Do yourselves a favor: Go to http://gigapan.org and look at the amazing image of the crowd at President Obama's inauguration.

The image was made using a significantly kewl device that collects approximately 90,434,876,079,876 bazillion-million pixels of a panorama, using a digital camera, a panning device and a computer, and, for all I know, Mr. Peabody's brain. 

In this image you can zoom in on people -- hundreds of thousands of people -- at significant distances, while Barack Obama is standing alone and orating, with Bill Clinton and two George Bushs behind him and Clarence Thomas  maybe sleeping and Dick Cheney looking all too much like Dr. Strangelove.

Pan and zoom around to see lots and lots and lots and lots of people -- Congress, movie stars, music stars, network TV cheeses, plenty of people in uniforms, plenty of people with cameras stuck to their faces. Look in the far corners and be amazed at the detail.  Scroll up to the top of the Capitol building and look at the Statue of Freedom.

Folks at my newspaper were able to find Victor Gonzales, our young assistant city editor, sitting behind the camera tower. I hope to find James Medina, principal of my little boy's school, who told me "There were about 33,000 people in front of me, and about a million and a half behind me." 

Most, maybe all, of those people are visible in this image. 

And something that will become quickly apparent in looking at all these hundreds of thousands of faces as the United States was in the process of what we all hope will be a significant change in government, at this moment of monumental historical importance: They were all freezing their asses off. 

It was cold on January 20, 2009, in Washington, D. C.  If I am reading the chart correctly on some web site I Googled, it was 28 degrees in Washington as President Obama was orating, not nearly as cold as some inaugurals in our long history, but cold enough to freeze any tears of joy any of the participants may have felt like shedding that day. 

Mostly, the hundreds of thousands of people in the amazing Gigapan image look like they will be very, very happy to return to their warm hotel rooms as soon as possible after that skinny politician finishes yapping. Man! Hurry up, will ya? This is history and everything, but geez, I haven't felt my toes for the last three hours!