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[austin_dern]

Filing into the studio takes a lot of time. It takes more time than you might imagine to get 210 people seated, even though it's superficially not actually harder than getting a movie theater audience seated. The monitors overhead showed blank pictures or the color-bar test pattern while the speakers played Modestly Rocking Songs Not Too Intense To Distract You until about 5:15, when everyone was pretty settled and Brian McCann came out to lead the warm-up. McCann is one of the writers and probably the most recognizable ``oh, that guy'' from Conan O'Brien's show: he's the one usually called on to portray Abraham Lincoln or a robot or a loud and oblivious guy. He's always done the warm-up, so far as I can tell, although the format's varied a bit from the 90s.

He pointed out the special nature of the show and appreciated everyone coming out, and did some asking about whether anyone got in on standby tickets --- given to people who lined up and waited outside all night. A few did, somehow, and he pegged them (as you might expect) as losers. I wouldn't have slept in Rockefeller Center in late February for a TV show taping or much of anything else either. As was reasonably familiar he asked where people were from; there's always a big New Jersey contingent to the point he'd stopped telling jokes about that. Someone was in from Iowa, another from California, some from Texas, and a few rows behind me was someone from Saudi Arabia. Next to him was someone from Pakistan, which McCann noted was remarkable although he couldn't really specify how other than it was neat people were coming together for this very silly thing. Finland had some representatives, of course. (Conan O'Brien bears a striking resemblance to President Tarja Kaarina Halonen.)

My father urged me to point out I was here from Singapore but I felt that was a really, really extreme stretch considering I flew in from Singapore over two years earlier. And then some women in the back by the stage-right aisle proclaimed they were from Hong Kong, which seemed to me a much fairer ``farthest from'' trophy, until they admitted they grew up in Hong Kong but had lived in Manhattan the last three years.

In the 90s, Conan O'Brien himself would come out to bring the warm-up to its climax, picking someone in the audience and singing ``Burning Love'' in a rather good impersonation of Elvis Presley until he would break character by singing more intently until he could point out what a fool he was making of himself. (He, rather admirably, admits he's a talk show/comic and not a singer and so doesn't want to inflict his singing on the public; however, he has got a respectable talent that he self-sabotages when performing.) He didn't come out this time; whether this reflects a change in warm-up policy established for years or just that in the fuss over the Final Show he gave it a pass I couldn't say. It was different, but then, it was a different sort of show from one I'd seen before. I'd never been to an event.

Trivia: The mathematician John Wallis used (in Arithmetica infinitorum, 1655) the symbol of a small square to represent the number 4/π. Source: A History of Mathematical Notations, Florian Cajori.

Currently Reading: Snark: It's Mean, It's Personal, and It's Ruining Our Conversation, David Denby.