The post-DC, post-conference, post-March wrap-up

Time flies and so does Superman.  My time in Washington DC for the Pop Culture Association conference is done, but the pictures and the memories remain.  Oh, the memories.

I arrived in DC on Wednesday evening and spent Thursday, Friday and Saturday bouncing between conference-related events and tourist attractions, and I had a nice time overall.  When I parked my car on Wednesday night, I saw this advertised in a nearby storefront window:

I've heard that the Superman musical is pretty bad, but still, I'd like to give it a try as hey, it's Superman, and I hear that he sings a song about beef at some point in the show.  What a shame that it's not showing for another few weeks and that it's not a bit closer.  For $15, I'd watch the heck out of it.

My presentation was scheduled for the bleary-eyed time of 8:00 in the morning, which, if you know anything at all about me, was a challenge, one compounded by the fact that I got up at 5:00 so I could drive into the city and find the hotel with enough time to register and find the conference room.  It was a long day.

The presentation itself went off without incident, I'm happy to say.  Mine was one of three presentations going on for this 90-minute session, and at the very least I didn't embarrass myself.  As I mentioned in my last post, my presentation was on Frank Miller's Holy Terror - the picture at the very top is a slide from the accompanying PowerPoint - and the possibility that the whole book was satirical in its intent.  Someone even asked me a question this time around, which was a first for me, and I even half answered it in a round about fashion.

I sat in on a few other panels over the weekend, including one that discussed using comics as teaching tools and another that looked at the nature of fandom in properties such as Firefly.  On Thursday night, the comics group hosted a dinner where I got to chat about comics with a number of other like-minded folk.

On Friday, I took the Metro into DC and saw some sights, including the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, where I'm pleased to say that they had on display crystals from the Fortress of Solitude.

They also had a Beast Wars display, interestingly enough.

Afterwards, I walked up Pennsylvania Avenue only to come across a line of stopped traffic on an adjacent street.  Curiosity got the best of me and I stuck around, and in a few minutes the motorcade for President Obama came rolling by.  You can't, of course, see inside any of the presidential limos, but it was a pretty fun experience nonetheless.  So I took a picture outside of the White House, along with about a hundred other people.  No sign of Biden on a dog sled.