Today at dinner at Din Tai Fund I got to experience something strange: the stupid little story on CNN's front page about Lindsay Lohan being found passed out in a car actually served to start a conversation. Not only that, but it went on for a while at our table, and ended with the
comment that the other table seemed to be talking about things much more scientific. Of course, when mentioned to the other table they got a good laugh at that notion.
The other interesting conversation starter was the movie Lost in Translation. Arguments raged, minor points were discussed and generally it served to hold most everyone's attention for quite a while.
Anyways. I mostly bring this up to mention a conversation method I picked up a while ago: read the front page of news to get interesting topics to talk about. They may not even be interesting, but it's something to talk about and usually a good way to get started finding a common topic you may be more interested in. (For example, at the memorial day event Nadine had yesterday, one news item mentioned was Dell putting out linux boxes for sale. This triggered a chain of minor conversations until it was established that all four people involved knew programming in various ways, and we went into a discussion of different high level languages. Pretty interesting.)
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