Digital Sextant

Traveled to New Orleans for the Popular Culture and American Culture Association 2009 meeting.  Inspired by cbd’s CCCC roundup, here are my bullets:

• Traveled with Jenny for our first real, non-kid, more than one night vacation in a long time.  It was really fun, and hearing Avery tell us about her day over the phone was hilarious.
• I didn’t get to very many panels this year: the more you do to help run the conference, the less you see of the conference itself.   I caught most of a panel on Firefly, attended my own panel (which had a healthy-for-PCA-audience of at least 20-25), and went to the Buffy “Once More With Feeling” screening.
• As we waited in line for the concierge, along came Dave Johnson.  We ate lunch with him on Friday at a charming little bistro called Oceana.  Excellent crab cakes.  Saw many other conference regulars and friends as well.
• Our panel, a five-person round table on teaching horror, went pretty well.  Each teacher had a different approach that suited the class and the situation they taught in.  Because it was a round-table, we spent 20 minutes talking and 60 minutes Q&Aing.  Our moderator was fantastic, too.
• The elevators at the Marriott on Canal street have a cool new system.  You punch in the floor number you want when you arrive at the elevator bank, and the lcd flashes with the letter of the elevator you will take.  Then, when you step in, the elevator has planned which floors it will stop at.  Disconcertingly, there are no floor buttons in the elevators themselves.  A couple times, people rushed on out of habit, trying to catch an upward-bound elevator.  Then they said things like, “Is this one going to 41?  No? Shit.” And hopped off at the next floor.  We joked that if you found yourself on the elevator without a floor selected, the door would open into the secret programmer access hallways from The Matrix. Or Hell.
• The paper table went okay this year, but I was a bit off on my game of getting volunteers, so we were a little understaffed.  As per Richard Sax’s suggestion, I’m going to go back to guilting the area chairs into helping out.  I ended up working three shifts myself, which is, um two more than I prefer.  We made $1200 for the travel grant fund, though.
• Other meetings: the regional execs chat, the area chairs meeting, the executive board meeting.  I skipped the business meeting, but since no one came, it was adjourned quickly anyway.
• I don’t know what I thought Burbon Street would be, but it was mostly stupid.  I did see a police officer with a decorative sticker of a flor-de-lis on the butt of her gun, though.   And lots of naked ladies.
• I bought a cool tee-shirt at Reverend Zombie’s House of Voodoo, but couldn’t wear it right away because it had adopted the smell of the store–a hefty odor of tobacco and perhaps a little marijuana.  Like a rock concert.
• Lots of seafood and good desserts.  My favorite was the Bananas Foster at Brennan’s, the restaurant where said dessert was invented.  Alas, our server was a little skittish about the fire and didn’t manage a tower of flame like some of the more daring cooks did.
• We took two tours of the French Quarter.  The first was the Haunted History tour, led by a jaunty tour guide in a jaunty hat.  She told dramatic stories of creepy houses and betrayed lovers as we walked around the quarter.  She also gave us advice for taking pictures to capture ghostly activity.  My favorite part of her technique was that she regularly mentioned multiple theories or stories related to a single thing, acknowledging that any one (or none) might be true.  She told a particularly gruesome tale about the LaLaurie house and the horrors that happened there.  Apparently Nicholas Cage owns the house now, but it’s unoccupied, standing mute for the history tours.  Yech.
• Our second tour was in a horse-drawn carraige, guided by a heavy-set man with a greasy mustache.  With a glimmer in his eye, he talked with an almost-incomprehensible rapidity mixed with a southern drawl that made him nearly impossible to understand.  He made quite a few ribald jokes, chuckling and winking and waggling his eyebrows with each.  “There was a pirate convention in town last week, you know.  They call their ladies wenches, and sometimes auction off their wenches. Heh heh heh.”  It sounds menacing but was really entertaining.  He was also able to explain the S-shaped metal hooks we’d seen in the walls — they keep the shutters open.