Busy conference day. I presented two papers. The first was a piece I co-authored with my pal Skye titled “In the Huddle: SCCT Analysis of NFL and Players’ Association 2011 Lockout Strategies” which looked at that particular piece of business through the Coombs’ Situational Crisis Communication Theory. In the final analysis they followed part of the model perfectly, but blew it elsewhere.

The second paper was a piece on the Colbert Super PAC, which was one part history of PACs that led to this moment, one part speculation on what Colbert was doing, where Super PACs are taking us and, finally, announcing the latest financials they’ve raised and spent. That is a lot of money.

That paper, which I co-authored with The Yankee, was well received. It won top paper honors. I got a plaque and everything. Not too shabby.

And immediately after that session I served as a respondent in another session.

How this works: someone has grouped a small handful of papers together for the researchers to discuss their examination and findings to their audience, as I did twice earlier today. Another person, the respondent, is assigned to make some larger sense of it all. The respondent’s job is often to find a common thread, but also give some feedback on the papers, deliver some helpful criticism as they continue their research and so on.

I was asked to be the respondent on a mass communication panel titled “‘Talking’ with the People We ‘Know’ Best: Traditional Interaction as it Happens Online.” (Academics aren’t known for riveting titles.) I had four fine papers to read, which makes being a respondent enjoyable. You read things beyond your area and, if you are conscientious about it, you find yourself working hard to make your actual response worthwhile.

It takes some time and sometimes a bit of trepidation. One of those papers I knew nothing about when I started reading. The nice person that wrote it is the expert. What can I say to that person? But eventually you find something. No study is perfect and all that.

And this might be a first: the timekeeper flashed me a one-minute sign. Not sure I’ve ever seen a respondent threaten to go over the allotted time before.

I hope it was at least a little bit worth it to the researchers.

This is Schilo’s:

Pronounce it “She-Lows.”

This is one of those downtown dining institutions. I’d had lunch there two days in a row. Yesterday it was the Wienerschnitzel of breaded pork and a side of red cabbage. Today I had the Friday special, which was a deliciously salty roast beef with mashed potatoes and green beans.

(UPDATE: The next day, Saturday, we returned for breakfast. I had the potato pancakes, which were not the best potato pancakes I’ve ever had by any measure. But the lunches? Oh they know their lunches.)

A man named Fritz Schilo opened a saloon 90 miles away in Beeville, Texas just after the turn of the 20th century. In 1914 he packed up his family and moved his booze joint to San Antonio. Three years later: Prohibition.

So the saloon business dried up. He opened a restaurant. His wife made the food for a location not too far away from this one. He moved next door in 1927, and Fritz Schilo stayed on through the first part of the Depression, until he died in 1935. His son, Edgar, took over and in 1942, during another war, they moved to the current location. You wonder if the family, before they sold the business sometime after the war, ever measured big personal events around big international events.

You’d think, from the perspective of history, everyone did. But do we? Aside from the occasional “Where were you when?” moment, probably not. Still, that Prohibition timing was pretty rough on ol’ Fritz.

A bit more local history, John Wayne stayed at our hotel twice during premieres of two separate movies. He charmed them so well the second time they named a suite after him:

And here’s the man John Wayne wished he could have been. That’s Audie Murphy, second from the right:

The man next to him, unknown to whomever wrote the caption below the picture on display in the hotel lobby, looks positively beside himself with nausea. You would, too, if you were taking a picture with Murphy. If you don’t know what that’s about, you should do a little reading.

(UPDATE: The guy on the far right might be Harold Russell a World War II veteran who is one of only two non-professional actors to win an Oscar for his acting in The Best Years of Our Life. Russell had an amazing life.)

The hotel itself is lovely, in the lobby. The rooms are a bit shabby for the $160 rate they’re asking from conference-goers. We got a slightly better rate. The joke of the conference has been “What broke in your room this morning?” Oh, roughly everything. We’ll see about those rates again later this weekend.

Oh? The Alamo? Everyone says it is smaller than you’d think. And there’s no basement.