Alex at MR blogs about being insulted by Gordon Tullock. Here' my story:

I am presenting my first paper at my first economics conference (the Southern Economics Association I think). It was a chapter or something from my dissertation and the empirical results were, um, how shall I say this, underwhelming. After going through the model and somewhat apologetically presenting my results which didn't show what the model predicted. Gordon says to me, "That's ok, Bob, a lot of other people haven't found that result either."