According to Newsday, the National Rifle Association is pulling its 2007 convention out of Columbus, Ohio because the city passed a ban on assault weapons.

“The party is canceled because last week your City Council unanimously voted to revoke the constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens in Columbus by banning perfectly legal firearms,” NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre said.

City officials said the NRA had been told there was a potential for the ban.

“Public policy decisions — especially those affecting the safety of our citizens — cannot be influenced by any narrow interest group that happens to visit,” Council President Matt Habash and councilman Michael Mentel said in a statement.

I guess the city decided that losing those 60,000 attendees would hurt, but wouldn’t cause as much pain as semiautomatic rifles with pistol grips and detachable magazines could.

Where else but Cadbury, where staff is so motivated that they even sing while they work. From The Sunday Herald:

“Oh yeah, the Oompa Loompas,” says Adam Harris in the Bournville inventing room or, as Cadbury prefers to call it, the “development kitchen”. “You’ve got no idea how many times I’ve been called an Oompa Loompa. I don’t really mind, because it’s quite funny. We were actually all singing the Oompa Loompa song before you came in here today. But we had to stop because it really does your head in after a while.”

Mauritius, a little island off the east coast of Africa, is looking to become the world’s first wireless island, according to this article.

“It is our vision to transform Mauritius into a cyber-island,” said Deelchand Jeeha, the country’s minister of information technology and telecommunications, in a speech last year. The nation, he said, “is confident in the potential of [the industry] as an engine of growth which can generate jobs and wealth creation.”

If it does succeed in luring telecom to its shores, I can only imagine that it will also soon be beefing up its meetings infrastructure to accommodate more than beach-happy tourists. Where the jobs go, meetings always follow.

According to the Press telegram, being the first to buy a ticket to Disney World “really cemented my reputation as a weirdo,” said David MacPherson. It’s a cute story.

In other Disney news, in some grocery stores you can buy torillas with edible Disney Tortilla Decals in the package. Just in case Junior wants to bite Mickey’s head off.

Also, ever wondered about Disney’s lost and found? I hadn’t, but still found this article pretty interesting: Reuniting people with their lost canaries, toupees, glass eyeballs, and diamonds. I loved this quote:

Disneyland’s Lost and Found collects about 140,000 objects each year, most of them hats and sunglasses. Some quests are hopeless, such as trying to recover rolls of film. When patrons came looking for those, McFaul would present a large bin of identical rolls and ask, Any of this look familiar?

Strangeplaces.net has a listing of funky English translations found around the world. Some of my favorites:

In a Bucharest hotel lobby:
The lift is being fixed for the next day. During that time we regret that you will be unbearable.

In a Leipzig elevator:
Do not enter the lift backwards, and only when lit up.

In a Paris hotel elevator:
Please leave your values at the front desk.

In a hotel in Athens:
Visitors are expected to complain at the office between the hours of 9 and 11 A.M. daily.

In a Zurich hotel:
Because of the impropriety of entertaining guests of the opposite sex in the bedroom, it is suggested that the lobby be used for this purpose.

In an Acapulco hotel:
The manager has personally passed all the water served here.

Well, made me laugh, anyway.

Oh no, not another one–first PCMA with its Meeting Xperiment (where attendees send in ideas they’d like to see happen at the PCMA conference, and PCMA puts them into action during special “Xperimental” sessions). Now ASAE has launched its 2005 show blog as XtremeASAE Blog.

Bleh. Sorry, but that “X” thing is really old these days. Hip it is not. At least they didn’t go with a spiral logo for it (link via Seth Godin).

Anyway, I’ll stop squabbling about names, because substance is what it’s all about, and the ASAE blog should be a good one. They’re already linking to their IntroNetworks social networking tool, which I hope to be able to use even though I’m not attending this year (dream on, Sue!). Their blog comes with a Bloglet daily e-mail alert option, an RSS feed, and they’re even asking their presenters to put asae2005 tags on del.icio.us. So they’re doing all kinds of things that really are sort of extreme, for an association, anyway. But the name? Sorry, I’d put a big X through it and come up with something as fresh as what they’re doing.

Part of what makes so many presentations boring, I think, is the reliance on corporatespeak weasel words, like “optimize” and “resonate” and “gain traction” and, well, you get the point. To combat the weasel-word syndrome, every potential speaker should be given a copy of Watson’s Dictionary of Weasel Words, Contemporary Cliches, Cant & Management Jargon, or at the least be pointed to the Weasel Words site. One of my favorites from that site:

For your convenience: ‘Heard on a Virgin flight from Brisbane to Sydney: “for your convenience, the cabin will be pressurised”. How about, “so you don’t die, the cabin will be pressurised” or just, “the cabin will be pressurised”? [from Michael Hewitt]

Fast Company has an item in its Corporate Shrink section. The question:

I travel to several business conferences each year, and after a while they all start to feel the same. I know they’re supposed to be important for networking, but nobody seems to be having a great time or learning very much. I leave feeling exhausted. Do they have to be this way?

While the Corporate Shrink says to emphasize the networking aspects, I’d say this person needs to find better planned meetings! (As do I, unfortunately, since I usually leave a conference feeling wiped out rather than energized.) There’s no excuse for boring meetings, especially these days when there’s so much out there on how to make learning fun, memorable, and, well, energizing. While I’d like for our industry association meetings to take the lead, let’s not hold our breaths. Try incorporating just a little interactivity — it can be a baby step instead of a leap into the unknown — and see what happens. I bet they’ll leave feeling a little less fatigued, a little more excited, and a little more likely to remember what they learned and try it when they get home.

A couple of other interesting items from FastCo:
Is Your Boss a Psychopath?

And more to the point: The results of the Microsoft Office Personal Productivity Challenge, which include the fact that “69% believe meetings are ineffective.” Probably one of them was the person who wrote the above question.