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Al Franken spoke here
Huh, I thought I wrote this from my laptop two hours ago but maybe I wasn't logged in.
Anyway... so Al Franken came to Amazon today to talk about his new book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. It was scheduled for 3:30pm in our AV room (which is literally about 60-70 feet from my office)... so I figured I'd check up to see if they had books or anything early. I went by at 2:55pm and there were ALREADY at least 20-30 people in the room! Holy crap!
So I went by and told Colin, but he was on a conf call... so I grabbed my laptop, power cord, ethernet cable, and went back to the AV room, finding a seat about 6 rows back that was next to outlets for both. And I sat there doing work for about 20 minutes (I needed to write a web page about some stuff, it was a PERFECT 20-minute task). It was funny, Chico was sitting next to me and he basically just zoned out for half an hour waiting for the presentation to start. Every 4-5 minutes I would look up as the room got more and more crowded. By 3:10 all the seats were gone. By 3:20 all the floor space was gone. By 3:25 I believe you couldn't even stand up in the back of the room anymore. (Colin got there around 3:10 and got a seat behind me.) They brought by the free copies of his book around 3:28 and there were NOT enough copies. We were both lucky enough to get them, but plenty of people were not.
Holy crap, so Al Franken shows up at 3:30 and gets a thunderous round of applause... then he spoke for about 30-40 minutes about various encounters he's had with the "characters" in his book (by "characters" I mean Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coalter, etc), and about a lot of other stuff like general politics, why Republicans suck, why the world is going to hell in a handbasket, just a ton of random stuff. And all of it was dead funny.
He opened the floor to questions around 4-4:10 or so, and EVERYONE had questions. It made me feel pretty dumb, actually... lots of stuff like "what do you think of [democratic presidential candidate]?" or "what do you think of Arnold?" (answer: he doesn't like him), etc... I'm just pretty politically apathetic, really. Al's speech made me wish I was more politically knowledgable, at least, and I definitely plan to read his book, though.
At 4:45 he had to cut questions, because he still had to sign books... about 50-75 people stuck around to get their books signed. Colin and I did. Assistants went up the line and wrote people's names on post-its and stuck them inside the cover page of the book to speed up the process. When I got up to the table, Al was all like "Hi, how are you?" and I was like "Great, that was a great talk," and he's like "So what do you do here?" "I'm um... I'm a technical writer, I guess it's kinda like being a comedy writer except nothing I write is funny," and he's like "Well of course not, everything here is so technical!" or something. And then I thanked him and Colin came up to the table.
Wow! I met Al Franken!
The 13-year-old Deanna in my head says, "Next you just have to meet A. Whitney Brown, and you're set!"
Anyway... so Al Franken came to Amazon today to talk about his new book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. It was scheduled for 3:30pm in our AV room (which is literally about 60-70 feet from my office)... so I figured I'd check up to see if they had books or anything early. I went by at 2:55pm and there were ALREADY at least 20-30 people in the room! Holy crap!
So I went by and told Colin, but he was on a conf call... so I grabbed my laptop, power cord, ethernet cable, and went back to the AV room, finding a seat about 6 rows back that was next to outlets for both. And I sat there doing work for about 20 minutes (I needed to write a web page about some stuff, it was a PERFECT 20-minute task). It was funny, Chico was sitting next to me and he basically just zoned out for half an hour waiting for the presentation to start. Every 4-5 minutes I would look up as the room got more and more crowded. By 3:10 all the seats were gone. By 3:20 all the floor space was gone. By 3:25 I believe you couldn't even stand up in the back of the room anymore. (Colin got there around 3:10 and got a seat behind me.) They brought by the free copies of his book around 3:28 and there were NOT enough copies. We were both lucky enough to get them, but plenty of people were not.
Holy crap, so Al Franken shows up at 3:30 and gets a thunderous round of applause... then he spoke for about 30-40 minutes about various encounters he's had with the "characters" in his book (by "characters" I mean Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coalter, etc), and about a lot of other stuff like general politics, why Republicans suck, why the world is going to hell in a handbasket, just a ton of random stuff. And all of it was dead funny.
He opened the floor to questions around 4-4:10 or so, and EVERYONE had questions. It made me feel pretty dumb, actually... lots of stuff like "what do you think of [democratic presidential candidate]?" or "what do you think of Arnold?" (answer: he doesn't like him), etc... I'm just pretty politically apathetic, really. Al's speech made me wish I was more politically knowledgable, at least, and I definitely plan to read his book, though.
At 4:45 he had to cut questions, because he still had to sign books... about 50-75 people stuck around to get their books signed. Colin and I did. Assistants went up the line and wrote people's names on post-its and stuck them inside the cover page of the book to speed up the process. When I got up to the table, Al was all like "Hi, how are you?" and I was like "Great, that was a great talk," and he's like "So what do you do here?" "I'm um... I'm a technical writer, I guess it's kinda like being a comedy writer except nothing I write is funny," and he's like "Well of course not, everything here is so technical!" or something. And then I thanked him and Colin came up to the table.
Wow! I met Al Franken!
The 13-year-old Deanna in my head says, "Next you just have to meet A. Whitney Brown, and you're set!"
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A. Whitney Brown isn't that cool
On the plus side, Craig walked up to me at the very end of that show to mock me for wearing a Yankees hat. About 4 frames of it made it on the air during the closing credits. :)
Re: A. Whitney Brown isn't that cool
Hmm... maybe, maybe not. It's just, Al Franken and A. Whitney Brown were my heroes when I was in 8th/9th grade or so. Sort of like how I got to meet Brian Kernighan at CMU 9 years ago, but never got to meet Dennis Ritchie...
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They need to do more of these sorta things.
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Yeah... most of the time I have no idea who the Fishbowl people are.
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The book rocks. I think you'll enjoy it. You can't help but start thinking politically when you read it.