It was an excellent time! Thanks for having me.

Did any of those port-wine shower pics work out?

yeah, there's a few where you look like one of the less mannered vampires from 30 Days of Night....

I fail to see how that should be in any way a bad thing.

When I scrolled through this before reading, I really thought the two photos were period photos from the Titanic or something.

Sounds like a very thoughtful party.

i'm not sure exactly what the difference is -- sharpness, depth of field, something like that, but i'm not getting it right. maybe i just need to be shooting with a 6x9 cm film negative...

Oh, he's played it lots and lots! Kyle never does anything half-heartedly!

Way back when I was in college, my history teacher spoke of the sinking of the Titanic. It sounds so simple.

He started out by speaking of what the ship looked like and described what it would have been like to be on that ship. Then he told us (our ages ranged from 18 to 70s) what happened. He was such a fantastic storyteller that when he gave her time of death (and that's what it was, even though he said "And she was no more") there was not a dry eye in that classroom. More than 100 students sat and listened as if we were hearing the story for the first time and to this day, so many many years later, I can still recall the utter grief I felt that night about an event that had occured 84 years before.

Ah, you were a Clive Cussler fan too, eh? I liked his early works like Raise the Titanic best.

But I was a Titanic fan early on and would read almost anything about it. I assume you've read A Night to Remember and The Night Lives On, both by Walter Lord? They were the classic works on it for a long, long time.

Is the Laurel Hill survivor John L. Thayer? I ask because I always kind of identified with him, because he wasn't far from my age when I was first interested.

i loved cussler until he started farming stuff out to other writers. once dirk came back as his son it wasn't so interesting. not sure who's in laurel hill, but it's on their website

The BBC did an really interesting broadcast about the titanic, translating her morse code transmissions through a voice synthesizer. Its strangely effective.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00q89fy

thanks for that. listening to it.

I certainly wish I was clever enough to come up with party ideas like this! Your home must be so full of wonderful and interesting memories.

It is pretty cool around here, but I think these things do just sort of come to you if you start thinking about it. A big part of it, for me at least, was the creative people I met in high school and college and just spending time with them got my own brain going. Surround yourself with creative people and you'll always be surrounded by creative people.