A Bit of Unexpected Conference Trip Happiness, The Pope Weighs In

So I went to a legal conference in Dallas yesterday. It was a solo trip, and I got up to Dallas last night and didn't have a lot scheduled for the evening before the conference (well, absolutely nothing planned, to be more precise). I took a walk on the streets near my hotel, and found a local sandwich shop where I grabbed dinner. I also spotted the Dallas Museum of Art a couple of blocks from my hotel, and there seemed to be a bunch of people gathering on its plaza in front of a temporary stage. After a quick chat with a helpful Dallas police officer (he was working crowd control) I found out that I had stumbled across a free "Jazz Under the Stars" concert- one show in a series that the museum puts on throughout the summer. It was a beautiful night, and my evening of potential thumb twiddling and bad TV turned into a pleasant concert experience.
The band was called Barri Pearson & Right Direction, and they were pretty good- sort of a jazz fusion thing (maybe not exactly my usual thing, but pretty good). Barri Pearson was the band leader, and he turned out to be a really good bass player (the saxophone player was also very good, but I'm embarrassed to admit that I didn't catch his name).

Little jazz fans.

Barri Pearson & Right Direction

This is the Belo Mansion. It's a restored historical masion that's been renovated by a bunch of Dallas law firms, and it 's where we had our conference. It has an addition built onto the back with meeting rooms.
Just Dallas at night.

So, anyway, the trip to Dallas turned out to be alright. The conference was okay, too (but not really picture worthy).

In an unrelated note, my ol' amigo, Dr. Kevin "The Pope" Palka, weighed in on the homeopathic remedies/chemotherapy discussion in the comments section of my recent Daniel Hauser update. Palka is an oncologist who practices medicine in Nashville, Tennessee, and who works with people with some very serious illnesses. Like myself, Palka isn't always shy with his opinions, but he's a smart guy, and given the fact that this Daniel Hauser situation bears directly upon his field of expertise, I thought that his comments were interesting. Check out some venting by The Pope in the comments section of my Daniel Hauser Update post if you're interested in that sort of thing.

And Pope? Congrats on having another rugrat on the way! Good thing you doctors are trained to live without sleep...