Blogtoberfest at the Pour House seemed to be a big hit. I was late arriving, then only had a brief window of coherency (about 20 minutes) before becoming excessively chatty and memory impaired by the start of the World Series game. I was happy to meet so many interesting people, though, and the crowd was pretty diverse. Here's what I could piece together from the various business cards I found in my back pocket.
I recall chatting with Jeff about the coincidental naming of his website, BowlOfCheese.com; I just consumed a helping of cheddar from the nearby food bar. I met him along with AnnaB, who has a the totally excellent blogspot address: slurmfactory and should really grab-up slurmfactory.com if it's available. Dana, who runs a PR firm and has very fine taste in chocolate. Michael, who writes ProjectFailure for ZDnet. A fellow with whom I share names, Jesse, who is Twitter-only at the moment, under the excellent URL of twitter/misc. And thanks to Jenny, who put it together.
There were more, many more, but this is the best I can do for now.
Afterwards, Josh and I stumbled over to a dive bar on Mass. Ave. He had complete faith that they wouldn't have TVs blaring the Red Sox game. He was wrong, of course, but in his words the TVs "weren't a big deal" (for them, not us). Starting out at the "Pour House" and moving down the price scale is difficult, but we succeeded.
Plans to ride home on the erroneously named No. 1 bus failed when the driver blew past the stop. We weren't especially surprised. As we rode from Symphony Hall to Porter Square, profanity and the MBTA's name came up in just about every sentence. We ended up at Newtowne Grill, where five bucks bought two drinks and left a nice tip. Full success.
Paul mentioned Industry, CA the other day. It's a famous and strange town outside Los Angeles that basically functions as an industrial tax shelter. Two pieces of trivia: it is the site of the mall in Back to the Future and it has exactly one Mcdonald's. Except you can't eat there: it's solely used for shooting movies and commercials.
I have 4 tickets to the Celtics tonight, but only 3 attendees. If you can be at the FleetCenter by 7 and want to see the new Celtics play LeBron James, let me know.
In my defense, what I meant when I said that the TVs weren't a big deal was that, unlike at the Pour House where they had 7 big flat panel TVs positioned all around the bar so you couldn't help but see them and blasting the announcer at full volume so that you couldn't help but hear them and pretty much everyone was just watching the game, TC's (the dive bar we went to) had only two fairly small TVs playing at a reasonable volume and even though most of the people there were paying attention to the game they were also chatting amongst themselves and sitting on stools or in booths so that there was actually room to move around and order a drink.
Come to think of it that was a really nice place for a "dive".