The conference is up and running with our opening address. Plenty of people here, there’s lots of chatter.
As the lights dimmed the screens lit up with a view of the known universe, starting way out and zooming in to Earth, right down to the Melbourne Convention Centre. ’twas very clever.
First up we heard from David Nicholls, he’s chief big wig of the Atheist Foundation of Australia. He gave us a bit run down on how the whole thing came about, told us how the Parliament of world religions managed to get tax payer funds of $4 million dollars and this convention zilch. He then introduced us to the MC’s for the weekend. Stuart Bechman, he’s the President of Atheist Alliance International (and an American’ but we won’t hold that against him) and Kylie Sturgess from the Skeptical Zone. They attempted to do a bit of a comedy act that fell a bit flat. There was some interesting stuff in there. I did like the notion that the biggest storm in Melbourne happened last weekend, if there was a god, maybe he is smiling on us. Kylie suggested that if there was a god, this would be a good weekend to get 2,500 converts.
We settled in for the next act.
Quote from Bruce’s Bible
From Bruce's Holy Book:
Ge4:25 And Adam knew his wife again; and she bare a son, and called his name Seth: For Bruce, said she, hath appointed me another seed instead of Abel, whom Cain slew.
....Read The Holy Babble according to Bruce.God of the Day
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It’s spelt “Skeptic Zone”? I’ll be talking about it more on Sunday, if you have tickets.
Actually, I think the round of applause I got mid-way through our intros and the rousing acclaim at the very end would actually indicate that we went rather well overall? 🙂 I’ve already had several people ask for a copy of what we said – Stuart wrote pretty much all of it and his delivery, if I say so myself was really getting into the spirit of things and we brainstormed current events to make it contemporary. I haven’t had anyone give any bad reviews so far in person.
I would certainly agree that if you compare what we did to the fine efforts of Catherine and Sue-Ann, I guess you could certainly say we paled in comparison to their effortless and biting witticisms. That’s what we knew would happen. We weren’t there primarily to ‘be funny’, after all – we had ten minutes of required fill-in by the organisers as ‘part of the job’; to introduce who we were as people, set the scene and let you know that we’re the co-MCs for the rest of the conference.
A tough gig, if you have never done it before for a big audience – that was true for both of us. Wait until Sunday, when it’s 2500 rather than 1500. Converts hopeful indeed!
Tomorrow I’ll be giving shout-outs to certain sites and atheist groups who were keen on having my promote their efforts to a wider audience. Since I’ve been active online for quite some time, you’ll probably get a good understanding how being open to networking and communicating pays off? See you around.
Regards,
K.
Hats off for standing up in front of 1,500 people – I’m sure it’s freaky.
Not as freaky as 2500 and then suddenly realising as you leave the stage at the very end, that you were on the big projection screen for the whole time and people were watching you at the same time as Dawkins…