The lighter side of the Capitol, usually…

The decision to read the budget bill — the long bill, which spans 661 pages this year — put a damper on the House’s already less‑than‑festive mood.

So Capitol M decided to catch up on some of the odds and ends that have been on my mind lately, or maybe it was sitting in the House for marathon sessions while they tried to figure out how to get the budget done without having to spend a whole day listening to a computer read it.

For the last several years, there’s been a special water fountain in the basement. Over its history, it has saved more than 110,000 water bottles. Also useful for filling coffee machines….

The day the House starts, and usually finishes, but NOT THIS YEAR, the debate on the budget is also a day to pay tribute to the late House Minority Leader Hugh McKean of Loveland.

McKean died just days before the Nov. 2022 election at the age of 55 and is sorely missed by many.

House members pay tribute to McKean by wearing a bow tie, which he almost always wore.

The budget also caused Capitol M, when things were moving along somewhat slowly, and to keep the mind occupied, to be honest, to see just how the closed captioning works during the debate on the budget.

The machine is quite confused about how to spell the names of lawmakers (you’d think just maybe those names would be available somewhere, right?)

In case you’re wondering, YouTube, where you can also watch the goings-on at the lege, is even worse.

Here’s a sampling:

Rep. Ken DeGraff of Colorado Springs was alternately identified Thursday as “Retrograph” or “Cryptograph.” There’s something oddly perfect about that.

Rep. Rick Taggart of Grand Junction, one of the trio from the Joint Budget Committee, is “tiger.” Also, oddly appropriate.

Capitol M would posit that the closed captioning machine is at least partly Hispanic and/or Italian – because it is on the nose for lawmakers with Hispanic or Italian-sounding names.

And sometimes, believe it or not, it gets everyone’s names right. It went back and forth with Taggart, sometimes calling him “tiger” and at others getting it exactly right. He was not confused about his JBC House colleagues, Reps. Kyle Brown and Emily Sirota, more often than not, get that correct.