Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Limited First Day Hob-nobbing

Well, I made it to the conference fine. Driving down yesterday afternoon and evening I must have been daydreaming, for I missed my preferred exit from I-40. Went to another one, and it was an inferior road. Probably delayed me 10 to 15 minutes. Then, when I got close to downtown Dallas, I missed the road I wanted to take. So I wound up on downtown streets. Fortunately I had studied the map just enough, and have a good enough sense of direction, that I made all the right turns and ended up where I wanted to go.

I turned on to Elm Street, which I thought was one of the streets that went through Dealy Plaza. Sure enough it was, and shortly I bust on to the JFK assassination site, the grassy knoll to my right. It was dark, and I was in traffic, so couldn't really slow down to see much. But to just be there was enough. I've read so much on the assassination, and formed opinions on it. This is my eighth trip to Dallas (not including plane changes at DFW) but it's the first time I've gotten to Dealy Plaza. Friday, after the conference, I hope to get there and maybe park and walk around.

I got the error in my class registration worked out today, and sat through a well-taught class on LID: Low Impact Development (or Design, I keep forgetting). This was exactly the right class for me and for CEI. I'll take this info back and teach our folks five or six classes on it the rest of the year. Now I have to head up to my room and prepare for tomorrow, figure out which of the concurrent sessions I'll go to.

And I hope to get 30 pages read in How Now Shall We Live?

3 comments:

Gary said...

Dave, I was there in 1999 and it seemed smaller than the impression one gets from the recreations and the Zapruder film. It was summer and a few conspiracy theorists were hawking books. Probably won't be many there in the winter, though. There is a small memorial monument a block or so away (to the east from the top of the road that goes downhill to the underpass) that you might want to check out.

David A. Todd said...

Yeah, my brief drive through lead me to think it was smaller. I hope on Friday to get to spend a few minutes there.

I'm pretty much on the side of the "conspiracy theorists",
BTW. I don't like that term, however. I prefer to think of it as "Warren Commission skeptics", as a) there is no way it could have happened as the WC said, and b) the WC did the poorest job ever seen in the history of law enforcement.

Dave

Gary said...

I make a distinction between the CTs and the WCSs. The latter have some real evidence of the sloppy work and missing information in the Commission report. The former take all anomalies and spin hypotheses that just can't be settled for lack of good data. It may be another 20 years before the story finally becomes clear.