That was before I saw this item on Yahoo:

LONDON (AFP) - A banana half eaten by a British television presenter has been sold for 1,650 pounds (3,000 dollars, 2,485 euros) in an Internet auction.

Probably not a great giveaway idea for your next event, though.

BTW: with 17 bids in, the Millennium package on eBay is up to $520, with nine days to go.

A relatively shocking (I thought) study by Arial Software on how organizations are doing in complying with the CAN-SPAM Act found that if you subscribe to 100 e-mail newsletters:

-Thirty-six will never send you anything.
-From the companies that actually send e-mails, you will receive around 77 e-mails per month.
-Almost no companies will outright spam you (0.4%).
-Of the e-mails you receive, 33 will have an unsubscribe link, and 31 of those will actually work.
-Thirty-one will have no unsubscribe link at all, and will keep sending you e-mails ad infinitum. This e-mail volume will amount to around 37 e-mails a month.
-Two companies will keep sending you e-mails even after you unsubscribe (1.8%)

Out of the 1,057 companies it studied, only 66 did everything right. Check the list on p. 7 to see if your organization is one of them. Or look at the much longer list at the end of those who didn’t make the grade. If yours is on there, time to send an (unsolicited) e-mail of your own to your online marketing folks!

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First it was inflatable hotels, then inflatable meeting space…and now we have blow-up booths! What’s next, inflatable attendees? There’s already too much hot air on the exhibit floor–stop the madness!

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OK frequent fliers, the good news is that the government has decided to scrap CAPPS II, the dubious airport screening program that would rank passengers’ risk of being terrorists based on personal information. The bad news is that they spent more than $100 million planning the thing before deciding what pretty much anyone could have told them from the start: bad idea.

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This poster from despair.com probably wouldn’t make the best backdrop for a teambuilding activity, but it sure cracked me up.