Today must be meetings disaster day: First I hear about the Borat thing, and now there’s guys in HazMat suits crashing the entrance at the WinHEC conference, disrupting Bill Gates’ keynote presentation.

While I appreciate the Free Software Foundation’s anti-DRM stance (DRM stands for digital rights management–click here for more on what that’s all about), this must have been a nightmare for the meeting planners.

Lesson learned: Where was the security? Even if the inside is secured, attendees still can be harrassed as they enter the building. Especially with a high-profile speaker like Gates inside, one would think outside the box, in terms of security. Here’s an article with some security basics I bookmarked a while back.

It would never have occurred to me, but leave it to media guy Rex Hammock to point out the unfortunateness of this guide’s title (as he says, “If this confuses you, do a Google search of the acronym.”)

ROFL!

Lesson learned: Ask a 16-year-old if your association, meeting, whatever, acronym might mean something you didn’t intend in IM/chat-speak, or check out this list.

Did you hear about Borat, a movie that’s coming out about a “Kazakhstani TV talking head Borat (Cohen)[who] is dispatched to the United States to report on the greatest country in the world. With a documentary crew in tow, Borat becomes more interested in locating and marrying Pamela Anderson”? Sounds harmless, until you read this report on Fox news:

But there are also some sequences that will defy censors, including one extended bit in which Borat and Azamat (sounds like HAZMAT), his sidekick — a thick eyebrowed sort of Sancho Panza with breasts larger than Pamela Anderson’s — wrestle nude in their hotel room.

The wildly explicit, freaky mayhem spills out in the hotel elevator and then down onto the stage of a conference of insurance underwriters.

The spectacle of Borat — a tall, lanky man, locked in hairy embrace with Azamat in front of several hundred straight-laced businessmen in blue blazers — may present to the MPAA its most confounding challenge ever about to rate a film for public consumption. The scenes are more disturbing than the end of “Hannibal.”

This is funny?? While the article goes on to say they got releases from everyone involved, they did so under false pretenses, saying they were from a TV station in Kazakhstan. But with a “near riot” caused when some well-meaning (I assume) insurance adjusters trying to break it up, I’d be calling my lawyer. Can you imagine this happening at one of your meetings? Just the thought makes me feel like I bit into an apple and saw half a wriggling worm. And the article calls the movie “a little gem”? Sounds downright hideous to me.

I guess the lesson must be to check credentials of anyone asking for a release, but who knows how this was done. It probably sounded pretty innocent before the fact.

Hat tip: MiForum Google group