I was down at CPAC today, where I had the pleasure of meeting Pamela and Eric and of renewing an old acquaintance with Little Miss Attila. The highlight of the formal program so far was the talk by Mark Steyn–there are a lot of people who write very well but are mediocre or worse at public speaking, and I was pleasantly surprised by his excellent presentation.
If anyone is going to be there tomorrow and would like to get together for a drink or something, leave a note in comments.
UPDATE: Congratulations to Ace on winning the CPAC Blogger of the Year Award.
I enjoyed meeting Karol and Skye, both of whom have CPAC pictures up–also the famous N Z Bear, who doesn’t look much like the picture on his blog.
(cross-posted at Photon Courier)
Pamela is a knockdown, isn’t she?
Try to find Karol from AlarmingNews.. Her blog is my anchor of sanity in this crazy city.
Yes, Steyn… all this talk about supposed Obama’s charisma – those people obviously didn’t hear Steyn speaking.
Besides, there is always something he speaks about, unlike the Mr. Empty Suit.
Obama is a pretty good orator, but he is viewed as a *great* one only because most political oratory is so mediocre.
Seems to me that one thing a person should get out of a college education is the ability to give an interesting and logically-coherent presentation, and to deal effectively with questions and objections. I can’t think of very many careers in which this ability would not be useful. But unless a person has pursued debate as an extracurricular activity, it’s unlikely they’ll develop this activity in college (and indeed, modern policy debate involves some pretty strange speaking styles)
[hmm…knockDOWN or knockOUT? I could never get it…don’t understand the logic. Yeah yeah, very funny.]
Tatyana,
I can see how you would confuse the idiom. After all a “knockout” (from boxing) always leads to a “knockdown”. Never thought of it before but knockout is used to described animals and humans whereas knockdown usually only applies to inanimate objects as in to knockdown a house.
In most ringsports (does not including things like mixed martial arts) the word knockdown is used to descbibe just that – knocking the opponent down. Many rules differ with different types of ringsports, but usually on a knockdown you receive a standing 8 count. In other words, you have 8 seconds to get up and show the ref that you have it together enough to get back in the fight.
After getting knocked down enough times and not being able to get back up to fight, that is termed a knockout. Alternately, if the ref steps in and stops a particularly lopsided fight that has not stopped because of a knockout, that is called a technical knockout, or TKO.
Pam, on the other hand, imho, is not a knockout in the sense of the word being used to describe a babe. Just not my type. And I would never be so impolite as to knock down a woman – unless she was in my Muay Thai class and we were sparring.
OK, OK, all right. We can safely say Pam is an knockout as she requires more than 8 sec repeated recovery time (have you seen her on a motorbike?)
There is also a “knockOFF”, but that one I remember; deal with them every day.
Shannon – you should hear me constructing composites of “hand+off+out+down &”.