I see that a few of us visited the old thread top make our comments about last night, but I’m glad I took the initiative to start a new thread on the aftermath of the DC regional Doper’s gathering. This way, I hope to encourage a few more people to show up for the next one. I’m not getting on your case for that (not even ramesh, who posted in the thread “definitely count me in” :p)- I realize that plans fall through at the last minute & some of you were coming from far, far away.
Eleven of us showed up, right out in full view of the general public and in the middle of a restaurant no less: Jeff Olsen, me, Wendell Wagner, Triskadecamus, AWB (who showed up as AWB, not as AWB II), Falcon, John Corrado, RTFirefly, Lucretia, Wierddave and one more gentleman who’s name escapes me at the moment (that’ll teach you to be a lurker!). Noticeably absent were potential presidential candidates Al Gore & George Bush, choosing instead to fritter away their campaigning time in the Delaware primary.
We met at the Capitol City Brewing Company, which turned out to be a very strange name for a place that didn’t sell virtually every single brand of beer that we tried to order. I cut them a little slack on this, partly because I didn’t order any beer, but also because my entrée was ready in about 90 seconds. I don’t usually expect this level of service unless my food is being served to me in a styrofoam box, and even then I usually end up having to scrape the onions off. I arrived about 15 minutes early so I would have time to set out the snazzy little signs featuring a screen shot of the SDMB banner on our tables, only to find out that they didn’t have any actual tables for us. They had misplaced our reservation. After about 20 minutes, they pushed about six tables & 24 chairs together for us. This turned out to be more than twice the number of people who actually showed up, but we compensated for this by getting up from our initial seats and moving to new seats, thus insuring that every available place setting was properly soiled. This only annoyed our waiter, who was obviously up way past his bedtime.
The conversation went from trying to figure out which one of us was Formeragent, to trying to figure out which one of us was Newton’sApple. Fortunately, nobody showed up wearing multiple nametags. Weirddave brought up the topic of where we thought a nuclear war was most likely to be spawned, which I thought would make a good GD thread as soon as he unpacks all of his reference books. We then moved on to the future of space flight, which I think is already a thread somewhere. The opportunity was always there to click over to a different topic if you wanted to because there were usually two or three heated discussions going on at once. I am pleased to report that at no time did we discuss Art Bell or Doctor Laura.
The evening ended just after midnight, and I am proud to report that nobody in our group was forcibly ejected from the building.
