ALA Anaheim: Say It with Flowers

    It is almost de rigueur for any conference speaker to devote a few words acknowledging their audience of librarians. The words are neither unflattering nor insincere.  To speak of librarians is equivalent to judging the merits of mom and apple pie. As much media makes plain, the public has a consensus of good will toward them. 
     However librarians might enjoy the plaudits they receive from celebrity speakers, when it comes to considering their own, the view is far from appreciative. Think of the Far Side cartoon where one part of a panel shows flowers and has the caption "How we see flowers"; and the other shows these flowers with grotesque physiognomies, the caption being "how flowers see themselves".

ALA Anaheim: Don't Go Away

After librarians have made the effort to travel hundreds or thousands of miles to reach the conference, one of their ambitions seems then to be to put in an equal effort to depart the same in order to see the nearby sights. This temptation is recognized and formalized by tours offered through the convention center. Nevertheless, odds are that once the librarian decides she has to get away, and spends hours deliberating which tour is most appealing, she will find that it has been canceled. Tour offerings are as substantial as mirages.
  
If it's going to be canceled anyway, a tour should be offered to really off-beat locales--say Barsoom or Oz or Arkham. Nothing compares with being able to boast of the places you would have gone to, if only there'd been a tour.

ALA Anaheim: Now Hear This

An audience is split into two types of people--those who microphone and those who don’t. Those who don't have as much to say as those who do; while those who do have as little to say as those who don't. Phenomenally, the better a speaker is known, the longer the microphone queue and (sometimes) the longer the questions or comments.

The microphone stand comes in all heights--except that of the questioner. Some questioners provide autobiographies (some are so long that you wonder who the featured speaker is) while others have decided that they are in a debate and are taking the opposing side.