I Blame Indianapolis

At least, I think it started there. Maybe not. But certainly since Tamara Kay moved up to Yankeeland to share quarters with Roberta Ecks the bloggers' brunches/lunches have been well reported, and sound like they are well-attended, as well.

So last night we had the second ( I think?) Northwest Bloggers' get-together, dubbed the Bloggers Munch, since, I suppose, it rhymes with Brunch and with Lunch, but it was held at night (well, in the evening, but at our extreme northern latitude, the street lights had been on for a while...)

Phil from Random Nuclear Strikes has a Roll Call here. And Ry Jones of Outrageous Malfunction has photos here.

The selcted resteraunt is in an area of Seattle I'm not very familiar with, but I managed to get there with only two wrong turns. (Actually, two missed turns. I hate it when the street changes names without warning. I had actually considered driving up there during daylight, and rejected the idea as unnecessary. Once again, I am the one who needs the Clue Meter...)

Food was excellant, as promised, although I doubt I'll travel to Hospital Hill for Mexican.

Conversation was scintillating. Okay, we might have been run off from the Algonquin Round Table, but that would be because we were drinking our beer from the bottle, and asking for the salt by asking for the salt, not phrasing it as a highly literate put-down of the person we were asking.

Certainly Mayor McCheese would be unhappy if he knew we were plotting his un-election. As Phil noted

applications for CCW permits counted in per-week totals for people living within Seattle doubled between September and November, and then doubled that number again just last week.

(Until about the time Florida went "shall-issue", Washington actually had more concealed carry permits issued per capita than any other state. Maybe we'll go back to that...)

Alas, it does not seem to have retarded Mayor Five Cents' ardor for disarming the populace.

We also discussed guns (duh!), knives, computers, cars and boats, swapped a war story or two (although the phrase "No, shit, there I was" was never actually uttered), and bashed a few labor unions. (It was noted that Boeing's "machinists"* have come close to running the commercial airplane line of business into the ground, and actually settled for less than they were offered at first. Genius, boys, sheer genius. Jimmy Hoffa is spinning in his grave, wherever that is.)

All in all, good times, and I hope to be able to make the next one, which will probably be held at about the time of the inauguration.


*"Machinsts" goes in quotes because the persons being discussed are not, in fact, machinists in the sense that I am familiar with the term. A machinist is a craftsman who takes a piece of metal and forms it into an intricate piece of machinery. A Boeing "machinist" assembles parts. I did that at Chrysler's, summers, when I was in college. Granted putting Aspens and Volares together is not quite as cool as building a 747, but the principle is the same. The UAW did not try to pretend that we were anything other than unskilled assembly line workers. It paid pretty well, for all that.