According to the Chicago Sun-Times, there’s a guy named Craig Smith who says gas prices could hit $5 a gallon by next year. And, it says,

if terrorists successfully strike a major Middle East oil field, Americans might end up paying $10 a gallon — about $110 to fill a Ford Focus’ 11-gallon tank.

We’re already seeing energy surcharges starting to pop up on everything from taxis to hotels. If the price of gas goes up as high as Smith predicts, the world will change. We Americans are like crack addicts when it comes to energy, and unless we kick our habit (highly unlikely), we could be in for some major shakeups. How many of our airlines could survive? And that’s just one obvious fallout.

Hey, how are we doing on those hydrogen cells, anyway? Haven’t heard much about that lately.

Another can’t resist article, this time from the St. Petersburg Times: Seeking space between state and USA. It seems that Visit Florida is changing its FLA USA slogan with, natch, Visit Florida. That’s fine. FLA USA always was a little odd. But the reason behind the change is fairly chilling:

Unpopular or unpatriotic as this notion may be, a brand name that hypes USA probably is not the smartest way these days to lure foreign tourists to the Sunshine State. “Florida” probably still has plenty of overseas sun-’n'-fun allure, but USA conjures up some pretty negative opinions in more than a few countries.

The columnist goes on to talk about a recent Pew Research Center survey that found that Europe, the Middle East and Asia still aren’t thrilled with the U.S.

In Britain, Germany and Canada - three countries Florida’s tourism industry depends on - favorable opinions of the United States fell from the comfortable 70- and 80-percent rankings five years ago to the 40s and 50s this year.

But, ahem, even though you can take the USA out of Florida, you can’t take Florida out of the USA. I mean, wouldn’t they still know that’s where they’re going?

This one is too weird to let pass without some comment. From the Edinburgh Evening News: Clear off, Pint, you’re not welcome at family show. Seems a woman dressed up as a big ole pint of beer was tossed out of family-type venues because, and I quote, “they don’t allow alcohol on the premisis.”

“She said: ‘I was told by the stewards I needed a special licence as I was promoting alcohol in a dry area. I’m sure they wouldn’t have said anything if I’d been dressed as a giant banana.’” No, probably not, and for some reason, I find that frightening.

I predict we’re only going to see more of this: Chinese Cryptologists Get Invitations to a U.S. Conference, but No Visas (from the NYT, free reg. req’d):

Last year a Chinese mathematician, Xiaoyun Wang, shook up the insular world of code breakers by exposing a new vulnerability in a crucial American standard for data encryption. On Monday, she was scheduled to explain her discovery in a keynote address to an international group of researchers meeting in California.

But a stand-in had to take her place, because she was not able to enter the country. Indeed, only one of nine Chinese researchers who sought to enter the country for the conference received a visa in time to attend.

I just heard about another cool thing related to the recent ASAE conference that I didn’t see on their blog: That every general session started with the “ASAE Country Band” singing three country music songs with new association-management-related lyrics. How cool is that? And the last song they did was set to the tune of “Austin” but was renamed “Boston” as a preview for next year’s annual meeting (which I hope to go to, seeing as it’ll be in my backyard).

Did anyone record these songs? Talk about perfect for podcasting. Or even putting them on a CD and selling them to people who could use them for board retreats and other staff meetings (I know, there’s probably copyright issues that would end up costing more than they’d make, but still…I love this kind of stuff. )