stop me before I nerd again

I just got back from my third science-writer-dominated social event in three days. Tonight a writer for Nature got some people together for Screen in the Green - they set up a big screen on the Mall, so you watch an old movie with the Capitol as a backdrop. People bring picnics and dogs, and you listen to the bugs and to the soundtrack echoing off the facades of the Air & Space and National Gallery. Tonight they showed The Big Sleep. I like it, but golly, I can't follow the plot at all. Eventually I stopped trying and just followed the delightful Humphrey-Bogart-Lauren-Bacall-ness of it all. Unusually for Washington in August, it was a beautiful night, with a breeze.