A peek out of the closet ...

It was not without some trepidation that my SO and I met PZ "Paul" Myers of Pharyngula tonight. PZ was visiting Los Angeles for the Future of the Book symposium, and had invited readers to meet him at a museum on Saturday; I couldn't make the museum trip, so he kindly invited me to dinner (along with a few other talk.origins pals of his - Don Frack, Troy Britain, and Andy Groves I'll hold off posting their names until I know they're not anonymous).

This was the first time that I'd met any of my readers offline, and only the second time that my SO and I had met online acquaintances offline. Meeting PZ meant that I would be breaking my anonymity a bit, but how many times do you get to go out to dinner with the biggest biology blogger out there? It was odd realizing that PZ probably knows more about me than anyone I work with.

Once at the restaurant, however, it was like any other gathering of good geeks; the conversation wandered among such topics as regeneration of hairs in the human inner ear, part-time teaching at community colleges, developmental processes of grasshoppers, creationist nonsense, and PZ's trash volume (which was more interesting than you might expect). PZ even looked just like he does in all of his pictures.

Probably the most humorous portion of the evening (for my SO and I) was when PZ admitted (jokingly) that, based on the number of not-exactly-healthy recipes I post, he expected me to be closer to 300 pounds.

[Update: PZ's got a summary of his Saturday in LA posted here.]