We attended a lecture by James Randi last night, as part of UBC’s “Science Week”. He was the keynote speaker.

I made sure to grab the batteries out of the charger and put them in our digital camera, and Mel put it in her purse so I wouldn’t forget to bring it. I’m always leaving important stuff behind.

Jess and her dad met us at our place, and her husband Rob was going to meet us there as he was working in Vancouver until later.

After a bit of scrambling around and leaving later than we had planned we got there “on time” for the official start of the lineup. Of course, nobody else obeyed to this and we were about 200 people back. Had we left on time we’d have been early for it too, d’ohh.

I grabbed the camera and started taking pictures of the crowd… or tried to. Every time I pressed the “take a picture” button it shut down. The freshly charged batteries were no good, and I’d brought no backups. Sorry, no photos.

Randi was entertaining and biting, though I’ll admit a bit rambling. His lecture consisted mostly of anecdotes of swindlers he’s caught and some proof of how silly a lot of pseudoscience is. As a fairly active online skeptic very little of it was new to me, and I did find myself wanting him to punctuate each anecdote with the moral of “so yes, even you scientists-in-training, can be fooled so question even yourselves” and so-on.

But we got more than we paid for (donated to Unicef for, technically) and Randi went on an extra hour. It really was a lot of fun, and the audience had a great time — with the exception of the girl who fainted when they showed the video of him performing “psychic surgery”. Here’s the video, but if you’re squeamish you might not want to watch. Don’t worry, it’s all fake.

Afterwards we headed out to a special Skeptics In The Pub, though when we arrived our famished party was told the Railway Club’s kitchen was closed on Mondays.  We headed across the street and had some pretty good sushi.  It was very fast sushi though, and we got back to the pub around 11:00.  We got in and people were sitting around enjoying some pizza.  We sat down but instantly realized that we couldn’t drink because we had to work tomorrow (them) or were driving (me) and so everyone else made “it’s really late” sounds and we ended up shuffling off home right away.

As soon as I got home though, Fred Bremmer tweeted that Randi was at Skeptics in the Pub, which filled me with instant jealousy.  It was too late for me to head back in though, so I just had to realize I’d have to plan better next time.

Fred has posted his photos from the lecture and the pub afterwards on his Facebook profile.  My favorite is the shot of Randi with the Randi doll.

Oh well, there’s always the next Amazing Meeting!  Hey Rob — it’s in Vegas!  July 9-12!