I just saw this on Lara McCulloch-Carter’s blog and thought it was the coolest thing I’ve seen in a long, long time. Downright Baaaaazar, I say.

Meeting planners of course always bone up on the local laws and customs of their meeting’s locale, but sometimes the local rules can defy all logic (and perhaps even sanity). Check out this great roundup of the world’s strangest laws, on the off chance that one of the attendees of your show in Paris is moved to name a pig Napoleon, or you are considering having single women parachuting into your event in Florida on a Sunday.

For more fun with dumb laws, I like this site. I can’t remember what exactly I was writing about, but I remember stumbling across it eons ago and having a great time looking up dumb laws in my home state of Massachusetts, like the one that says it’s illegal to put a gorilla in the back seat of your car, and the one that is just so Boston: “Tomatoes may not be used in the production of clam chowder.” (This would make it Manhattan-style chowder, not the real New England kind.)

Keith Ferrazzi, author of Never Eat Alone, speaks out about the value of meetings. Listen up, people!

Check out this survey on Meetings Collaborative. It asks “Is the economy causing your business to suffer in 2009?” As of this morning
Yes - significant 64.3%
Yes - slight 30%
No - 5.6%

Wow.

premumble
Opening comments by speakers (or writers) before they begin their real presentations. Hopefully interesting, frequently not.
Nominated by Ashley Bogle

I’ll admit to being guilty of premumbling occasionally in my writing, but now that there’s a name for it, I’ll edit every intro with, “is this good info or just more premumbling?” in mind.

Courtesy of Buzzwhack.com

Why not? The Green Upgrader found this very cool hotel, the Hotel de Vrouwe van Stavoren in the Netherlands, that took old wine casks and turned them into hotel rooms. A little funky, but I’d love to give it a try. (Via BoingBoing.)

Great editorial in today’s New York Times about business travel and meetings. Writer Ben Stein’s money quote for me was: “Business meetings are not the enemy. In terms of making the nation more productive and better off, they are builders, not saboteurs.”

From Hotel Chatter: How to avoid Paying for Multiple WiFi Connections in One Room

Another brilliant post from Hugh at Gaping Void: What do middle seats on airplanes and the recession have in common?

Maybe it’s not a perfect analogy, but pretty darn close.

Well, that’s not quite the headline of Chris Brogan’s awesome post (The Art of Butts in Chairs), but he’s right, putting together a conference is an art. One that entails the sort of vision that makes it easy for attendees to take it all for granted, just as we take for granted the way the paintbrush marks build up the detail in a painting.

The most artful part, I think, isn’t so much in the overtly creative-seeming things like room sets, formats, props, or entertainment. It’s in the part he calls “being empowering”: My goal with building events is to put the right people together in a room…It’s important that we empower people to connect. Easier said than done, but when done right, it makes a meeting truly a thing of beauty.

Thanks to InXpoLive for the pointer!