Thanks to David Shaw, I get to play a game that’s been going around the blogosphere, where you have to post five things people probably don’t know about you, then pass along the honor to five more bloggers. So, here are five things you likely don’t know about me (and likely didn’t care to know, but what the heck):

1. I once wrote the screenplay for a horror movie, based on a plot treatment from a producer. I hear it actually got made, but I never saw it. It was truly, entirely, awful in every possible way (hey, I just wrote it—I didn’t come up with the idea!).

2. I like to collect sand from around the world. I have no idea why, but I have little glass dishes of sand from places I’ve been all over the house. So far, I haven’t been flagged going through the airport and had to explain those grit-filled baggies, but I’m sure the time will come…

3. Roger Daltrey of The Who once told me to @%#$ off. On the flip side of brushes with fame, I once danced on the stage with Tower of Power. Now that was hip.

4. The worst job I ever had was insulating houses in the summer. Think crawl space, bugs, snakes, and fiberglass that gets into the skin and doesn’t shower off. Or maybe it was being a bartender in a disco back in the late ’70s, where the uniforms, if you can call them that, were small, the customers all wore spoons on chains around their necks, and Donna Summer never, ever, stopped loving to love you, baby. I still have nightmares about that.

5. I once was a die-hard Star Trek fan (we’re talking junior high, here). I not only was wildly in love with Captain James T. Kirk, I also made tribbles that moved and purred out of cannibalized plush toy parts, and a communicator that flipped open out of an old microphone from our school’s AV department. Yes, I was, and still am, a hopeless geek. But I have gotten over William Shatner, though I do get a guilty pleasure from watching him and his cohorts on Boston Legal.

Tag—It’s now your turn:
Michael Chaffin, A Star in the Margin
Ben Martin, Certified Association Executive
Mike McCallen, Grass Shack Events & Media
Jeffrey Cufaude, Idea Architect
Tim Bourquin, Tradeshow Startup

I hope their five things are more interesting than mine!

After reading this press release about how the DIY (for “Do It Yourself”) Network is setting up a “blog cabin,” where anyone can vote on design elements from countertops to fireplaces for an actual log cabin to be built in the Smokies, I thought it would be a very cool experiment to do for a meeting as well. Why not give all the options, from formats to speakers to room sets, and put it all out there for a vote? At the least, it would give you a better handle on what people actually want, versus what you think they want.

If you include any graphics in your meeting’s marketing materials—and if you’re not, why aren’t you?—this periodic table of graphical styles is a terrific tool to goose your creativity and bring dull old text to life.

And while you’re at it, kill these buzzwords from your copy. If I never see another paradigm, I’ll be a happy camper.