Saturday evening we found ourselves making a brief visit to the Metropolitan Museum and wound up wandering over to the Temple of Dendur which I blush to confess I've never checked out in any of my trips to the museum.

I can't decide whether I was more struck by the museum's setting of the temple -- in this atrium-like space with one wall entirely of windows, which reminded me chiefly of Dulles Airport in Washington, DC -- or with the fact that the temple sports a fascinating array of scratched in travellers' grafitti, dating back to at least the 1820s, from what I can see. The history of boorishness preserved lovingly: I'm of half a mind to go looking to see what monographs there are on Grand-Tour-Making-Boobs Tagging the Wonders of the Ancient World.

If you've never been in there at night, please go -- the way the temple (and everyone milling through the floodlit space) reflects off of the slanting window-wall, as the moving lights of Saturday night cut through somewhere in the depths of the image, is worth the effort.