Great Aces

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What?

That dude is German.

It's a very good photo. Good as the Che Guevara one any day. Menacing. Excellent pilot. Killed a whole bunch of us good guys. Yes, he was an ace. An enemy ace.

Manfred Von Richthofen. The full photo shows a broad black scarf over a leather flight jacket, with a bit fat iron cross in the middle. 

The link goes to Great Power War with descriptions of aces in a click-through format. So there's that if you're interested. 

But I'd like to talk about something else.

The Ace Von Richthofen's uncle built a castle in Denver modeled on the original Richthofen castle built in Germany. 

And it's ugly as hell.

Big. Thick. Clunky throughout. Even the sunroom is is big, thick and clunky.

It's a thing with mansions built in that period. They're overstuffed with rugs, sofas, chairs, and furniture, intrusive large lighting, huge lamps and chandeliers, large plants, paintings in thick frames, tapestries, statues, shelves, layered fabrics, textured wall paper, taxidermy, armor, weapons, vases, curios, such that very large rooms are actually crowded. The walls are thick and cold. The glass is wavy. The beams are heavy. The coffered ceilings are crap. All remodeling makes everything worse. 

I adjusted the mid tone of these photos. They're all too dark to see anything. 

Imagine your dog running circles through these rooms. Poor thing would bang into furniture.

I'm exaggerating, okay? I'm trying to make a point over here.

If you had $3.75 million to spend on a house, any run of the mill modern McMansion would be better than this. As an empty shell, it's way too thick and clunky. 

The photo doesn't show exactly how crap the ceiling is in this bedroom. Nor does the photo of the sun room show how incredibly heavy the exposed wooden ceiling supports are. The room allows more light than usual, but there is nothing airy about the space. It's like a bit more glass than seen in a State prison. And the plants all died from failure to photosynthesize.

I should have picked worse photos. Because the place really is worse. Here, the photographer is too good at cropping the truth. 

One page I read the writer said he grew up near this house and he was convinced vampires lived there. It is the site of a famous murder. 

Here's what I mean. See all that junk on the steps? 

They had a thing about cluttering their front steps. Molly Brown did this same thing to her house a few blocks away from where I live now. 

And the cement Roman and Egyptian statues, Grecian plaques, and various vases and planters are truly deplorable, especially when taken together all crammed into such a tight space.

I hung out on this porch for awhile talking to some dude about other places to visit. I didn't care to go in because they wouldn't allow my camera.

So I went to the carriage house in the back, large as a rather large home, and turned into a gift shop, and I must say, it's the best gift shop I've seen apart from the one at the Museum of Natural History for all the insane scientific stuff that it has for kids, and the hidden gift shop at the base of Dinosaur Ridge with all its fantastic dinosaur-related things for kids including shoes, and pith helmets, 3-D lenticular pictures of dinosaurs and such, combined with genuine fossils. 

Speaking of lions on the sides of front steps, one of my grandmother's neighbors in Bethlehem Pennsylvania had such lions at her entrance. I loved those two lions. I loved pretending to ride them. I was in kindergarten back then, it was natural to climb on and ride them. They didn't move, but giddy-up anyway. Come on, move! Doot-dodo-doot dodo-doot dodo-doot dodo-doot. 

We didn't go anywhere, but oh my god, the glory of riding a cement lion is amazing. But I had no appreciation of how filthy those things are. I'd come home literally covered in dirt from head to toe from hugging a filthy cement lion and pretending to ride it. When you've got cement lions out front you really must hose those things off.