News-Record.com

I blogged this on my site moments ago...I had an impromptu meeting with some supporters (some teachers, actually) and it ran way over. I was so looking foward to meeting you all; holler when the next one is and I'm there for sure.

This is why I need a campaign manager...sing out if anyone's interested.

E.C.

Highlights for me... a tall Coca-Cola and meeting The Savage.

Allen:

I would like to go on record proposing a big federal program to mandate that bloggers be nicer to each other. Alternatively, we could have a mean and bad ideas tax so that bloggers will have to face the costs of their terrible posts.

Ah, it's great to be back out of the real world and into the safe and kindly virtual world.

Thanks for setting the real world meet up.

Also, the Savage turned out to be a nice guy. Go figure :)

Best wishes,

Allen,

Thanks for setting this up. Although I arrived as David was leaving it seemed as if everyone was able to comment in a civil manner. Next time, you may want to try for a larger place or reserve the separate room. I'm serious, try the potato salad sometime.

Biotekboy

Savage has already told me that you and Doug werent such a bad guys Allen. However, I still cant opologise to Doug yet for the scrooge efigy I made of him. No, the damage to my family, friends and community is too big to simply forgive. Just like that!

As for Savage being a nice guy. Should you be suprised to know that all of us in the NHP Liberation Army are good friends and all reasonable people in normal circumstances. Savage, myself and the several others that regularly hijack the posts here have just got a little upset in having our children kidnapped, our community broken up and our local school turned upside down.
One thing we always say though is how many good friends we have made along the way!

Allen, thanks again for setting things up for yesterday. I really enjoyed meeting everyone. And I was a little surprised (although in hindsight I'm not sure why) that so few of us there were "from" Greensboro (my family didn't move here until I was nine and I spent most of the '90s in Charlotte, but I even went to college at UNC-G).

If Ed is right, and we *won't* be "nicer" to one another on the blogs, I can't help but wonder why that is. Is it just something about the "electronic abstraction" of blogging/commenting/emailing versus face-to-face? Oh well, I'm sure someone has written reams on the subject, I just need to look for it.

Great meeting everyone and let's do it again soon.

Regards,

Thanks for your time and comments, guys. We'll definitely do another one. As for the lack of women in attendance, I hope it wasn't something I said.
Now back to the blog wars.

Was a good time. Too short.

Like was said, the great paradox in blogging I think is that to have a good vital blog, confict is needed. This in itself can promote a certain degree of animosity at times, some of it may be artifical.

The problem with the busing issue is that the people arguing were on different levels-visceral level for the people involved and a detached,abstract,jounalistic level for Allen and Doug.

Allen and Doug, at least in the early stages
saw a greater good involved. Due to mistrust of the schoolboard and the many times-all abject failures-that this same thing has been done to NHP people in the past,the parents saw it as a political gimmick repeated ad infinitum

Be that as it may, it is appreciated that Doug and allen have allowed themselves, even though it may be a function of their jobs, to be used as targets so to speak, for people to unload on during the frustration of this issue the last three or more years.

Thanks for doing it.

It was well worth the drive.Would do it again.

The biggest surprise to me was Ed Cone. That little picture they have in the paper that accompanies his columns makes him look like he is about sixty years old and he looks about thirty in person.