Fond Memories of a Forgotten Industry

If you want to know where the future goes to be seen, look here.

― Charles Pappas

Charles Pappas, reporter for Exhibitor, has compiled a lighthearted treasury of trade show tales titled Flying Cars, Zombie Dogs, and Robot Overlords: How World's Fairs and Trade Expos Changed the World. 

It's a whimsical wayback machine that whirls you through a century and a half of gadgets and the shows that made them famous.

Pappas' goal isn't to spotlight the stars, but the stage. 

Although worth about $100 billion today, trade shows are a forgotten industry, he says, "as invisible as the oxygen in the air around us."

And that's ironic because shows are much more than "product platforms," Pappas says: they help launch social movements.

You'll find tons of delightful trivia inside his 250 pages.

Among my favorite:

• We owe our obsession with dinosaurs to an 1851 London show
  
  
• We eat bananas because an 1876 Philadelphia show popularized them
  
  
• The seed money for the Statue of Liberty came from shows in Paris and Philadelphia
  
  
• Aunt Jemima owes her fame to an 1893 Chicago show
  
  
• The electric vibrator premiered at a 1900 Paris show (where else?)
  
  
• The Patriotic Food Show promoted eating roadkill to help ration food in 1918
  
  
• Space travel launched at a 1927 show in Moscow (30 years before Sputnik)
  
  
• Picasso's "Guernica" began life as a trade show mural
  
  
• The run on Nylon stockings began at the 1939 New York show
  
  
• The term "Con" (as in Comic-Con) was coined by the same promoter who coined "Sci-Fi"

Pappas' book suffers from the author's overuse of puns, but they're easily overlooked amid the fascinating stories he tells. 

Don't miss Flying Cars, Zombie Dogs, and Robot Overlords. It's a lot of fun.

Free College for Everyone

Anyone can go in, but it is not everyone who can go out.

― Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit

Bernie Sanders only says free college should be everyone's right; Donald Trump is guaranteeing it is.

Inmates of London's Marshalsea―enshrined in the novels of Charles Dickens―liked to call the brutal debtors' prison "the college."

Trump is busy reinstituting Marshalsea-style "colleges" nationwide.

Although federal debtors' prisons were outlawed in the 1830s, the states remain free to operate them.

Since the 1980s, one-third―including Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia and Texas―have found them immensely profitable ventures, both for state and local governments and for the shareholders of private-prison companies like Geo and CCA.

And where there are profits to be made, you'll find Trump.

So, parents, celebrate!

College lies in every child's future.

These are the 10 Most Bizarre Crimes Ever Committed by an Association Executive

NOTE: The confessions below are transcribed from official police files.

"We spent our marketing money on digital ads."

"Yeah, we sent email, but didn't know it was all flagged as spam."

"We quit phoning members twenty years ago."

"We quit sending direct mail twenty years ago."

"Games? Don't believe in them! Our members are serious."

"Humor? Don't believe in it!"

"Fun. Don't believe in it!"

"We never thought about authenticity. What is it, anyway?"

"We didn't change with the times. It costs too much."

"We ignored everyone under 40."

TAKE A BITE OUT OF CRIME. 

Download Growing Your Event: 10 Magic Bullets for 2018. 

It's yours free, courtesy Bob & David James.

And have a Happy New Year!

Why Being a Bore Will Wreck Your Career

It is vain to do more with what can be done with less.

― William of Occam

"Don't be a bore," says 17th-century Jesuit Baltasar Gracián.

Talking overmuch is a sign of vanity.

"Brevity flatters and does better business," Gracián says. "It gains by courtesy what it loses by curtness. Good things, when short, are twice as good."

Worse, talking overmuch is a sign of ineptness.

"It is a well-known truth that talkative folk rarely have much sense," Gracián continues. Talkative folk are "stumbling stones" and "useless lumber in everyone's way."

Useful folks get right to the point. "The wise avoid being bores, especially to the great, who are fully occupied: it is worse to disturb one of them than all the rest. Well said is soon said."

Art Depreciation

The art-show blabbermouth peeves me.

He knows why every artist chose his subjects, what he intended by painting them, and where he ultimately disappoints viewers—and wants everyone in the gallery to know he knows.

Were he right—like a stopped watch—just twice a day, the blabbermouth would deserve a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.

We should be so lucky.

One of these wearisome windbags trailed me during my visit to Vermeer and the Masters of Genre Painting this week.

At one point she complained for all to hear that the exhibit was a "huge disappointment:" it simply didn't include enough Vermeers.

She doesn't know Vermeer produced only 40 works; that the dozen on display represent a full third of his extant work; or that the show's curators have received universal praise.

"Know how to appreciate," urged the 17th-century Jesuit Baltasar Gracián:

There is none who cannot teach somebody something, and there is none so excellent but he is excelled. To know how to make use of every one is useful knowledge. Wise men appreciate all men, for they see the good in each and know how hard it is to make anything good. Fools depreciate all men, not recognizing the good and selecting the bad.