We Kinda Use 'Sorry' As Our Hello

The scientific program of the conference began on Monday. AnOs and I found the rest of the NRD-herd, The Hawk and Kampay, and also added AngiO, The Hawk's counterpart from AFIOH. Although we're a true team, we sometimes split up to make sure we had both concurrent sessions covered and to cover our differing interests. The conference schedule is pretty brutal, with only short breaks in between long sessions that run from 8:30 AM to 6PM. The endurance race begins...

Monday night was the first of two poster sessions and the one during which AnOs and The Hawk presented. AnOs managed to ask Nancy Cox whom she was whilst holding a beer in one hand. I figure this cost him the poster contest although he claims he recovered. Nonetheless, his poster was pretty well received and we had all the questions that people asked covered. Go Team!

After the poster session we went to a local pub to have a few pints to round out the evening. It was there that The Hawk saw a poster for Sonic Playground. One look at the lead singer and the Hawk decided we'd be coming back. So after the poster session on Tuesday, we headed back to the same tavern. We also added PosterGirl, whom we'd met at the previous poster session, to our team.

Now I'm the first to say that if you're going out to see a cover band, there's something wrong with the music scene or your priorities, but I have to admit Sonic Playground were enormous fun. Their songs ranged from 70's funk to more modern sounds (negative: they didn't know the Pixies!) but all done well yet not in total copy-cat fashion. Their 10-minute medley of Superstitious/Play That Funky Music/Turn This Mother Out really got the crowd in a good mood. After their warm-up set, they invited audience members to participate:

Oooo-wee-ooo-I-sing-just-like-Rivers-Cuomo

We were at this pub for quite some time and the Strongbow Cider was flowing. In fact, you can monitor the changes in the NRD-Herd with respect to time in this following series, which goes from early evening, to later on:

Could Possibly Still Discuss Science

Able to Discuss Possibility of More Drinks

Unable to discuss much

You can see in the above photo how we're starting to interact a little with our bar neighbors, as AnOs almost knocked the guy on the right down for his two-second two-step with AngiO. (That went over way better than The Hawk's stealth stalking picture taking.) Well at some point, our neighbors started to interact with us, as depicted below:

AnOs declines to give the man a hand

In this photo, we see AnOs in flight after being prodded with the strange device this member of a rugby team (yea, go figure!) used to drink from. Now I've seen AnOs running around the bases at softball and during flag football, but you've never seen the man move until he turns around and realises he's just been poked with a penis-shaped cup.

The photo at the top? Yea, we managed to go to a ball-game after the second poster session. We had good seats to heckle the Dodger bull pen from, but they still won 11-1 or something like that. I mean it's baseball, you can't really expect me to pay too much attention.

Somehow the rest of the AFRIMS crowd that joined us managed to escape having their photos snapped, at least by me. Wallace was amongst them and his grin was as large as ever, having just been taken to his first ever Hooter's restaurant. His grin said it all: Democracy! Whisky! Sexy! So much for Sea World...

The title quote comes from local native PosterGirl and a discussion on just how smashingly nice Canadians really are.