Fire Dog Lake meet and greet in Branford

Notorious Progressive blogger Jane Hamsher, from the nationally celebrated blog "FireDogLake.Com" was on hand to meet with local and regional readers/commenters from FDL, along with local bloggers. The event was held on the patio of the scenic Owenego Inn in Branford, overlooking a placid (today) Long Island Sound.

In attendance along with the roughly forty FDL readers and Connecticut bloggers were several members of the media. The NY Times and GQ Magazine were represented, with a BBC documentary crew there also. I met a lot of FDLers who were previously known to me only by their internet handles.

The main talk of the evening was, of course, the Lamont-Lieberman contest. The Q-poll numbers had been released earlier in the day, so everyone was in a fairly good mood, albeit cautiously optimistic. And repeating an observation I made several weeks ago, the median age of the group completely discounts the theory that the blogosphere is chiefly populated by a bunch of whiney teenagers who like to stir up trouble.

Also, I couldn't find a single "angry" leftist blogger anywhere. It seemed to me that everyone was in a fine mood and, in fact, we may have to change the meme to reflect the growing number of "jolly" leftist bloggers!

I also took a bunch of photos, but I can't recall who did or didn't want their pictures to appear online, so I'm going to keep this simple for now and just post a few select images.

Jane manages to not cross her eyes for this photo. In fact, she's been very good about not crossing her eyes for nearly every photo that's been taken of her lately.

Jane and an FDL commenter named Mike discussing things bloggish.

Your humble narrator, posing for a self-portrait.

Late in the evening, a pensive CT Blogger; one of the BBC guys (Nigel? Basil? something like that; the BBC guys were very cool and seemed to really "get" what was going on); and local hero and Lieberman-question-asker Maura from VA/CT ruminate on the evening's discussions.

I won't try to name everyone I met, because I'll inveriably omit somebody and I'm in far too good a mood to want to hurt anyone's feelings. So just know that I enjoyed meeting and talking to each and every one of you! (...except Spazeboy...he was irritating!) LOL!!!