As I was walking to Dragonfly last night, I came across a few thousand (ok, dozen) college-age people camped out in front of the city government building. They were pretty much sprawled out all over the place. Some toted sleeping bags, some covered emo tracks on acoustic guitars, and at least a half dozen members of the group were frantically running around snapping pictures of everyone. Thinking that this would make for some interesting encounters when 2am rolled around, I continued on my way and didn’t think much of it. After all, if it was anything important, it would’ve been in the news — right?

Here’s the first rule of staging a protest, demonstration, or any form of in-person mass expression: Have a cause.

I’m assuming that this group didn’t, because there weren’t any signs, flyers, placards, handouts, chants, or other forms of communication whatsoever. About the only clue to their purpose were the orange-on-yellow “invisible posse” shirts each wore. Good job, guys.

Around 9:30, one of the protesters walked past Dragonfly and struck up a conversation. She said they were protesting invisible children, and something about Uganda. So I guess they were protesting Ugandan children, which frankly is pretty cruel. Jerks.

Anyway, pretty uneventful night downtown. DJ Smooth had the bulk of the crowd upstairs, and it got proportionally thinner the farther underground you went. At no point during the night did I use too much fog, nor was fog rolling down the stairs into The District. For that matter, fog did not roll out onto Second Street and into oncoming traffic. In fact, Dragonfly’s upstairs fog machine — which blasts out 588 cubic feet of fog PER SECOND — was off all night, so I don’t even know what you’re talking about.