And how did this odd, cacophonous gathering come about?
Nowadays there are some 40 odd annual Gatherings in the summer.
The odd-couple gathering led to speculation that Rush Limbaugh, who said that he was in D.C. for a "secret meeting," was also in attendance.
Gazing out upon this gathering of Odd Fellows and Rebekahs, all about to dine on small portions of beef or salmon, he sees a bobbing sea of gray and white.
We divide the data acquisition process into two steps: data gathering for odd and even time points of the cardiac cycle.
To compliment this smoothness, the set seemed aristocratic, if odd for an American fashion gathering.
Just attending a feminist gathering was an odd thing for a Syrian man to do; SY females are expected to stay home, rear children, socialize and, if possible, dazzle.
While the conference's 140-odd participants skewed young, the gathering also attracted notable senior scholars, including some who have carried the torch for intellectual history through decades of eclipse.
The Harper is a posthumous gathering of 50-odd of his last poems, ending with a brief fragment transcribed from a handwritten draft: "Buzz-saw cry of the gannet, / a ghost of water, / his outside child / The next station is God / Mind the doors!
THE forthcoming European summit in Brussels may be marginally less momentous than the Potsdam conference of 1945, but that event provides one of the closest historical analogies to the odd circumstances in which next week's gathering will take place.
