Garfield Ridge

After work Friday evening I snuck across the river to Fado's Irish Pub in Chinatown to attend the little National Review Online get together.

Unfortunately, I really couldn't stay very long, mostly because I'm:
A. Broke after yesterday's inaugural festivities;
B. Exhausted after yesterday's inaugural festivities;
C. Really hate Fado.

C was my number one reason. The place is always too crowded, you can never move around, and worst of all for an event like tonight's, it's an impossible place to hold a conversation.

In my brief time there, however, I did get to meet a few of the folks:

-- Jonah Goldberg is really, really tall and broad-shouldered. Think Hulk, sans eyebrows. Something tells me that whenever The Nation rolls out their definition-of-the-week for "neocon" (this week's: they're pod people from Kaytron 5), Jonah's eyes go green, his blazer rips apart, and he chucks a Volkswagen into a crowd of ISO protesters.

Regardless of his freakishly-large nature, Jonah was quite pleasant, and housebroken. He's just as gregarious as one would expect.

I listened as he held court for a number of younger NRO readers. They all looked like little apes at the foot of the Lawgiver. At one point, Jonah related his earliest memory: his mother telling him to keep quiet during the Watergate hearings. My earliest memory is of Star Wars at a drive-in on the South Side of Chicago-- see, we're practically identical that way.

Before I moved on I managed to snag a picture of me with everybody's favorite columnist. Since I did it on a lousy disposable camera, I expect to develop the pictures sometime around the next inaugural, in 2008. I promise I'll post the photos then, so keep on coming back!

-- I met the enigmatic blog-mistress of The Corner, Kathryn Jean Lopez. I couldn't help but feel obnoxious poking around her, waiting for one of her many fans to part for a moment to allow me to introduce myself. But once I said hello, she was very charming. Our conversation was brief, mostly centered on 9/11 (once I tell anyone I work at the Pentagon, it's inevitably the next subject). 'Twas definitely cool to finally put a face to the name.

And no, I'm not telling you what she looked like. That's a perk reserved for those who go to these shindigs!

-- The first thing I noticed about Kate O'Beirne is that TV fails to show how beautiful she is in person. She's a very handsome woman. If the Capitol Gang can put her in such bad lighting, it makes me wonder whether outside of the studio Robert Novak looks like Robert Wagner.

-- I saw Ramesh Ponnuru and Rich Lowry, but alas, I didn't get to say hello.

Anyways, for the short while I was there it was very cool to meet everyone. My only advice to the gang would be to choose a place a wee bit more conducive to conversation the next time. Especially for us newbies introducing ourselves out of the blue-- otherwise, it's easy to feel left out of the conversation, and next thing you know, Rich Lowry is introducing you to Mohammed, Sidney, Clayton, and Jagdish over on the couch.