The Winter 2006 Iowa Blogger Bash

Fun fun fun!! Tonight was the Iowa Blogger Bash, held at the Raccoon River Brewery down on 10th & Mulberry in downtown Des Moines. For a list of all these folks' names and where they blog, you can visit Joe Kristan's blog for the official roundup.

The anonymous blogger on Joe's list was Stef from Bob, by the way. She's very cool... one of only two leftward bloggers in attendance tonight, but I still love her just the same. She takes awesome photographs.

Even though I'm rather rightward in my political beliefs, I can put those aside easily and find something to appreciate and admire in just about anyone from any side of the aisle. I find that I often have artistic tastes more in common with lefters than righters, and art plays such an enormous role in who I am... Anyway, I was wishing that Jeff Gitchel from TrainOrphans had been there because I would've loved to meet him. And Brent from Law & Disorder didn't show up!!! After he promised he would!!! I knew that Brett might not be able to make it, so I wasn't too upset about that one -- besides, I got to see him recently in my own living room, so hey, who's complaining?

The other Kris from Side Notes & Detours didn't make it this year; Stef said she had business in Chicago to attend to. The last of the three pictures above was a "Jazz-Hands" pose just for her benefit.

So far as we know, we still haven't met State 29, although we all speculated as to his/her profession. Tops on the list were insider government -or- university professor. The mystery continues.

Mega-thanks to Joe Kristan for buying everyone's first round... now that's a stand-up guy, to buy my Dr. Pepper for me! You're the bomb, Joe.

It was great to see the Iowa Geeks Doug & Jody Halsted again... and Doug's got a budding political career in the works.

A fun evening with lots of laughs; Blue, Royce, Kyle, Joe and Jeff have solved the problem of the Iowa Rainforest boondoggle porkbarrel project. I'm going to be watching their blogs in the upcoming days to see if any of them are going to blog about their solution, and if they do, I'll link to it. It's ingenious, really. Remarkably ingenious. Involves machetes and blacklights, if that grabs your attention...

UPDATE: Joe's already blogged it... or at least parts of it. He failed to mention the idea of hunting under blacklight illumination. I tell you, Royce is a man's man. Give him a blowgun and stand back, people. And it was BlueFish who first suggested hiring scantily-clad babes to work in the Rainforest building. I was shocked... SHOCKED, I tell you.