From your latest Tweet about it, it might be this person: [REMOVED] **please don't post personal information here, however well-intentioned.

In regards to the "mandatory-ness", only "contract carriers" (aka conventional airlines) require this. "charter carriers" do not. While you are a super-awesome Hollywood-type, I do still imagine you probably can't afford to take a chartered flight every time you need to travel. But there *ARE* "charter airlines" out there, that operate scheduled service out of small local airports rather than large international hubs. These, by operating as "scheduled charters" rather than a standard airline, are not subject to government-sponsored rape to board. There is a fairly major one up here in the Pacific Northwest, SeaPort Airlines, which flies this way. The cost is only slightly higher than conventional carriers. (Portland to Seattle is about $275 round trip.)

Then there is poor Vancouver, nary a word. Always the red-head stepchild in the Portland-Seattle rivalry. Trying to scream out "HEY! We're up here, too!" As a Timbers supporter since the USL return (even went to a few NASL matches as a kid,) but a fairly "light" supporter (never sat in 107, the shame!) I always looked forward to the Vancouver matches more than the Seattle ones. Vancouver's supporters always felt more like "distant kin" than enemies. The matches against Vancouver always felt more like good natured (but loud and bawdy nonetheless) ribbing than threats and anger.

Just the last paragraph you wrote made me think that if they ever remake Stand By Me, you'll have to have the Dreyfuss role.

PDX would be more than happy to keep you in beer for as long as you're here. :-D So, moving here would keep you in "embarrassment of riches" for the rest of your life. :-P

Anecdote #2, sadly, I'm the rules lawyer in this one. Later, in a 3.5E campaign, our sorcerer's player was out for the night. I was tasked with playing his character. He had wisely emailed his Word Document character sheet (I use 3-10MB Excel spreadsheets filled with tons of autocalculations for every conceivable circumstance I find myself in.) Through the course of the night, I noticed a few cases where he had done math wrong. The most egregious being that he had been following the Wizard spells-per-day table instead of the Sorcerer table. Which meant he didn't have the 4th level spells yet that he thought he had. I made the mistake of bringing it up to him the next week. (In my defense, I did it discretely, without making the DM aware of his mistake.) He made a big (only semi-serious,) stink about my finding flaws in his character sheet, and I have never since been allowed to take over for a spellcaster. (Which I count as a blessing, really.)

My usual D&D group (at present with myself and one other member in the group for 10 years, two more at 8 years,) had just started a D&D Birthright campaign (awesome setting, look it up,) when 3E came out. We spent about two weeks painstakingly converting our then-2nd-level characters to 3E, and another two weeks working the wrinkles out of how to convert the Birthright setting to 3E. About a year / 11 levels in to our campaign, rules lawyer #1 noticed that we'd been playing "multiple attacks" all wrong. We had been substituting ANY single action for each attack. So our Wizard was casting two spells per turn, the Cleric had just gotten to a third. (Apparently that's a no-no in 3E.) The even-bigger-rules-lawyer DM just looked at him, looked in his book, went "huh." Followed by "Well, we've been playing it this way for 11 levels, might as well keep playing it that way. Rules lawyer shot down. Hard. By a normally VERY rules-lawyery DM.

"I was relieved to hear from lots of people in the audience that they didn't mind." "didn't mind"?!?!? We would have paid extra to make it run to 5.5 hours! "We won't let that happen again" You better! Three hours seems *WAAAAAAY* too short. I can't imagine any part of that show being shorter! I just wish we hadn't had to leave immediately after to relieve the babysitter. I didn't even get to buy any of the merchandise. Now I'm going to have to find all the participants and buy their stuff online separately. And not get them signed. :-( P.S., my non-geek wife was laughing hysterically the entire show, minus one or two of the ultra-obscure references. (She didn't get "Farpoint", although I think our five year old daughter would have, had she been there.) She said that this show was an excellent explanation of my personality. (Hrm, I took it as a compliment, but now that I write it, I'm not entirely sure if it was meant that way.)

I know you've probably already completely hashed it over; but what model HP scanner? If it's one of the networked models (like a multifunction printer/scanner,) you have to use Apple's "Image Capture" now instead of the dedicated HP software that was used before. This one threw me for a loop with Snow Leopard, too.