We dedicated one day to exploring the city of Madison, the capital of Wisconsin. So you don't get bored reading about architecture, I'll be diluting the post with entertaining facts.
Like this one, for instance.
For several years now, Madison has been in the top five most popular female names in the US. Until the mid-twentieth century, the word wasn't used in this role at all, since it meant the surname of the statesman after whom the city is named.
Popularity of the female name Madison
| Year of birth | Rank |
| 2007 |
5 |
| 2006 |
3 |
| 2005 |
3 |
| 2004 |
3 |
| 2003 |
3 |
,
|
Source
More than 300 thousand people live in the city of Madison and its surroundings, which isn't particularly much. If you're paying attention, you should have noticed that Chicago, despite its size, on the contrary, is not the capital of Illinois. The question immediately arises: how come?
The answer is simple. The capitals of most states have capitols, that is, buildings where the state government sits (and in Washington there is also a capitol for the whole country). For us, it would probably be a "city and district council", since there are no states in Latvia. The capitol is a very majestic structure, symbolizing the power of the state and the people, and therefore it was decided that building anything taller than the capitol is prohibited. When this law was passed in the olden days, it wasn't a problem, because apart from churches, the capitol had no one to compete with. But in the twentieth century, when all decent cities started building skyscrapers, the capitals got totally screwed by this law. The lack of skyscrapers hindered the concentration of business activity downtown and the creation of megacorporation headquarters in the city, wanting more space for themselves. That's why the population of state capitals only grew up to certain limits, which is what we're observing. I haven't read any of this anywhere, I just made it all up, but since everyone will be too lazy to check the theory, readers will assume that's exactly how it was. We've got a classic simulacrum, and if anyone didn't know what that is, now you'll be one step closer to understanding.
The Capitol
To start off, we walked around the center, which was all dug up — as you remember, this is due to the fact that there are only two seasons in Wisconsin, and one of them was exactly during my stay there. It's funny that when I returned to Latvia, I observed the same thing — in Riga they were massively repairing the roads, and our entire city center was dug up. This is not surprising — the climate in the Madison area is similar to ours, a bit milder though, but the rains, snowfalls and tornadoes are a constant plague.
We didn't see anything special in the center, not even students. I must report that all life in Madison obeys a special rhythm stemming from the fact that it houses one of the best universities in the world, namely the University Of Wisconsin-Madison. It's the best according to the famous Chinese ranking, I'll provide the top 20 lines for fun.
The ranking is good for those who still think Americans are dumb
Because of the forty thousand students living in the city, it is primarily tailored to meet their needs. Students live either in unpresentable-looking dorms, or in small ivy-clad cottages right in the center, which overall looks cute and green. In the dorms, however, every room has an air conditioner — with an average summer temperature above 25°C this is a must, meaning not a luxury, but a means of survival. By the way, an air conditioner in a warm state eats an order of magnitude less energy than winter heating in a cold one. In Wisconsin, though, both are required.
A security guard at the capitol asked where he could buy such a t-shirt for his daughter
In the center of Madison, just like in Chicago, there are newspaper vending machines, but what's funny is — the humor newspaper The Onion is handed out for free. For me, a paper The Onion didn't really fit into my mind at all — I'd only seen the online version, and never thought it grew out of a paper one. Well, The Onion is handed out for free because its editorial office is located in Madison, something some residents are proud of almost on par with the university. By the way,
The Onion's website is built on the
Drupal system, which I also use for my
Radio Archive. In general the magazine is awesome, you come across funny jokes in every issue. As Goblin says about Matt Stone and Trey Parker's brainchild South Park: "Year after year, the intensity of the jokes does not weaken". Same here — my sister is also surprised at how the authors of The Onion manage to crack good jokes in every issue. By the way, I found a paper issue in Lena's bathroom and read with interest about heaps of music festivals in Chicago, Wisconsin and even a separate jazz festival in the Madison suburb of Middleton, where Lena's house is located. The culture of a well-fed society, no matter what you say, is higher than that of a hungry one, though not always.
Alina even dressed up for the trip to the center and the capitol
The Madison Capitol is a structure built for the ages. Next, I will brazenly quote a brochure in Russian that we were given for free inside. A US state is way more significant and powerful than a country like Latvia, so it's no surprise that there are brochures in dozens of languages — and it's translated into Russian extremely competently, without the slightest errors.
The door under the statue between the columns is the exit to the observation deck
The Capitol is a truly unique building. It was built in 1906 after the previous, second capitol was destroyed by fire. So the current one is the third, and
they spent on it, converted to modern dollars, more than half a billion.
The height of the building is 87 meters, 5 meters higher than the capitol in Washington (even back then they couldn't help making everything "the most-most"). On top of the capitol is a statue of a woman with a badger, the state symbol, symbolizing its motto "Forward". Not the most original motto, I must say. But during the construction of the capitol, 43 types of stone from 6 countries of the world were used, including Norway, Italy, Greece and Algeria. It looks, I must say, imposing, even though I'm not a fan of baroque, rococo and other pointless pathos.
The dome of the capitol is one of the largest in the world, which is absolutely impossible not to note in the brochure. It's also funny how meticulously it points out the exact prices of all the work, including painting in the form of frescoes, of which there are tons in the capitol. There are also special mosaic pictures there, statues, a bell, but if I quote the whole brochure entirely, everyone will skip this post, which is not what I need at all.
The view from the observation deck, which my sister had never been to before, despite 8 years of living in Madison
I'll just say that all three branches of government sit in the capitol — the council, the governor and the supreme court, which gathers not all that often because it mainly considers appeals. By the way, there are also juries, and refusing this honorable role is very difficult. So if you're a citizen, at least once in your life you'll visit the bench in the role of a judge of human vices, and your employer is obliged to pay for your missed work. Curiously, while there are no lawful inhabitants of the building, meaning officials, you can walk anywhere: I calmly sat in the chief justice's seat in the courtroom, and we also went into the governor's office.
Supreme court ruling: ban copyright, legalize marijuana
