Some fact checking

Last night I went with some friends of mine to a talk on Laos. Thom is in a group that meets once a month to hear a speaker and have dinner at the faculty club. The median age of the group is 60-something so I feel like a toddler there which is kind of cool.

Alas, they spend too much time yammering about member introductions and club business and it's kind of a snore, that part. And then the slide projector quit working so we didn't get to see enough of the pictures but I did learn that the ethnic group that we worked with in Laos was the Hmong. Although officially we were never there. The speaker also told us he had a silver watchband (which I got to see) that he had to hide in Laos or people would have cut his hand off to get it. He wears a watch on each arm, one is the silver one. Actually, I'm wondering why he does that? Doesn't the time dissonance between the two bother him? He said Laos still had a communist government. This is nominally correct although they appear to be more like socialists in recovery now. I don't know much about this part of the map other than what I've read about Vietnam and Cambodia. I should pick up a book on this.

Sometimes the dinner thing can be kind of tedious depending on who you sit with. Once we sat with a lady who did something with public health in the county so we had an interesting conversation about epidemic prevention and H1N1. Plus, she watched Star Trek. But another time, we sat with some....nice people who talked about the zoning laws in their rich suburb for 30 minutes. This is where the rules of polite society are some of the most chafing for me. You are boring me. I know it's hard to make conversation with strangers. Why can't I pull out a book and read? I don't care what your township's rules about streetlights are. It's not personal.

There was a nice retired dentist at our table though who didn't talk about zoning liked a few things I was familiar with: Indian food, Bhutan, Thomas Jefferson and Ken Follett. He also talked about a history book he was reading, the title of which escapes me because I had trouble hearing him and I'm also not sure he got it right. He said there had been a number of Magna Cartas in history to which I said-really? Specifically, one involving Charlemagne. I threw this in my mental fact-checking folder. Bad facts check in, they don't check out. Ideally.

Actually, he was correct so that's cool. Bonus, Thom leaned over to ask me what year the Magna Carta was and I said 1215 but I wasn't positive. And now, can I just say, up high! And you never know when having a map of Asia in your head or knowing the bibliography of Ken Follett can come in handy. I asked if he had read the cathedral books and he had but it was kind of loud in there and I couldn't hear that well so I dunno if he gave them the thumbs up.