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Daigacon - Author's Notes - 2007 College Heights, on hilltop fair, With beauty all thine own, Lovely jewel far more rare Than graces any throne! College Heights, we hail thee; We shall never fail thee Falter never, live forever, Hail! Hail! Hail! Mary Frances Bradley, 1924 We're assembling these notes next to a cascading seven-story fountain in the atrium of the Holiday Inn at Bowling Green, Kentucky, watching the gradually dimming sunlight from beyond the hotels main entrance. One of the veteran fans at Daigacon said it reminded him of the atrium at the hotel that once held AnimeIowa, and we realized that it was a familiar pattern. It took only a couple of minutes looking around the hotel lobby to find that the Holiday Inn is a John Q. Hammonds, hotel, one of several that have housed anime conventions in the past. With conventions at Hammonds hotels in Virginia, Iowa, Kentucky, Colorado and Tennessee, that hotel chain may have housed more anime shows than any other hotel owner. Of course, that trivia means nothing to real people, as will the other, continuing coincidence which still fascinates the author of this site. The main road past Bowling Green is I-65, where exit 22 is the main exit leading to town. The first time we rode on that road to the interstate, 15 years earlier, we were amazed to find that the exit had two identical Waffle House restaurants on each side of I-65, only a few hundred feet apart and clearly visible one from the other. Since this was on the Independence Day holiday, the Waffle Houses were the only restaurants open at the interchange and each one was packed, including the one where our racing group stopped. Move ahead to 2007. The rise of interstate traffic on I-65, the success of Western Kentucky University, the business generated by the Fruit of the Loom factory and the popularity of the Chevrolet Corvette assembly plant and museum have led to the overbuilding of businesses at Exit 22. Every scrap of land is covered with a gas station, hotel, motel or restaurant. Yet, both Waffle Houses still stand on both sides of the interchange, and both were busy when we drove through on Daigacon's Sunday morning. That Kentucky land is like what we saw one week earlier while in Manhattan for the New York Comic Con, where the land is so valuable that you have to grow by building up or down, but not out. When we stopped at a drug store near Madison Square Garden for a tube of toothpaste, the store looked too small and we couldn't find anything - until a clerk let us know that the rest of the store was downstairs. There were few other comparisons between the New York show and Daigacon. The comic con was as busy as a Wall Street trading floor, but Daigacon was as calm and quiet as one of the caves that dot the land around Bowling Green. It was a small convention with some fascinating guests, including singer Yoko Ishida, professional cosplayer Yunmao Ayakawa and actor Yasuhiro Koshi. Of the three conventions held on the first weekend of March (a major statement in its own right), Daigacon was the only one to have guests from Japan - and one of the few in 2007 to feature Japanese guests. All three were exceptionally approachable, friendly and downright curious about Kentucky-style fans. Those guests took advantage of a calm, laid-back attitude where there wasn't any reason to rush. We'll hope that enough people showed up to help the organizers make some money; at the closing ceremonies, Daigacon's chair promised a 2008 convention. Those organizers got a lot of assistance from the staff of other conventions in the general region, including people we spotted from Ohayocon, the Middle Tennessee Anime Convention and SugoiCon. Those people, including the con chairs in some cases, just showed up to help for the sake of helping. On SugoiCon: they'll have a new home around Fort Wright, Kentucky for 2007 - but it'll be on the same weekend as Anime USA. Looks as if we have another series of tough choices to make about conventions we like in November, complicated by Youmacon and Nekocon being on the same weekend at the first of the month. We already had to make a tough choice about Daigacon, since our work schedule kept us from getting to the convention's first two days and made us settle for a one-day Sunday trip. As we headed away from home on I-65, some slippery snow almost discouraged us from driving past the county line, but we decided to stick with it, slowing to avoid trouble and save fuel. As always, the trip was worth the effort - our seventh convention trip of 2007. Daigacon Main Page