The Con Report - Sunday
Aug. 30th, 2008 05:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
awmperryThe Con Report - Sunday
Sunday
Breakfast was good, and the coffee quite drinkable for once. I wonder if they can be persuaded to have streaky bacon as well next time... Well, here’s hoping.
After breakfast I wandered over to the Church of Om – checking the klatch board on the way, and noting that I was down as a reserve – and sat through probably the least boring church service I’ve ever attended, with the possible exception of a fantastic gospel service at a church in Washington DC back in 2000... but then, anything with gospel music is likely to win out over CoE music...
Father Fanthorpe was good, as expected, as were the others, and it was nice to see Terry himself in the front row. All in all, a service worth waking up for.
Then came the swashbuckling, of course. This year it seemed to focus more on the historical aspects, rather than just “this is a sword, here’s how you hit people with it”, which led to some brief but hilarious little vignettes. Örjan’s part of the show is always worth turning up for, and this year was no exception.
The swashbuckling was extended this time with a very interesting introduction to fencing, though quite how they were in any condition to ricochet all over the room[1] like that so early in the morning is a mystery to me. Oh, and Conina With Big Axe is a very amusing, though rather scary, combination.
The whole thing was rounded off with a brief impromptu martial arts demonstration by Conina and... Jen, was it? The elbow trick – those who saw it will know what I mean – was particularly memorable.
At noon came my moment in the limelight, or what there was of it. Unfortunately we hadn’t really had time to publicise the Inter-Guild Just A Minute tournament, but we had more people in the audience than on stage and everyone seemed to enjoy themselves, so it all worked out all right in the end. I’ve covered the game elsewhere, but I enjoyed myself, everyone else seemed to enjoy themselves, and I got a ToA “...for knowing his hymenoptera”, which is possibly the thing I least expected when I set off for the Con.
Oooh yeah, I’ll definitely be running JAM again next time. :-D
Then there was lunch, of course, and the Colin Smythe klatch, in roughly that order; the klatch coffee was better than at breakfast, but not much[2]. But the klatch itself was very interesting, and proved both entertaining and informative.
After that things started to go off the rails.
Once is coincidence; twice is happenstance; thrice is enemy action. Well, in terms of missing programme items, I narrowly missed out on enemy action, but a bloody annoying bout of happenstance did get me. I’d been wandering off to attend SotD, when I noticed a trickle of blood from my nose. It happens occasionally[3], so I’m used to it, but the timing could have been better – and my haemostatic cotton was up in my room.
This was a nuisance; the blasted nosebleed didn’t stop for ages (going straight through the UFO talk), and I couldn’t really inflict a dripping blob of orange cotton wool on my tablemates at dinner, at least not without trying to pass it off as a really authentic ghoul costume, so I had to miss the gala dinner I’d been looking forward to for months. Imagine my chagrin when I got home, saw the photo albums – and found that everyone had got little dragon place markers as well.
Ah well. The extra expense of the meal, the planning, packing a suit, missing the chat around the table, the cute little dragons... A huge disappointment, and no one to blame it on but my capillaries. Infuriating.
By the time I was in a fit state to go out again, the dinner was well under way. I haunted the halls for a while, nipping into the Toast And Jam a few times, but mostly chatting to people in the bar.
Midnight ticked around. The contestants for the Post-Watershed Just A Minute tournament were eventually rounded up, a table wrangled, and the game kicked off. And it was brilliant (apart from some guy with a didgeri-don’t who kept trying to put his pint on top of my notes).
The main combatants were the Conjurors (Davina) and the Seamstresses (Conina). A few other guilds took part as well, but the outcome was never really in any doubt. At one point Dave and Heather got so into it that they had to settle a disputed point by arm wrestling[4], with unsurprising results.
By the way, if anyone was there (or at the daytime “clean” JAM), what did you think of the topics? Any you particularly enjoyed, any that were dull? The people on the real show have had four decades to figure out what works, while I was winging it; anything that gives me ideas is terribly useful. Oh, and whoever it was who worked on the real JAM – was it the UU rep? – it would be interesting to hear what you thought, what could be improved, and so on.
Eventually the game ended in a hard-fought – and high-scoring – draw between the Conjurors and Seamstresses, and the group dispersed. I don’t suppose it’ll come as a surprise that I don’t really remember what else happened that evening, though I’m pretty sure I joined the singalong and did I Wanna Be Like You in true Satchmo mode. I had fun, anyway.
