disappoint - yes the Republicans are making a reality TV show based on some of their candidates. It's impossible to overstate the success of reality TV here - the top rating shows by a mile are America's Got Talent and Big Brother. I saw one edition of the talent show and the performers were woefully bad - the important thing about so many of these reality shows is the opportunity to humiliate some poor slob....