That was before I saw this item on Yahoo:

LONDON (AFP) - A banana half eaten by a British television presenter has been sold for 1,650 pounds (3,000 dollars, 2,485 euros) in an Internet auction.

Probably not a great giveaway idea for your next event, though.

BTW: with 17 bids in, the Millennium package on eBay is up to $520, with nine days to go.

That’s the headline of this article from Special Events:
“Demonstrating once again that ‘reality TV’ is a questionable term, two professional event planners lost out to a planner who had never staged a wedding in [Sunday] night’s primetime special ‘The Great Domestic Showdown’ on ABC.”

I didn’t watch it, but it doesn’t sound right to me. Then again, nothing about reality TV sounds right to me (except Extreme Home Makeover, and I’m getting pretty sick of that one, too).

Hey, that’d be a fun idea for a new show-—Extreme Meeting Makeover, where you give the boringest, snoringest meetings to some professionals with unlimited budgets and let ‘em rip. Know anyone at CBS?

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The Harrah’s look, that is. Reminds me of back in the dark ages when I was a bartender at a disco and had to wear, well, we’ll just call it a harem costume and let it go at that. According to the article, cocktail waitresses have to audition for the job in bathing suits (uh uh, no way). Then:

Once hired, they would be required to wear makeup, mascara, lipstick, heels, and have their hair styled a particular way.

If they got pregnant, they would have six months after giving birth to fit back into their pre-pregnancy uniforms.

Sounds like the courts say they can do this because they’re an “at will” employer (of course, an employee sued). Guess I’ll never be a Harrah’s gal–no way would I let my boss tell me what color lipstick to wear–or make me wear lipstick at all, thank you very much! I’m with Cathy Raynor, president of the union that represents most workers at Newport (R.I.) Grand, who says in the article, “I think it is extremely insulting to any person to be told that they have to wear makeup. . . What you put on your face in no way enhances your job performance.”

Beer bombs: This can’t be for real, but according to an article from Cleveland.com:

Just in time for the holiday, the FBI issued a warning last week to be on the lookout for booby-trapped beer coolers and floating garbage.

The alert warned to ‘look out for plastic-foam containers, inner tubes and other waterborne flotsam,’ because they could be rigged to blow up on contact around beaches, harbors and marinas. It warned about marker buoys, too. Watch out for them.

OK then, let’s all be sure to check to make sure there’s no twist to our twist-offs, no plastique in our plastic floaters, and no jetsom in our flotsam.

Hottest new toy in Iraq: a chubby, hip-swaying doll of Saddam Hussein that dances to the tune of “Hippy Hippy Shake.” According to yahoo.com:

The owner of the store started offering the dolls shortly after Saddam’s regime was overthrown in April last year.

A Turkish traveling salesmen turned up with the Chinese-made puppets, also featuring dancing Osama bin Ladens, Fidel Castros and George W. Bushes, and he placed an order.

At first it was the hip-shaking Osamas that sold best, but slowly Iraqis grew less fearful of ridiculing their deposed president and started buying the Saddam ones too.

Now for a little fireworks fun!

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If so, you might want to check out some of these oddball lodging choices.

I think this one’s my favorite: “Jules Undersea Lodge, the world’s only underwater hotel, sits 24 feet below the surface of a lagoon in Key Largo, and the only way to get there is by diving. Once you enter the facility, though, you can dry off, change clothes and watch the world swim by. A stay at the hotel includes breakfast and dinner, cooked by a chef and brought to the guests in a watertight container.”

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Check out this idea: An inflatable meeting room. It reminds me a little of Mr. Amato’s grammar school gym class, where we’d all take the edge of a parachute, fluff it up, then jump underneath it while holding the edges down.

While it was great fun then, somehow, I don’t think this will replace the board room anytime soon!

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According to this article from the Las Vegas Sun, “thieves snatched two computers from a Hong Kong trade fair, a particularly brazen act considering that the victims were security companies showing off the latest crime-stopping technology.”

Talk about ouch. The article goes on to say, “’If you can’t expect good security here, where can you expect it?’ exhibitor Shinah Lunty was quoted as saying in the South China Morning Post newspaper. Lunty told the newspaper that her mobile phone, worth $260, was also stolen.”

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OK all you cellphone fanatics–have you ever worried about getting radiation burns from carrying your cellphone in your pants pocket? For the truly paranoid, check out the cellphone radiation-blocking pants blogged about at egadget.com. Now, I officially think I have heard of everything!

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That’s what we may become if some of the future hotel ideas explored in this article from Forbes become a reality—-one of the ideas is to have a “pod” hotel on stilts that can be collapsed and moved to a new location with ease. And while space hotels may still be far off in the future, Dubai already is planning the Hydropolis, an underwater hotel complex.

Very cool article—don’t miss the slideshow button at the end that gives artist renderings of the hotels talked about in the article.

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Thanks to the good folks on the MIMlist listserve for reminding me that there truly is an association for just about everything imaginable, such as:
Association for Dressings and Sauces
Flying Funeral Directors of America
The Institute of Makers of Explosives
The Academy of Accounting Historians
The National Association of Chewing Gum Manufacturers

If you haven’t been able to find the right association to fit your very narrow niche of interests (the Society for Ladies Who Crochet Booties for Six-toed Alligators, perhaps?), keep looking in databases like this one from ASAE or the really extensive one at the Internet Public Library site.

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