Poky Little Wifi and WAGYU

   Here at the bustling Westin Crown Center in downtown Kansas City, Mo., we have rather slow Wifi offset by expansive views of a conventioneering area, with a downtown-shaped downtown on the photographically convenient horizontal horizon and closer up, myriad-windowed gray high-rise rectangles, a little bronze horseman in a parking lot pocket park and, once in a while, a long line of boxcars.
   The hotel has an indoor fountain about the size of my backyard decorated with enough live plants to keep an office-plant supplier in craft beer for a month.
   During my hilarious transit here from the airport, I shared a SuperShuttle with 10 people, including three gregarious guapos in town to compete in a reality TV show, Make 48. Construction worker Angel and his friend the painter were half of a four-man crew from Portland calling themselves the Mount Hoodlums. Joe of Team Believe from northern California was to meet up with his three sisters from Hawaii, one of whom was the computer nerd.
   They had not yet signed confidentiality agreements, so I learned they were paying their own way, including the Holiday Inn fees, and expected to be awake for 48 hours while trying to fabricate an invention to solve some problem the producers will spring on them as the cameras started to roll Thursday morning.
   They were thrilled.
   Beside the painter, a surprisingly secular-looking lady also from Portland announced that she worked for the Mennonite church, as did Joyce, an utterly lovely young brunette in a business suit. The contestants and the Mennonite lady bantered nonstop all the way to our hotel.
   At the Westin, Karen Martin from Baton Rouge introduced herself to me in the Westin lobby. Also an SFJ attendee, she had disappeared behind the wall of fun in the shuttle, listening quietly, which I should have been doing, too. She said she'd gathered I was also a newspaper person by my questions, which made me feel better about talking so much to strangers in a van.

   The lobby around the hotel restaurant was crowded by a scattered herd of tall Midwesterners holding beer bottles and tagged with the logo of the American WAGYU Association, which is also convening here but wearing convention badges on lanyards. They are color-coded but I couldn’t find the pattern.
   I knew you would wonder, so I asked and learned that WAGYU was not in caps for any good reason. It is an especially fat-making kind of cow associated with Japan but raised in the United States so it no longer expects to be massaged.