Not visiting Digby
After the meeting I got four other survivors together and we drove to Santa Monica and had a fish dinner overlooking the Ocean. We were regaled with stories from Phnom Penh -- I'd no idea that Norodom Sihanouk blogged, or that he'd a nom de plume under which he writes as a childhood friend of the (retired) King sundry things which the (retired) King can't write. That he was a hot rabbit as a youth. That the son living in Paris, a dancer, and the UNESCO rep, who was voted in as his successor, "as a good Buddhist, loves all women like his sisters", that ...
We decided to export good Argentine wine to Cambodia, as the Chinese approach to wine production is chemistry plus sugar. Lots of sugar. Diabetic coma inducing amounts of sugar. Milk in Phnom Penh comes from rather far away too, as only the Cham people have cattle, and their milk production is consumed on-site, so market milk all comes in UTH boxen, from Oz.
Saturday we started the day in the Farmer's Market and spent the afternoon on and off the Promenade, unwinding from the whirlwind of half a dozen city and cultural proposals, and the joy of close encounters with ICANN staff and the GNSO (think "Hairspray") Council and other "observers" like ourselves and going over the entire new gTLD process -- more than 60 slides, or 9 unbroken hours of review and comment.
I picked up the California Green Party rules, not the same as our Maine Independent Green Party's, answered frank questions about Patti LaMarche, learned from the they-might-be-Laruchies that immigration, in particular Mexican immigration, is the root cause of all of California's evils. Silly me, I thought it was something else, like the open boarder to the east. I also learned that 911 is all a big conspiracy, and that if I only just reviewed the flight recorder data ... and there were Obama persons.
I allowed my Obama-besotted European friend to exchange social strokes with the native Obama persons, not distracting from the preening at a 40,000 foot overview (my friend really does "fly over" all of the United Snakes except the high-cap bi-costal metro bits, and his dwell-time in complex-urbia isn't quite long enough to decode why we speak Spanish to people selling organic citrus and veggies in the morning, and why we speak Spanish to wait staff at cafes in the afternoon and evening, while everyone else is speaking English) to suggest he ask an awkward question, like anything about policy, rather than the native Obama persons' scripted histories of enlightenment and conversion to the "true Democratic Party".
It was a first amendment extravaganza, with lots of DFH ephemera. I got a "make coffee, not war" sticker to put on my laptop, and a "Girls can do anything" for Gracie.
