Google is great. But it is useless this morning at finding any stories about the Hunter Thompson tribute at the National Press Club last night. Maybe all the reporters present were too stoned and drunk to write anything about it.

It could be that I am too hung over to have the patience to keep looking. The only thing I can find is this brief in the Washington Post about it. Maybe you can catch it on C-SPAN.

I didn't take any notes, but the program provides a few interesting details, including a few select quotations from the good doctor himself.

"Gonzo journalism is a style of reporting based on William Faulkner's idea that the best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism," Thompson once said. "The best journalists have always known this."

Perhaps blogging at its best could be called gonzo journalism. You be the judge.

My only complaint was that non-Press Club members were confined to the 13th floor ballroom where smoking was not allowed and the only imported beer served was Heineken. OK, my attorney in Florida insists Thompson actually liked Heineken - or at least he referred to it in his writing.

My recollection is that he made Bass Ale famous in the U.S. when he talked about drinkng it by the case at the Washington Hilton swimming pool during the Watergate hearings. But then life has taught me that personal recollections are not perfect, especially when a buzz is involved.

In what the Press Club refers to as, "A tribute to Hunter, by his friends, peers, colleagues and other troublemakers," several speakers who knew him told stories about the man who killed himself in his kitchen a couple of months ago.

Former Aspen Daily News editor Chris Robinson was on the panel, along with Frank Mankiewicz, Al Eisele and Corey Seymour, one of the editors of the Rolling Stone HST tribute issue.

Time magazine White House correspondent Matt Cooper acted as master of ceremonies and introduced a list of speakers who all attempted to make the audience of Thompson fans laugh.

Several of us walked out and headed for the upstairs bar when James Rosen of Fox News came on. Smoking was allowed at the Press Club bar for members, and they did serve Bass Ale.

Several non-members crashed the bar, including an interesting fellow who described himself as a local auto mechanic who kept chewing on psilocybin mushrooms and muttering that Thompson would have been "appalled."

I'll have more to say about this in my Sunday column. For now I've got to head out into the rain and entertain a dog named Ripkin before he bites one of the neighbors and gets me kicked out of place where I'm house sitting in what they call The People's Republic of Takoma Park.

As HST might say, got to go, Ho, Ho.

GW