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Kudos to the Washington Auto Show for adding a little “Sex And The City” flavor to this year’s event. The show partnered with the capitol’s 200,000-member social networking group, Professionals In The City, to offer the nation’s first speed dating go-round at an auto show. Popular Washington Post columnist, “love guru” Carolyn Hax kicked it off with a Q &A session, then the males went from car to car in the General Motors exhibit while the ladies stayed put (No doubt in the driver’s seat). One female participant said the excitement of the show and the new cars made it, “a perfect icebreaker; there was no trouble making conversation.” Post-event participants gave the event three stars out of a possible four stars and Professionals in the City prexy Michael Karlan said comments included, “awesome”, “fun” “exciting” and “enjoyed the privacy” He said they had a decent turnout for a weekday night and they would welcome the opportunity to do it again next year.

The first and so far only photos received from the Quatar Auto Show were of people. Dignitaries, yes, cars, no. . . . The Detroit Bureau reports, “cognitive researchers at the University of Rochester have found that playing video games can train drivers to make the right decisions, and quickly. But other studies suggest that gamers may also be less tolerant of the decisions others make – at least on the highway.” . . . Automotive News reports General Motors is diving into the murky world of creating entertainment as well as building cars and trucks. GM is the sole automotive sponsor for a new weekly half-hour TV show Inside the Vault – “aimed at entertaining and informing today’s classic man.” GM and other sponsors collaborate on creating the content. Hailed as a new approach for new times, it sounds like the bygone days of radio and early television when ad agencies bought the time and created content to please their clients.

Did we miss it? In honor of Photographers Month last October Suzuki offered to award the shooter whose automotive photo was most “liked” by the brand’s Facebook fans. Who won? And who won Suzuki’s virtual racing game, “Kizashi Ring of Fire.” The race was slated to be over January 3. . . Just for fun here are the 2010 Management Guff awards bestowed by Lucy Kellerway of the Financial Times, as reported in Media Digest:

• Best Combination of Weasel Words

Royal Dutch Shell, for the opaque statement that it was “in a delivery window for new growth.”

• Gold Fig Leaf

Amid the usual euphemisms trotted out for sacking people (“bank initiated departures”), stockbroker J.M. Finn wins for telling customers that it was charging more. “We have decided to further progress a fee element.”

• Silliest job title

Commendations to Frost & Sullivan for its Client Value Enhancement Executive; and to the international bank that advertised for a Customer Journey Re-engineering Manager. But the winner was FBM Consulting’s Andy Roach, who describes himself as a “Prosultant”.

• The Global Guff Award

This goes to China for its new “Five-year Plan”. “Facing the future we are standing at a new historic starting point.”

Also from our grumpy brethren across the pond is the complaint of outgoing Press and Journal editor Darren Tucker that J-Schools are “failing newspapers” because very few of their graduates “possess the street cunning and inquisitiveness that is the hallmark of a good journalist.” And Boris Johnson writing for The Telegraph notes, “Getting beat up in cyberspace does no one much harm” and concludes with the observation or hope, “Politicians are being held to account by journalists; journalists are being held to account by their readers – and it cannot be long, the Internet being what it is, before the wind of popular scrutiny blows through all the bourgeois professions. What are we going to do about the lawyers?”