Stasher "Fidget" tracked me down at NORML CON 2009
Blessed be, my wife drove down from Portland to San Francisco to surprise me for NORML CON. That meant I had the choice between a one-hour flight home that I’d already booked, or a ten-hour car ride back with my wife and Karri.
Given my love for the airlines (cough cough), I took the $90 hit for the canceled ticket and chose the car ride. Still infinitely more enjoyable than the airlines.
There will be no podcast today, as my boss, Allen St. Pierre, insisted that I take a day off because I worked my ass off at NORML CON. Judging by my 42-waist jeans, there is still some ass to work off, but I appreciate the gesture.
What I will be doing is attending to the #1 question people asked me at the NORML Media Table: “Is this going to be available on the web?” Yes! Nine hours are already up at http://live.norml.org from our three-hour live streams we ran. Sound quality is superb!
Then I’ll be processing the photos to upload to my personal gallery at http://picasaweb.google.com/radicalruss. Wait til you see how cool they look with the logo banner in the background! Some of them are already featured on my http://twitpic.com/photos/radicalruss.
The rest of the conference audio needs to be trimmed and compressed and it will be uploaded and available at our Special Events feed at http://www.norml.org/rss/normlevents_podcast.xml. Rick Steves, Norm Stamper, Dr. Lester Grinspoon and more are coming soon for download to your iPod or MP3 player.
As for me, this conference couldn’t have been more successful. My presentation of the Student Activism Award for Derek Copp was well-received, but my Friday morning presentation on “The Zeitgeist of Legalization” was the hit of the conference (I am told). Dr. Marsha Rosenbaum and Ethan Nadelmann from Drug Policy Alliance were highly impressed and I’ll be discussing the possibility of presenting it at the DPA Conference in New Mexico in November. Hmm, wouldn’t a Portland – Boise – Salt Lake – Denver – Albuquerque – Tucson – San Diego – Los Angeles – San Francisco – Medford PowerPoint tour, a la Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” be an epic undertaking? Maybe have NORML Chapters in each city coordinate the meeting hall and ticket sales for the event and find me a place to crash? Drive the whole way so I can pack all my gear and avoid the hassles of TSA while seeing more of this beautiful country?
How many hot wings do I have to eat to buy a Madden Cruiser? 