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Katsucon - Author's Notes - 2007 Where may the wearied eye repose when gazing on the Great; Where neither guilty glory glows, nor despicable state? Yes --one--the first--the last--the best-- the Cincinnatus of the West, Whom envy dared not hate, bequeath'd the name of Washington, To make man blush there was but one! Ode to Napoleon, Lord Byron It took only a few hours for the energy level at the Omni Shoreham hotel to diminish. On Sunday afternoon, the lobby was filled with costumed and camera-carrying fans, enjoying Katsucon's final hours. On Monday morning, the lobby was again filled with furniture and the fans were gone. It was that lack of furniture that made the difference for Katsucon from 2006 to 2007. The basketball court-sized lobby was cleared and turned into the cosplay capital of the Potomac for the weekend. Gone were the don't-stand-there attitudes of 2006, replaced with a laid-back 2007 approach. Looked like the 2006 complaints were taken to heart, and there were no 2007 complaints that we could observe. Anime convention fans are exceptionally benign - nowhere close to hard-drinking pro football fans - and they're pretty reasonable when left alone, as the 2007 Katsucon weekend showed. Those fans are so harmless that the people at the Funimation booth, which also was located in the lobby, had to work hard to convince people that the DVD's and posters at their booth were free for the taking and not for sale. A couple of times, we spotted actor Greg Ayres stopping at the booth, picking up boxes of Beck posters so he could autograph them. The closest thing we had to a complaint was that the hotel's main restaurant was closed on Saturday and Sunday. The hotel had a small food store with sandwiches and salads and room service food was available, but we missed the restaurant's breakfast buffet on Saturday and Sunday morning. We did get a huge turkey club sandwich from the hotel bar's food menu on Sunday afternoon while watching the Daytona 500 (about which more later). The odd moment of the weekend came at the Saturday night costume contest when the best of show award was announced to some dissatisfaction (a few boos) from the audience. The judges decided that an unconventional entry was the best of the night, but they were hesitant in making the announcement and a little ineffective in explaining their decision from the stage. Best of show went to a young woman in a summoner Yuna costume from Final Fantasy who performed a dance on stage, assisted by more than a half-dozen black clad assistants who provided a series of special effects. What looked like a solo dance was actually a carefully choreographed group entry; those who saw a similar effort at Anime Central in 2006 will have an idea of what happened with that Katsucon act. The judges could have used a trained rhetoritician to get their point across. We bumped into producer and translator Toshifumi Yoshida and expressed our sympathy on the January death of his mother. Yoshida replied that his parent's passing had led to a reconciliation with his father and a chance to get reacquainted with relatives he hadn't seen in years; amazing how things such as that turn out for the better. Katsucon was the first of two consecutive trips out east for this writer. We're planning to head to New York for the big New York Comic Con, where we expect to cover the American Anime Awards on Saturday night, then get cosplay pictures for Newtype USA at the magazine's 10 a.m. Sunday panel discussion. It'll be just like the arrangement we had at Anime Expo in 2006; if you show up in a costume at the panel, we'll get your picture and turn it over to Newtype USA so it'll appear in a future issue. Doesn't have to be an anime costume, either - which brings to mind another costuming story. One of the highlights of the Star Wars Celebration III in 2005 was when actor and musician Vic Mignogna played Obi-Wan Kenobi and met up with an Anakin Skywalker costumer who, frankly, looked better than Hayden Christensen. If you know who that Anakin costumer was, drop a note to Mignogna at his web site. He'd really like to find that guy so they can get together again at the 2007 celebration in California. With the early end of convention activities on Sunday, we spent much of  the day hanging out in the hotel bar, watching the Daytona 500 on TV. Our only disappointment for 2007 was that we weren't able to get down to Florida for some racing, but that'll happen when you decide to go to five conventions in the first month and a half of the new year. NASCAR racing has its share of fans who complain that things aren't as good as they were in the old days, and they're right - the racing is far more intense, especially at Daytona. That was the case in 2007, when Kevin Harvick edged Mark Martin while a dozen cars wrecked behind them. What has changed in NASCAR has been the fading memories of some of the oldtime spear carriers and journeymen, guys who filled the field while the stars ran up front. Among them was Delma Cowart, the driver who's supposed to have said "I never won a race, but I never lost a party." Anime convention fans also shouldn't forget one of their oldtimers, Steve Pearl. The original east coast Otaking was a regular sight at the region's early conventions; it's safe to say that he was going to anime conventions before a large number of today's fans were born. Unfortunately, Pearl has suffered from health trouble that makes our 2006 problems look trivial; his diabetes has led to repeated hospitalizations and amputations. It's exceptionally sad to see someone who was once so vital in such pain, and you have a special way to keep Steve in your hearts and prayers. During the Katsucon weekend, a supply of blank cards was delivered to artist Steve Bennett's booth in the dealer's room. The goal was to have as many fans as possible write goodwill messages to Pearl on those cards, then deliver them to Pearl at his hospital. Many of those cards were filled out, but many more remain to be written to reach the goal of 1,000 cards for Pearl. Check out Bennett's web site and write him a message on the forum to learn more about this effort for Steve Pearl. Katsucon Main Page