Can you even imagine an award recipient at your conference giving a speech like this? Just goes to show that even the most overdone and/or boring award event (obviously, I’m not a fan of these things) can have its redeeming moments.

After wiping away the tears, I took a few moments to thank those special ones who have loved me into being.

(Thanks to Mental Floss for this one.)

If you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend checking out Life After Layoffs, Arlene Sheff’s first-person account of losing her senior meeting and event planner position with The Boeing Co. I couldn’t put it down.

I wish it weren’t the case, but so many people have recently gone through something similar, or are going through it now, or are ducking and covering and hoping it won’t happen to them that I’m guessing it resonates with more than just me. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t been touched in some way by the economic downturn, and the way she shares the emotions that go along with a layoff is just, well, you can’t help but root for her.

To all who are in the throes of unemployment right now, keep the faith. As someone who’s been laid off, I know how disheartening, frustrating, and scary it can be. But, as they say, this too shall pass. Eventually. Hang in there.

As for Arlene, I can’t wait for the followup story on her brilliant post-Boeing career.

I ran across this post on Gizmodo outlining some great Android and iPhones apps to help you save money at the gas pump. Actually, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to pass these along to potential attendees if you have a drive-in meeting coming up.

Do games have a place in the future of the meetings industry? I don’t mean pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey or icebreakers, but really integrating aspects of gaming (particularly those that make online games so addictive) into a meeting’s agenda.

I started thinking about this a few years ago when I attended a session at ASAE led by Susan Fox of The Forbes Group on how online gaming would affect the future of associations. It came up again at the 2010 Global Alliance for Medical Education meeting in a session about how mobile online applications based on gaming are infiltrating the world of continuing medical education (in a good way).

More recently, I read on the Interactive Meeting Technology blog about how the Green Meetings Industry Council used gaming to spark learning at its meeting. Then, in another piece of serendipity, I finally got around to reading my latest issue of Wired and came across an article by Clive Thompson on how games can re-energize the work environment.

Is anyone else getting really excited about all of this? Maybe it’s just because I can get a tad competitive (ask my sisters!), but I think the intersection of gaming with education may just be an important new tool in our educational kit.

What do you think? And do you know of any other good examples out there?

The worst I’ve seen actually was a near-miss, when the opening keynote speaker didn’t show up until the very last second, didn’t answer her phone, and left the organizers scrambling to shuffle the schedule around to come up with someone else who could do a credible job of opening keynoter. But she did show up, albeit a bit late, and the show went on. I must live a sheltered life.

Of course I’ve also heard of horror stories like keynoters dropping dead on the dais; and natural disasters like a twister dropping in on an outdoor exhibition. And, of course, there was 9/11, when meeting planners at the World Trade Center had to shepherd their attendees through the unimaginable and others had to find ways to get their people home. It still hurts my heart to read their stories.

But somehow, no matter what you have to deal with (and check out the “everything-that-can-go-wrong-did” story Mike McAllen tells on Meetings Podcast), you manage to get through it all.

So, what’s the worst thing that’s happened at one of your meetings? How did you cope with it?

New Hampshire Rep. George Lambert, R-Litchfield, has introduced “a bill that would make the touching or viewing of a person’s breasts or genitals by a government security agent a sexual assault,” according to the Union Leader. “At what point have we gone too far?” he asked. Fair question.

This would, of course, also make TSA officers just doing their jobs classified as sex offenders, which doesn’t quite seem right, either. Here’s a bit more from the article:

Bill sponsor Rep. Andrew Manuse, R-Derry, called the new security procedures a slippery slope. “What’s next? Will they do body-cavity searches?” he asked, and noted he was told of a woman who lives with one of his constituents being strip-searched at Manchester-Boston Regional Airport.

“Where do you draw the line? … You do that any other place and it would be sexual assault,” Manuse said.

As someone who flies out of Manchester, N.H., pretty regularly, I should keep an eye on this one. I don’t know if this is even possible on the state level, but even if it goes nowhere, it shows the level of unhappiness a lot of people have with the current TSA security system.

Update: Just after posting this I found a reference to another state bill looking to rein in TSA at its airports, Texas HB 1938. Are there more out there I haven’t found yet?

Check out Dave Lutz’ excellent summary of what sounds like a truly great session at EventCamp 2011 by Liz Strauss. I love this idea: “Instead of thinking of the top 10 reasons to attend, list the reasons that people shouldn’t.” (See his post for examples, along with three more takeaways.)

Yes, I feel compelled to post a link to this story about people suing a Las Vegas hotel for $750,000 over bed bug bites, if only to be able to say that it bugs me on so many levels (sorry!).

Not just the macro environment of Mother Earth, but the micro environment of your meeting space. I know, I talk about this a lot, but I just saw the photo of the Catalyst Ranch hosting EventCamp 2011’s annual meeting on this The Conference Handouts blog, and I wish more than ever I’d been able to be there. (And then I clicked through to see more pictures, and yet more, and really, really want to go to this place, even if I couldn’t make the conference.)

Poster Patty Keller shares some good thoughts gleaned from a presentation by John Nawn about conference design, including this question I wish every planner would not just ask, but do something about: “Is the environment stale with buzzing florescent lighting and rows of chairs or does it provide a sense of creativity and learning?”

If you want your meeting attendees to make good decisions based on what they learn, go ahead and pump them full of coffee (or water, or any other beverage, though I presume alcohol would nullify the effect). So says an article to be published in the March 2011 issue of Association for Psychological Science.

After feeling the inevitable full-bladder effect of mucho coffee during a long lecture, Mirjam Tuk, of the University of Twente in the Netherlands, did some research on that bodily discomfort and decisionmaking. The upshot? “You seem to make better decisions when you have a full bladder,” Tuk says.

Do with this nugget what you will — I’m just the messenger.