So I finally met up with longtime Internet buddy Julian Sanchez last night after work. I met him at a bar called Stoney’s and he introduced me to a bunch of folks from Cato, including Jerry Brito and Gene Healy.

Then we split up for a while and I met Julian and his girlfriend later on at a party at the home (I guess) of Kevin B. Zeese, president of Common Sense for Drug Policy. You’ve probably seen their ads in public affairs magazines like Reason, The New Republic, National Review, etc.

I used the downstairs bathroom and Zeese had a very funny sign posted right above the toilet: “Certified Urine Drug Tester,” or something to that effect. It was a legit poster, too — I imagine a friend got it for him as a practical joke. I don’t recall the exact wording. Anyway, I met a bunch of Koch fellows there, as well as LP campus coordinator Marc Brandl, for whom I can’t locate a Web site at just the moment. All were very friendly and we had some fun conversation and a few beers, too, of course.

Then I took a cab home and went to some parties around the dorms at Alumni Square here in Georgetown, which naturally weren’t as libertarian-infested and therefore less interesting.

Hmph. I might go to this. I am free Wednesday night.

Actually, the weather has been refreshing the last couple of days — in the 70s and low 80s with grey skies and light showers. So it’s been much more tolerable than it was before. Unfortunately, there are no 24-hour labs here as I thought. Well, I guess the labs are theoretically open, but you are supposed to swipe the GoCard through this machine for the door to open. But we have the new and improved GoCard which, apparently, does not work with any of the old and still unimproved card-reading machines.

Which means I’m more or less limited to the library for blogging. And they’re closing off access to the computers at least at 5:30 p.m. There are these three Macs in the student center which doesn’t close until midnight, but you have to stand up to to use them, and with only three they are occupied much more often, naturally.

So far, work has been fun. Working at KRT is kind of a meritocracy. The editors aren’t going to say, “No, don’t work on that — we don’t have space,” because it’s a wire service and they can move as much copy as they want on to the wire. But it’s a meritocracy because however good or timely your story is determines whether it gets picked up by the member papers.

So I’m pretty sure I had a story about Senate Democrats attacking Bush’s Social Security plan published yesterday, but I have to look it up on Lexis-Nexis to make sure, as KRT does not track its stories.

And I’m working on four or five other stories right now and also wrote a couple of very brief Web site reviews for this “Hotlink” feature they run.

As for classes … they’re three-hour lectures, and they’re tough. Tuesday and Thursday nights from 6 to 9 p.m. I have economics class. That’s after an 8-hour working day. And these are lectures, all the way through. The chairs are uncomfortable and there’s no time to eat or change into comfortable clothing after work. Those 12-hour days are killer.

Meanwhile, on Wednesday morning we have a guest speaker or speakers every week, followed by a three-hour class in ethics. That’s pretty brutal. So I have no energy to do any reading for class during the week, which means I’ve got to do it all on the weekend, in addition to laundry, shopping, etc.

Jeez, don’t I have it terrible? And here I thought all those kids dying of AIDS in sub-saharan Africa were badly off.

Here’s an interesting tidbit. The boss of one of my roommates, Daniel Epstein (who’s from Houston, by the way) , apparently started the IPJ program and he told Daniel that pretty much everyone who applied was accepted. No surprise, really. I always thought the application process was a little less than rigorous.

Once you’re here, though, they wear you ragged. We are told repeatedly that these seven weeks will just fly by. Well, it’s just more than a week since I’ve arrived and it feels like two or three. So I hope it does start flying by soon. I want to get back home.

So, IPJ finally told us about our internship assignments today. I will be working at Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services, a leading wire service that provides content to more than 365 newspapers aorund the country.

I’m not sure yet what I’ll be doing there, exactly, but all in all it sounds like a sweet gig. It’s certainly no Hog Farmer Quarterly.

By the way, the roommate whose internship with the International Fresh-cut Producers Association freaked me out actually got precisely the assignment he wanted. His major is something called agricultural marketing communications, and this gig is right up his alley. So good for him — and for me.

The folks I’ve met so far are very friendly, and my roommates are amiable fellows as well. Though, presumably, one should wait more than two days before judging the matter, as surely some bitterness of one kind or another will bubble up sooner or later.

They weren’t kidding about the humidity here. Luckily, I had the opportunity to appreciate the midday sun for more than an hour, as I waited in an unshaded, outdoor line to get my Georgetown University ID card, which inevitably has a stupid name. It’s called the GoCard. Whatever.

There are labs here open 24 hours a day, so that should give me plenty of time to blog, once I figure out how to log on to the system using the new password I was just given. Until then.

As I just mentioned, I’m leaving for D.C. on Saturday, and I’ll be there through the end of July. Between classes, internship work and no PC in the dorm room where I’ll be living, the blog should slow down quite a bit. But do check in, as I plan to write about how things are going as well as whatever news catches my eye.

So, you’ll recall that one of my reservations about doing the Institute on Political Journalism program was that I really didn’t know how good of an internship I’d get in D.C. Though I leave for the program on Saturday and classes start on Monday, I still have not been told about my internship placement.

But I’ve been in touch with one of my roommates who is also in IPJ and he said he’ll be working for the International Fresh-cut Producers Association. No joke. This is not to say that I expected to be working at the Washington Post or anything ridiculous like that, but I’m hoping for something better than to work for a lobbying group.

I also don’t mean to suggest that it won’t still be a valuable learning experience no matter where I work. At this point, I’m not in a position to turn down any writing experience, especially trade or business-related work which could come in handy when looking for a job here in Chicago.

But there’s a question of alternatives. I had other choices. I just hope this wasn’t a mistake.

I was in the Walgreens buying some things and two men who were price checking with those handheld machines were working near the checkout counter. One said to the other, “So what happened with that whole Enron thing? Did they just cheat everybody out of their money or what?”

His partner answered noncommittally. But boy could they operate those machines, typing in numbers a gazillion miles a minute without even looking at the keypad. A perfect example of rational ignorance, which is both a blessing and a curse. And to think that I sometimes flagellate myself for not keeping up enough with the news.

In a fine story debunking some of the previously reported profits of porn companies, AlterNet’s Emanuelle Richard (link via InstaPundit) makes the mistake of relying on none other than Luke Ford as a supposedly reliable source. Richard concludes:

With the increased coverage, and the addition of porn beats at a handful of mainstream publications, the myths about the adult business are bound to give way to a more accurate picture. But, says Luke Ford, it might take a while.

“The media don’t catch the baloney, the lies, the true horror of this industry that you capture when you go on sets and you mix with the people, and you just see the cavalier way they deal with life,” Ford said. “Every one of these people lie. Everyone. They lie by habit. When their lips move, they’re saying lies — they can’t help it. … If the greatest reporter in the world decides to make porn his beat, it would still take him a year or two to get up to speed.”

Yeah, it’s a colorful quote, and I might have concluded my story the same way. But Luke Ford — who makes Matt Drudge look like Bob Woodward — is hardly the guy to talk about great reporting. Sure, he knows firsthand of the deviousness of many people in the porn industry, but he did his part to make reliable information about the porn industry hard to come by in reporting rumors, gossip and off-the-record conversations on his pseudo-news site.

He burned as many times as he was burned, and is not exactly the kind of disinterested observer you should turn to for a balanced view of what’s really going on in the industry. I guess Richard’s years of covering porn — on and off — did not teach her that much.