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Description of Pictures: Every year, the grounds of the public visitors center at the Mormon Temple gets decorated up for Christmas. A million lights, re-enactments in a manger, lots of friendly smiling faces. It's very pretty. Unfortunately, of course, they consider it to be a good time to convert the heathens. So this attractive, well dressed, young woman strikes up a short conversation with me that after a few howdy do's becomes "So have you ever talked to missionary, like me, before?" "Not willingly, no." She gave up after a few more minutes.
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Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.
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I love well-behaved spiders! They are, in fact, how most people find my site. Unfortunately, my network has a limited bandwidth and pictures take up bandwidth. Spiders ask for lots and lots of pages and chew up lots and lots of bandwidth which slows things down considerably for regular folk. To counter this, you'll see all the text on the page but the images are being suppressed. Also, some system options like merges are being blocked for you.
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Description of Subject Matter: The Mormon Temple in Kensington, Maryland is the 16th operating temple of the religious denomination. The 52-acre site was selected in 1962 but it wasn't announced until 1968 when the groundbreaking occurred. There was a five-week open house in 1974 and then the structure was closed to all but Mormons. (I'm told all of the carpet was ripped out after the non-believers had gone through it.) The temple itself is made of reinforced concrete sheathed with 173,000 square feet of Alabama white marble.
Every year, they sponsor a monster Christmas light display to bring in people and, if you can get around the ones who try to convert you, it's quite nice. Newsweek mentioned that they don't really consider themselves Christian although the non-Mormon visitor center prominently promotes Jesus Christ.
Bigger photos? To save server space, the full-sized versions of these images have either not been loaded to the server or have been removed from the server. (Only some pages are loaded with full-sized images and those usually get removed after three months.)
I still have them though. If you want me to email them to you, please send an email to guthrie.bruce@gmail.com
and I can email them to you, or, depending on the number of images, just repost the page again will the full-sized images.
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