It wasn't that big a group of us who showed up for the con, but it included pretty much a who's who of lefty bloggers such as Digby, Jane Hamsher, Eric Brolert, Kargo X, Will Bunch, Atrios, etc, etc. Comandante Markos was not there, which meant it wasn't a media  circus. Also there were lots of nobodies like me. I liked meeting another nobody called "Uncle Smokes" who had flown in from South Dakota, where he's a VB programmer for GE Medical, who has a hobby of making mix tapes of Noam Chomsky set to beats he samples from Brittney Spears and similar. And he don't pay royalties to none of them, the communist! While the rest of us were staying at the deluxe (non smoking) Marriott Courtyard right in City Center, Uncle Smokes was staying at the Travelodge a few miles away, where he could do his three-pack-a-day thing with no grief from the anti-smoker policia like me.

Only two or three people I met had heard of my blog wetmachine (or of my famous novels, for that matter). I guess that means I'm not "a-list"?  Matt Stoller did say nice things about it though, and Jonathan Schwartz of A Tiny Revolution did too. So lovely to be noticed, don't you know.

Ted Rall was on a panel and introduced himself by saying he was only there because Ward Churchill wasn't available. He was pretty funny. The Rude Pundit, whose blog posts I often like, was funny on the panel, but I thought his standup routine on Saturday night was pretty lame. I left and went down to the bar to watch basketball on TV.

I wonder if you, the typical (USian) HuSi reader knows who I'm talking about? Probably not, I'm guessing. Alrighty then, I'll try to keep this short.

I bought a DFH t-shirt. , where DFH stands for Dirty Fucking Hippie, Atrios's name for us who were right about Bush and his damn war but still can't get on TV or in the newspapers because we're not serious. Krugman said of the press and the pundit class, "There seems to be an reverse Cassandra syndrome. Cassandra was right and was never believed; these guys haven't been right yet and are always believed."  Then he added, "I must be doing something wrong; I'm going to be on Stephanopolis tomrrow."

Congressman Waxman's chief of staff was there, as was Kargo X from Daily Kos, and some guy from Harper's Magazine, talking about impeachment.

I had a lot of fun, met some nice people, including the illustrious Digby and Atrios, and drank mass quantities of beer with them.

All in all it was like a HuSi beer blast, only with Jane Hamsher in the place of Blixco.

P.S. I was going to post a short diary about this on the boat on the way home, but the Steamship Authority's filter blocked HuSi, saying it was a porn site.  Just as well; that was the first time I had ever used wireless on the boat and was feeling conflicted about it. They only just made it available. At least cell phones still don't work over much of the distance to the mainland. But that will catch up with us soon enough, I'm sure.