Barney reveals the briefing room

"Barney's Holiday Extravaganza" is available now on the White House website. In it, Barney has a run around the EEOB, ground and state floors of the Residence, the West Wing, and--briefly--the East Wing. Among other places, he visits the Press Briefing Room, which we see is still in quite a state of disarray. They seem to be opening up the windows on one side to full length. I think that's a shot of the basement where there are no windows. It'd be nice to have a look at those "Press Briefing Room Renovation" plans Barney's looking at....

The 1960s

Got around to setting up my camera and got out my Kennedy-Johnson books and shot a number of photos of photos from the era, including the Kennedy Press Briefing Room swimming pool mural, the Johnson Yellow Oval Room, Kennedy and Johnson Family Dining Room, Johnson and 1890 West Sitting Hall, Luci's wedding reception in the East Room, and the Diplomatic Reception Room. I have several more I'll do later.

Update: Added the Kennedy Library, Queen's Bedroom, Treaty Room, and the Oval Office with Boudin's red rug and LBJ's desk and the Cabinet Room.

Update: Added JFK, Jr in the President's Secretary's Office, the replanting of the Rose Garden, the Kennedys playing in the South Fountain (!), and Caroline's kindergarten class in the Sun Room, the third floor Central Hall, and the Family Theater.

Miscellany

I added several miscellaneous photos here and there, including a couple in the Blue Room of the Kennedy and Taft eras, a different view of TR's Green Room, the 1922 East Wing exterior, and W in the Press Briefing Room.

A couple of days ago, I added a few others, particularly images of artwork in the State Dining Room and Palm Room.

UPDATE: Dennis commented on the Ike pic, which has always bothered me, so I reprocessed it to fix the fade (and straightened it) and posted the new version (old version here).

TV West Wing

Made some changes to the TV West Wing page to include some of the most relevant parts of Pete's review of season 1 and not include the Amazon ad link. Then I added a link to this page from Wikipedia's page on the TV show.

I wanted to be sure the page WP links to is as relevant and non-spammy as possible. The WHM get quite a bit of traffic from Wikipedia's White House pages (I put links on several of the room pages, most of which I started in the first place), so I figured I might get a bit more traffic from WW fans.

New front page

Just changed the front page image to one of the White House at Christmastime, complete with snow. Permission to use it was graciously given by Keith Stanley of kestan.com, where you can even get a print of the image. Thanks, Keith!

History

While making some other, minor changes, I accidentally uploaded new Overview and Residence pages where I had started to break out the various stages of White House history. I'll continue breaking out the history in more detail, with pages on the 1902 and 1952 renovations and construction and expansion of the wings. However, the structure isn't working out quite as I intended (we discussed in an earlier post how it would be nice to have detail on each of the major renovations), so these pages will continue to shift.

Capturing WH video clips

When I first starting creating WHM, I tried to pull the official White House video clips on pages like Life in the West Wing to archive them in a more-or-less permanent place. But because of the way they are encoded (RealMedia) and hosted (some non-gov site), I couldn't even figure out how to link to them from WHM, much less save them and host them myself (I'm pretty sure they're government-created and therefore public domain). Before this administration retires to points west, I'd like to capture them so they're available in the future. Anyone who can figure out how to download (as opposed to just view) the clips, I'd like to hear it.