I’ve Been A Bad Blogger
In yesterday’s post about Cal Skinner’s coverage of the Chicago Junior Rowing Championship, Blog Reports On Crystal Lake Rowing Event Not Part Of Gay Games, I wrote
Regardless, [Cal Skinner is] still the guy out there on a slate-colored Saturday, darting from point to point on the Lake, taking photos of a competition for which it appears he personally constituted a significant fraction of the entire audience.
Well, it turns out that I may have miscalculated the size of that audience by just a tad.
Jack Sebesta, the Superintendent of Recreation for the Crystal Lake Park District, provides his own crowd count, which hardly seems fair since he has the advantage of having been involved in the arrangements for the event and probably even attended the races himself, while I, loyal to the Code of the Dilettante, divined the number of spectators based on photos – not photos of the audience, mind you, but photos of the rowers the audience was watching.
There is a reason this happened; unfortunately, that reason is that sometimes I’m an idiot.
Anyway, Jack writes
Last Saturday there were 550+ male and female rowers. Over 1200 spectators and approximately 35 volunteers at the event. The 11 teams came from Minnesota, Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois and one that rows in Kentucky but is based out of Ohio. There were 37 separate races or heats. It was a great event that generated overnight hotel stays, restaurant, gas station and other sales within the community.
As I explained in my two point response to Superintendent Sebesta or, as I like to think of him, BlackJack Sebesta,
- AAARGH
- It’s a perspective thing. We hillbillies who grew up in the Ozarks are less likely to attend something called a regatta than we are to try ordering one at an Italian restaurant.
My apologies to the regatta’s athletic participants, any one of whom could, I note, both batten down my hatches and shiver me timbers, the numerous and apparently free-spending spectators, the Park District, Cal Skinner, and, of course, Ol’ BlackJack himself.
