Check out this meathead I just found on BoingBoing (from Make magazine’s Halloween issue; recipe is here). Yeah, now there’s a centerpiece sure to get everyone’s attention!

Thanks to USA Today’s Gary Stoller for putting together this comprehensive breakdown of airline fees. Of course, it will be outdated momentarily, but in the meantime, what a great reference to have handy when booking a flight. I’d include it in my online reg materials, too, so potential attendees will know how to budget for travel and not get hit with surprise fees. Amazingly long list, isn’t it? (Thanks to Patti Shock via the MeCo listserv for the pointer.)

I ran across this video about where good ideas come from (thanks, BoingBoing!), and it just makes so much sense. Good ideas generally don’t happen all at once, but begin as a hunch that incubates for a while, then bumps into another hunch that completes the idea, or transform it into something that works. Go ahead, watch the video (it’s only four minutes long):

Key quote: “Our ability to reach out and exchange ideas, and to borrow other people’s hunches and combine them with ours to create something new, [has been the] primary engine of creativity and innovation over the past 600 or 700 years.” Also, “Chance favors the connected mind.” Now he’s of course talking about the Internet, but that doesn’t mean meetings aren’t still one of the best ways to provide that connection. Especially meetings that are designed specifically to provide lots of opportunities to let hunches collide (and wouldn’t that be a fun thing to see on a meeting’s marketing materials instead of the usual “networking opportunities”?).

This plays into an idea Jeff Hurt wrote about recently: flip-thinking your meeting. Jeff says: “What if conference organizers and event professionals flipped the standard lecture presentation? What if the lecture was put online for people to view before the conference? People could then attend the session onsite and participate with the presenter and others in activities that helped them solidify concepts and ideas. They could engage in roundtable discussions with one another on what did and didn’t work.”

While all meetings models encourage some level of collaboration and idea-sharing, seems to me the flip model would maximize the chances of bumping into just the nugget you need to complete an idea/concept/product/new thing that will completely change the world.

And it makes me wonder what strange fragment of a great idea I have incubating, and when and how I’ll find the other pieces I need to complete it…

This article has some good tips for getting the most out of virtual meetings, both tele- and videoconferences. While it should be obvious that you should show up prepared and ready to engage, the tip about using the mute button is one that can’t be said too often!

Believe it or not, there’s now an app you can download that will let you search to see if TSA will let Lady Gaga bring handcuffs or you bring your tatting shuttle on board the plane. (Here’s the Web version.) Now I think there may officially be an app for everything.

What’s your favorite travel or meetings-related app? My new iPhone wants to know (so in love with my shiny new gadget — it really is the coolest thing around). Thanks to the TSA blog for the pointer.

After reading this item about the next “Undercover Boss” being from the hotel industry, Joyce McKee over at the CEIR blog thought it’d be interesting to think about what a boss going undercover at a trade show might experience (as an attendee or as a booth staffer).

What I think would be even more interesting is to have the chief executive in charge of the facility work undercover on the loading docks, laying pipe and drape, etc. I’m sure s/he would learn some interesting lessons from the experience. It’d be hard to do on the meetings side, though. I imagine most association execs are fairly hands-on with their meetings, though if they’re not, it could be an eye-opener to have them see what planning a meeting really entails, from site selection through evaluations. On the corporate side, it would be very cool to have meeting planning be one of the functions the CEO would do undercover, but somehow I don’t think it will make the cut (here’s hoping I’m wrong). But we have a good shot at meetings being a part of the season premier, since Choice Hotels does have a fairly robust meetings business. I know I’m going to watch, just in case, though I’m guessing it’ll be more front desk, reservations, housekeeping, catering, than meetings per se.

But Joyce’s main point is that we all should be our own undercover boss, in a way, and try to look at meetings from the attendee point of view instead of the planner perspective. It sounds obvious, but it’s worth saying, I think, because, especially for those who’ve been doing it a for a while, it can be easy to think you know what they’re experiencing. But maybe things have changed — either in your attendees or your meeting — and your meeting may be not quite coming across the way you think it is.

However, I’m not convinced that having the head of meeting planning go undercover is the way to go: Frankly, you might not be the best person to do it, since it can be easy to not really see something that you’ve looked at a thousand times before. I’m a big advocate of getting a secret shopper, or a hoard of students, or someone totally outside your field, to come in and experience what you’re offering with fresh eyes and minds. That could be truly enlightening.

We’ve had fake speakers, fake shows, and fake reviews, but this one I hadn’t heard of before: Actors hired to play enthusiastic users of a product at a product launch.

You know, fakery never works. I don’t know why people keep on doing this. My advice is, don’t. You will get caught.

You may think you know what’s on board, but there could be surprises lurking in your fellow passengers’ carryons and stowed luggage … like scorpions, human heads, and squirrels. Whoa, and some nice acid dripping from someone’s leaking suitcase onto your face?! Now I’m feeling pretty lucky not to have been sitting near these folks.

The worst I ever carried on board was a couple of geode bookends I was bringing my Dad for a present. This was way pre-9/11, but the X-ray guy got pretty excited about them — guess they looked more like bombs than bookends to him. But I did put them under the seat so as not to brain someone if they fell out of the overhead. If there was anything super-strange on any of my flights, I remained blissfully unaware of it. I really hope to keep it that way, too.

WiFi is still at the top of many, if not most, meeting planners must-have lists, so many thanks are owed to HotelChatter for its 2010 Hotel WiFi Report (which somehow I missed when it first came out in the spring). So who’s got the best WiFi offerings? Who always gives it away for free? Who’s the worst WiFi offender? The report will answer these and all your burning wireless Internet accessibility questions.

Except this one: How long will it be before wireless laptop cards and 3G access make the need for plentiful, free (or at least cheap) WiFi moot?

When you’re designing your meeting brochures and promos, how much attention do you pay to the typeface you use? If you want to ensure that it’s the right one for your purposes, check out this post on Inspiration Lab. Nice! And pretty funny, even if you’re not a font geek.