There was the usual chit-chat first -- checking the temp on club members' relationships, jabbering a drizzle of baseball, tallying injuries from any DIY jobs, and finding out where everyone else's job search was pegged for the week on the Barf-O-Meter.
We talked shop -- blogging for free, from home. We don't talk about the crank-it-up, on-demand, enforced gold mine of the Olympic games, thank goodness. No-one's much interested in corporate somersaults, or in teevee.
Half of our members are likely using their sets as boat anchors, paperweights, or goldfish bowl display cases. The other half probably doesn't yet know that there's been a transition to digital, and that their old analog sets will now only get static from Mars.
I chewed on an old, favorite bone, the all-but-cancelled space program, and its catastrophic loss to the nation and to knowledge. "We now have no way into space. Our astronauts have to hitch-hike up with the Russians, at 60 million bucks a seat!"
It was a shame, all right, everyone said. After all, how would poor ol' Willard Romney find his way to planet Kolob to see if his god was there yet, so Willard could be made one, too? Mittens was hustled off the conversational Lazy Susan at our table, for being a twit on 83 separate levels, then bundled off in his magic underpants, while we twisted our own undergear with current events.
As I type these lines, on June 3, 2013, Private First Class Bradley Edward Manning is...
