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I'm watching a panel discussion that consists mostly of people telling stories they've been telling for years. Stories, of course, get ritualized as they are told, and the changes to them from that process are part of how they get less true. But then once they are ritualized, they're no longer able to be presented in a societally relevant context, and that poor aging is the meat of how they stop being true. In the worst case, it gets easy for the teller to simply forget that context entirely and dive into the ritualized storytelling without thinking about how the story has aged or whether it's a good idea to tell at all. (Tom, it was your extension cord story that got me thinking about this.)

I'm sure I've told stories I should have stopped telling. And I'm sure I've done that as part of a panel discussion. In fact even the story I'm telling now, about how stories get less true the more you tell them, is itself a story that I have found myself telling in ritualized form.

That's not to say that there's no place for story. And maybe the stories are better if the storyteller doesn't have to think, in the moment of telling, about which stories are still a good idea to tell. That could be some advance planning, or an edit pass, or for real time events a separate person whose job it is to curate -- an interviewer, or a panel moderator, or someone else who's familiar with the stories and can consider how they fit into the current context.

There's probably no single best answer for this. The current panel discussion has few enough people watching, and enough back-and-forth between the panelists, that making it a prepared recording instead seems easiest, and I bet that's the answer for a fairly wide swatch of convention programming as well. And as a side benefit, we'd have more content available for people who can't attend the conventions in question in person.

( Twelve hours in New Jersey )

We have used one bottle each of Coke, Diet Coke, Barqs, Sprite, raspberry-lime soda, lemon seltzer, and apple juice. We have used a pound of carrots and a pound of hummus, about a pound of assorted sweets, a container of salsa, and three bags of chips. We have used forty or fifty cups, six or seven bowls, four or five plates, two spoons, one trash bag, and one paper towel. We have used two and a half boxes of Girl Scout Cookies. Had I been thinking, I would have brought a case of them and had it be the theme of the party. Maybe next year.

So ( this story ) has not one but three traveling lessons:

• Never take the last flight of the day
  
• Never run for a plane
  
• Never assume a train is running on time
  

A friend of mine has recently returned from a trip to West Africa, after a delayed Royal Air Maroc flight. I've had some adventures with Royal Air Maroc myself, and though I haven't yet heard his story I am inspired to tell mine.

I was flying from Boston to Morocco to visit a friend. Lufthansa flies to Casablanca and Tangiers with one change of plane, in Frankfurt. Iberia flies to several destinations in Morocco with a change in Madrid. The only nonstop from the US to Morocco is on Royal Air Maroc, which flies from New York to Casablanca and will ticket from Boston, Montreal, or Washington DC via a code-share with American. I decided that if I was going to get stuck someplace I wanted it to be someplace I could speak the language, and booked my flights accordingly.

Everything went smoothly on the way there and almost all the way back. Casablanca's airport is capable of dealing with much more traffic than was present at the time (nearly a decade ago) and the R.A.M. 747, though aged, had no problems in either direction. The return flight was during Ramadan and I was amused that the long-journey fasting exception applied to alcohol served on the flight as well. I was worried about my 90-minute connection to a different terminal in JFK, but cleared customs in New York in plenty of time to make it onto the last leg, an American Eagle ATR-42. An hour or so into the flight -- just past Hartford -- the airplane lost a generator on one of the two engines. No problem; there are two generators on board. But once a generator has gone, it has to be fixed before the next time the airplane can take off. And American doesn't have ATR maintenance facilities in Boston, only New York. They could have paid someone else to fix the plane in Boston. But it was cheaper to turn around, fly back to New York, and put the bunch of us on a shuttle flight. So back to New York we went. Of course the shuttles fly out of Laguardia, not Kennedy, so we got to endure a chartered bus ride through Queens as well.

Needless to say, I now avoid turboprops (along with checked baggage, running to make connections, and taking the last flight of the day, all of which have stories associated with them) whenever I can. The next time I flew across the Atlantic from Kennedy, I made my connecting flights on TWA, which flies regional jets. And as a bonus, I got to enjoy Eero Saarinen's wonderful architecture along the way.