I'm sure that College Station, TX, probably has its delights, but the facade of the Hilton isn't one of them. Yes, I have deliberately used the CameraBag app on my iPhone to render it 1974-style, which is somehow appropriate. Even though all the conference, so far, has been in this hotel, and we haven't yet been bussed off to Texas A&M campus, I have already learned a good deal about the institution. Somehow, I thought its name was related to Hymns A&M - the Church of England standard pew issue - but it's not Ancient and Modern, here, but Agricultural and Mechanical. And this area is also known as Aggieland. The principal local crop is sorghum. The George Bush Presidential Library and Museum is here. "Let future generations understand the burden and the blessings of freedom, Let them say we stood where duty required us to stand," the brochure in my room quotes GB as saying in 1991. Since the accompanying picture shows him and Barbara standing in College Station (actually I don't think it does - it's a fairly crude piece of photoshopping) the inference, of course, is that one only hangs around Aggieland if duty requires one to. [Disclaimer! This doesn't refer to the conference itself! Just the environment...]
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