From: neal*nsdev.org
Subject: Your conundrum
Date: May 23, 2004 11:52:51 PM CDT
Hi Bruce,
Okay, you're probably being email-flashed now, people from all over the world reading what that microsoftie transliterated that you said at some function promoting some book of yours that a friend of mine though I should read late at night, so I did. It is certainly a problem you've worked yourself into. Other than the obvious: why throw a party if you can't handle it? Here's a couple more ideas for you.
First, you could give everyone a coloured tag at the door. Have several different colours, and the people at the party would have to wear them as wristbands or some such. Then you'd carefully explain to them that sometime during the evening they will be required to read a rulebook explaining the meaning of the coloured band. If you had four colours, for instance, you could have a rule for the red bands be ensuring that extremely loud conversations were somehow quelled in such a way as to not disturb the flow of the party, such as kindly asking the main chatterbox for a word in private, and then complementing them on their obvious intellectual prowess, or something even more confusing, like making a remark that they really aught to read the rule-book for their coloured band more closely.
Green band wearers could be responsible for ensuring that anyone sufficiently drunk would be taken care of. They'd make sure no drinking and driving was attempted, and so on. Quite simple really.
Yellow band wearers might be responsible for the timely dispensation of alcohol negating measures, such as periodically running through the crowds with fattening snacks, high protein, low carby goodness. Whatever the usual partygoers would need to counteract the effects of their intoxicants. Perhaps even caffiene... really good coffee could be served half-way through the evening, and the yellow bands would be the distributors.
I guess another band could be added, a blue band. Your guess is as good as mine as to what these would do... perhaps they'd judge the mood of the crowd and carefully counteract dangerous surges through carefully applied mood music. They would be responsible for making sure things didn't get out of hand by making suggestions to the DJ, who I would assume would be you, from your published collection of digitized music, if you have such a thing. Though, for some reason, I imagine you would.
Additional colours might create even more interesting variations on the emergent behaviours that would manifest during the evening. You could cover health issues such as overindulgence, dehydration, lack of bodily fluid receptacles, indecent exposure, lack of grace, brawling, and so on all with carefully chosen colour distributions and a well written rule book.
Let me know if you actually end up using the idea. If you do, maybe fly me out for the party, I'd love to see it in action!
Cheers,
Just some random guy with a keyboard.
Neal Sanche
PS: I never quite made it through one of your books...
