Special Episode: The New Orleans Meetup!

What a fun time!

Concerning kids carrying rifles across New York City, the late Justice Scalia spoke frequently of his high school days carrying his rifle on the New York subway from his Catholic school (which did not have a shooting team) to a Catholic school that did have a shooting team on which he competed.

I'm intrigued that for @RobLong it was the fall of the Berlin Wall that opened his eyes to the problems of socialism / communism. For me (I am much older than Rob) it was seeing in person the Berlin Wall a couple of years after it was started, and as it was being built up in 1963 (I was 7 years old). The economic disparity between East Berlin and West Berlin was obvious even to a second grader. I saw the museum of efforts people had already undertaken to try to cross the wall, and observed that it was always people tryin to get from East to West. Why would people be so desperate to leave East Berlin, and why did the East German government have to work so hard to keep people in? Any place that has that many people trying to get out, and a government working so hard to prevent them from getting out must not be a place I would want to live. Even 7 year olds know the difference between a fortress designed to keep invaders out and a prison designed to keep residents in.

@6foot2inhighheels deserves a lot of credit for her work making this podcast happen. She brought the recording equipment, set it up, and directed the recording. I have to assume it was very time consuming editing it because only the three of us at the table had microphones, so I'm sure she had to tweak the volume in dozens of places so that you can hear the people who do and don't have microphones. Melissa is my hero!

After hearing that Charles hadn't seen "Rocky" but that he should, I watched it myself for the first time. (I never would have done that if the movie hadn't come up in the conversation.)