Stasher "Fidget" tracked me down at NORML CON 2009
Blessed be, my wife drove down from Portland to San Francisco to surprise me for NORML CON. That meant I had the choice between a one-hour flight home that I’d already booked, or a ten-hour car ride back with my wife and Karri.
Given my love for the airlines (cough cough), I took the $90 hit for the canceled ticket and chose the car ride. Still infinitely more enjoyable than the airlines.
There will be no podcast today, as my boss, Allen St. Pierre, insisted that I take a day off because I worked my ass off at NORML CON. Judging by my 42-waist jeans, there is still some ass to work off, but I appreciate the gesture.
What I will be doing is attending to the #1 question people asked me at the NORML Media Table: “Is this going to be available on the web?” Yes! Nine hours are already up at http://live.norml.org from our three-hour live streams we ran. Sound quality is superb!
Then I’ll be processing the photos to upload to my personal gallery at http://picasaweb.google.com/radicalruss. Wait til you see how cool they look with the logo banner in the background! Some of them are already featured on my http://twitpic.com/photos/radicalruss.
The rest of the conference audio needs to be trimmed and compressed and it will be uploaded and available at our Special Events feed at http://www.norml.org/rss/normlevents_podcast.xml. Rick Steves, Norm Stamper, Dr. Lester Grinspoon and more are coming soon for download to your iPod or MP3 player.
As for me, this conference couldn’t have been more successful. My presentation of the Student Activism Award for Derek Copp was well-received, but my Friday morning presentation on “The Zeitgeist of Legalization” was the hit of the conference (I am told). Dr. Marsha Rosenbaum and Ethan Nadelmann from Drug Policy Alliance were highly impressed and I’ll be discussing the possibility of presenting it at the DPA Conference in New Mexico in November. Hmm, wouldn’t a Portland – Boise – Salt Lake – Denver – Albuquerque – Tucson – San Diego – Los Angeles – San Francisco – Medford PowerPoint tour, a la Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” be an epic undertaking? Maybe have NORML Chapters in each city coordinate the meeting hall and ticket sales for the event and find me a place to crash? Drive the whole way so I can pack all my gear and avoid the hassles of TSA while seeing more of this beautiful country?
How many hot wings do I have to eat to buy a Madden Cruiser? 
Good evening to all! Man I got to say, I had the time of my life at NORML Con 2009. Just in from Arizona, as soon as my shuttle got to the Grand Hyatt hotel, a sweet fragrance filled the air, and excitement kicked in. First thing I did was checked in at the desk, and even though I was like 3 hours early for check in, they gave me my room… 18th floor with a kick ass view. I dropped my stuff off in my room and headed down to the basement where the conference was happening. Right from the start things were just right… I got on the elevator and what do ya’ know? – ‘Happy Smiley People. Got down stairs, hit all the vendors … Then it was a constant back and forth between conference ‘happenings’ and the side gathering area of the hotel.
I met ‘Generous Joe’ who is 65 and lived 4 blocks from the hotel. He asked me where I was from and if I had any smoke with me. I told him I was dry -beings that I just came from Ariz(get a felony for simple possession)ona. All of the sudden – It’s freakin’ Christmas! Joe pulls out about a 1/2 pounder, reaches in, and pulls out some nugs of the sweetest ever, and says, “Here ya go, I hope you enjoy your time here, God bless ya…” and off he went.. I met Russ pretty quickly and must say, he is a man of talent and character. I never once saw him not give 2 minutes of his time for fans and other people – EVER. No matter how stoned or Bizarre, Hot or intelligent, Russ always made them feel like a friend. Not to mention he did all this while WORKING his ASS off. Russ seemed pretty darn happy when his wife showed up. ‘Kudos to ya’ Russ!’
Madeline Martinez and her family kicks some serious ass for being nice people as well… I got invited to an exclusive after hour with everyone, and Madeline had me laughing hard. One person I didn’t really THINK I would meet or get along with exceptionally well was Dr Earlywine. One of the nicest people I met. Him and I tried to get a photo together like 4 times but every photo we looked like we were wiggly squiggly baked cookies.. It was funny as hell… I finally got a good photo with him. Saturday Nights Extravaganza was the best party I have EVER attended and the $100 contribution was WELL worth it, ten fold. My only complaint is when they shut the Hash Bar down early (or maybe they ran out.. hehehe) There was a HUGE turnout and all I can say is you could never get that many drinkers in a party like that without someone getting sick, beat up or arrested. I have been to church services that were more out of control… :) Point being, cannabis users are the most polite, happy, well behaved people around. Ok, that’s about all I can add.. I’m sorry about my Typonese, but in closing I say, I don’t think I will ever miss another Conference! See you all in Portland Oregon 2010! Boo Ya!
Blessed Be indeed! A loving and supportive partner is a good thing to have… a keeper.
I’ll also be chopping up that audio for the special events feed, so you can get just the panel you want to hear without sitting through three hour long shows.
It was a thrill to bring the live audio from the floor and to Spype Dr. Grinspoon into the conference. We borrowed and scraped to put enough tech gear together to send audio to the floor, the remote speakers, the press patch bay, to my laptop for Skype into NORML SHOW LIVE, and to Chris’s recorder for the other panels.
Big thanks to William Panzer from the NORML Board for a Mackie sound board when we ran out of time to buy one. (For what hotels charge for audio, we can get a mixer at a decent used pro shop for the price of one conference.) Richard Wolfe loaned us a wireless microphone, and Chris, Karri, and I brought ours to round out the panel. Chris’s laptop and the NORML laptop I use for the show got quite a workout, as has my terabyte portable drive (damn I like typing “terabyte portable drive”… you kids these days… and that 8GB chip in my BlackBerry that’s the size of my pinkie fingernail? Why, back in my day, we had cassette tape drives for our Commodore PETs! And we liked it!)
A blast was most definitely had, though five consecutive 20-hour days is a bit rough on my neglected middle-aged body. I’m going to have to go into training just to do my job!
One million wings, mwahahahhahaa….sorry
Nice work out there Russ, gonna have to put in my time to review that massive stack of audio!