It may be an ad, but it’s a fun one:

On second thought, maybe you should try it at your next banquet — it’d be a showstopper for sure.

Even though Up in the Air didn’t score big in the Oscars, the road warriors mindset it portrays is one that pretty much every meeting manager can relate to. But when I read this editorial in yesterday’s Boston Globe, I thought it might be going a bit too far to actually praise jet lag. But who could argue with this sentiment?

“My own theory is that jet lag begins not in midair but the moment one sets foot in the airport. Checking in, passing through security, drifting toward the departure gate - all stages in a glorious slippage of identity. As you hover along the concourse, eyes a-flicker, your tastes and habits fall away. You are between states, between countries: Unwonted pleasures recommend themselves. You buy an expensive magazine about cars, despite having no interest in cars. At 9:30 in the morning you find yourself eating a plate of General Gao’s chicken. Who are you?”

Been there, done that. I think author James Parker is right after all — we should embrace it all as part of the human experience. Or something. Anyway, it’s a great read.

From ASAE’s Acronym blog comes the results of a new association executive study. Here’s the interesting meetings-related piece of it:

“Where execs were most wrong, though, was predicted in the first economic study we did after the economy soured in early 2009, when we got responses from 8,500 members of 97 diverse associations. The data from that study suggested that there would not be a mass movement from face-to-face meetings to online events. This was contrary to the expectations of association execs, 61% of whom were expecting revenue from online education to increase. In actuality, only 33% reported in 2010 that such revenue had increased.”

That’s about what I would have predicted (she says, with perfect hindsight).

Frankly, Blunch doesn’t come close to it for me (that would be Barf Bed and Breakfast, though maybe a B&B doesn’t count as a restaurant?), but check out this post about bad restaurant names on Serious Eats. There are some doozies in the comments, but it could put you off your feed if you peruse it over lunch.

Thanks to Patti Shock for the pointer!

Thanks to Lara for the pointer to this site: 3floz.com, which offers TSA-sized health and beauty products “for those who travel, those who are curious, and those who can’t commit.”

If I ever run out of the Mary Kay samples my neighbor gave me, I’ll give this site a shot.

I’m sure you heard about how hot dogs can be a serious choking hazard for kids (how did we all survive our childhoods, anyway??). Well, thanks to the good folks at Fast Company, the hot dog has been redesigned for safety, if not visual temptingness.

Mm, mm good.

People think they’re being polite and attentive by turning their cellphones to “vibrate” mode during conference sessions, but that isn’t enough to keep their attention. According to Fast Company, the sound a vibrating phone makes is the third most-addictive noise there is (behind only a baby’s giggle and the Intel dum dum dum dum). As the article says, “When we switch our phone into silent mode, we think it cannot be heard. But the vibration has its own sound, and almost immediately the test subjects stopped whatever they were doing to attend to their phones.”

The whole article is well worth a read, especially to those of us who wonder where marketing will go next. Which should be every conference planner, because no one puts more time, money, and research into how people learn and how to make learning stick than marketers. Now that they’re starting to look into how to reach people through more than just their visual sense, here’s hoping we do as well (and we’re not even selling anything other than good ideas, right?).

Jeff at Midcourse Corrections thinks big-name speakers who are hired just for their big names actually are beyond the “becoming” phase when it comes to irrelevance, and that they may just make your meeting — and your organization — irrelevant too.

Read his post for all the reasons he thinks celebrity speakers who don’t customize their messages should go the way of the dodo bird. I agree with him, for the most part, though, as I noted in a comment on his post, I’d hate to see a conference get so insular with its content that ideas that aren’t directly related can’t get in. While I can only speak for myself, of course, I’ve found that some of the best ideas come from things that have nothing to do with the topic at hand, but spark me to think differently about that topic. I can’t tell you how often something from meeting planning has changed the way I look at journalism, for example.

Targeted content should of course be the main course of any conference mental buffet, but I wouldn’t rule out throwing in some unrelated, yet thought-provoking, appetizers as well.

This is so despicable: Fake Boston bridal show signs up thousands. What makes it even more despicable than just scamming brides-to-be and vendors out of an estimated $50k for a show that was never intended to actually happen is that the organizer promoted it as also donating a portion of the proceeds to Haiti relief efforts. Just made me sick to my stomach to read this one with my morning coffee.

I don’t know how attendees and vendors can guard against getting scammed in something like this. According to the article, the Web site looked legit. Have we come to a place where you have to actually call the venue to make sure that a show is actually booked? I’m not sure how else people could have caught on to this before plunking down their money (a quick Google search found this advice, but I don’t think it would have warned anyone off the phony bridal show in Boston). I know this has happened before, mostly with international scientific congresses. What can we do to stop it, other than find the scum who do it and prosecute the living daylights out of them?

I don’t know if it motivated me or not, but it did make me laugh: Ketchup is the Key to Motivation.

Sorry to have been so quiet lately. Here’s hoping this week is a little less crazy than last week was, between getting my magazine out and surviving a birthday (thanks for the card, AARP. You really shouldn’t have!).