Brainlock day

There’s no more room for any more data, which is fortunate, because the seminars are all over. All that’s left is a bash at a restaurant down a few blocks from the hotel.

Not that three days of alcohol abuse and sleep deprivation affect the brain or anything, but I was in John McIntyre’s sesson on “big picture editing” first thing this morning and I kept failing the tests: he’d hand out these stories teeming with gaping holes, libel, maudlin language, etc. and I’d look at ’em and think: heck, these aren’t so bad.

One of the big lessons I’m bringing home is that you never really know people till you see them in the flesh — I met at least a half-dozen people I’d talked to via e-mail over the years. There weren’t any big surprises, but correspondents need faces to go with the names.

Oh, and Mr. McIntyre: thanks for opening my eyes to how much fun these shindigs can be. If you hadn’t invited me to speak I probably would’ve passed again this year. Now I want to go to the next 20 years of them.

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Phil Blanchard, testiest copy editor of them all, conducts his “This is Simple” seminar, which offered a glimpse of how the world would be if he ran things. There’d be a lot less bullshit. Center is Jim Montalbano (JJmoney on the Testy Copy Editors site) and right is Mary Ellen Slayter, who works with Blanchard on the financial desk at the Washington Post.

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