AR Conference - Day IV - final day
Trip Start
Jul 14, 2007
1
9
12
Trip End
Jul 27, 2007
Los Angeles,
California,
United States
Sunday, July 22, 2007
We got there at 9am and the majority of my day was spent in workshops that focussed on various aspects of communication methods in AR: Engaging the Media, Writing Our Message, Printing our Message, Advertising Our Message, and Producing/Airing Videos, which I personally found quite relevant and interesting. Ben is completely not interested in learning about "fonts and graphics", as he put it, and had chosen to attend some completely different workshops - some that he made it to and found incredibly boring, he said, and some that he actually found very engaging and proved this by of course causing sparks in the discussions by raising his own thoughtful (and sometimes controversial) points by speaking out his very pensive mind. I encouraged his activity in these sessions because it made him be a part of it all rather than feeling like an outsider and not taking any interest. And apart my the above-mentioned workshops that made up the most of my day, we also did attend a few interactive discussions together where the attendees had the majority of the time to participate rather than just listening to the speakers. Ben was so into it, that in one of the workshops I even heard him proclaim to the group, with my own two ears, "I am definitely going to become a vegetarian and then a vegan". This came as a shock to me, given his stubbornness and unnecessary carnivorous ways, and I even asked him later if he meant those words, and he stated yes! So despite his many complaints during the whole conference, I am so happy that it seemed to have really made an impact on him, towards his thoughts, beliefs, and even actions. I asked him about this afterwards and he did reinforce this by saying that yes, overall, he found the AR conference to be beneficial for him, so I think it served its purpose by just having him exposed to such a large group of like-minded people who are all compassionate and passionate about doing good in the world, and perhaps opened his mind even more to all of the various issues there are out there pertaining to the subject and the validity of them all.
In the evening we attended the banquet, which there were 400 people at. The $35 dinner was cooked by the hotel staff and consisted of an opening green salad, followed by what seemed like a "hybrid" of a traditional banquet-like meal, though veganized for the occasion with: slices of cooked Tofurky deli slices with some other kind of grainy faux meat product, plus stuffing and gravy, accompanied by the obligatory token vegetables: a small bunch of broccoli and a meagre serving of julienned carrots. The dessert - a vegan carrot cake - was delicious! It was the first non-fruit dessert too that the hotel had served all week. It's too bad that the cook staff there is obviously completely ignorant about creative cooking that doesn't follow the same old traditional menu model of a slab of meat garnished with a vegetable or two, but at least we all knew that the meal was "safe" to eat, and as long as that's the case, food is food and as long as it's edible to us wacky vegetarians, I don't think we otherwise mind what it consists of, since we are so used to not being accomodated for. I did find it interesting that the topic of "veganism" was openly frequent and constant throughout the whole conference, even though that it was an "Animal Rights" conference (and not a "vegetarian" conference). Well, guess what? The two go hand in hand, and while I wondered if everyone there was actually even vegetarian or vegan themselves (though it did seem that way), it is true that not all self-proclaimed animal lovers even follow a dead animal-free diet. There are the dog and cat lovers who don't make that connection with farmed animals, and we even met people from the "save the sea turtle" exhibit table who said they weren't veggie, but that they "don't eat shrimp anymore" (and obviously not sea turtles) since that's part of their message.
During the dinner there were some speeches, a fundraiser auction hosted by Howard Lyman, and then the awarding of...
Kim Sturla, founder of Animal Place
awards, for people who have made outstanding contributions in AR. During this time, Ben took a time-out to go to the washroom, and then I went to the washroom and saw him standing there with some hotel staff, so I asked him what was going on. Well, it seems that Ben the Police Officer had found a bomb in the men's washroom (I am not making that up), and had to come to everyone's rescue by calling 911 to attend to it so that it didn't detonate and blow up 400 animal rights activists to pieces who were just sitting in adjacent room to the washroom. The hotel staff had closed off the washroom while waiting for the LAPD to arrive, and Ben, of course, would not leave the scene until the police arrived there because he didn't want anyone to get hurt. But then he finally came back with me to see Paul Watson give the keynote address, but then went back out during that, at which time the drug sniffing dog arrived and determined that yes, there was a bomb in the washroom - so Ben was right in his appraisal. He came back into the room until the speech was over, and then we left and by then the LAPD were all there and were starting to close off a larger section, in the whole hallway that the washrooms were in, and while we stayed close to them, as they wanted to keep Ben close by, they actually then evacuated the whole lobby floor of the Westin hotel while they were waiting for the bomb squad to arrive. We were told that the bomb squad was on its way, but after waiting for some time, Ben finally asked if we could go and the Sergeant said yes, so they released him and we went home. Ben had asked them to call him when it was all over to let him know what had happened, but we didn't hear back. Anyways, one can only hope that this "bomb" was deactivated and that no one got hurt! And hopefully the bombs will stay away from appearing before Ben in the future - this is the second bomb scare I have experienced with him since knowing him!.
Ben annoyed
Comments
bomb scare
wow, what were the circumstances of the first bomb scare, should have told the LA police, they would have been interested, 2 bomb scares in one lifetime, like winning the lottery twice don't you think
hmmmmmm
the 1st bomb
Ah... it was actually ANOTHER 'suspicious'-looking suitcase that he found, this time on the street - and during the first time we met of all instances!