Overheard on the long line outside the coat-check room near the Park Avenue entrance, a gray-haired woman was telling a man, presumably her husband, "If you had gotten on line earlier, instead of arguing with me, we would be finished by now."

Near the elevators, Senator John F. Kerry (Democrat of Massachusetts) towered over a small group that was in animated conversation. "Oh yes," he was telling a woman in the group, "he's a very good friend of mine."

Outside the Plenary hall, another very tall man, broadcaster Garrick Utley, was the focus of an impromptu reunion of former employees of NBC News. Others in the group were Steve Frazier, Ken Auletta and Karen Curry. Utley and Frazier--who are both with CNN--were commiserating about the pressures everyone in the industry is feeling to deliver higher ratings. "It's a repeat of what happened to the networks," Utley said, "except now we are all talking about much smaller numbers." A few yards away, CNBC had set up an anchor desk to be used for live broadcasts from the Forum.

At one of the kiosks set up in an area off the main lobby, two women were obviously having some difficulty deciding which workshops they should sign up for, going back and forth between the listings on screen and the printed version of the schedule. An aide from the Forum asked if they needed any help with the machine--but they explained that their problem was not with the technology.

As is usual at World Economic Forum Annual Meetings, male participants at this meeting outnumber females by a wide margin. And that is as true on the podiums as in the audience. During a Friday workshop on global anger, Kumi Naidoo, one of the panelists, made some reference to the need "to look at groups of people that have been excluded"--including youth, indigenous peoples, those with disabilities and women. He noted wryly that such an effort could begin right there--since the panel consisted entirely of men.

As white-badged participants waited for cabs on Park Avenue to take them to luncheons in other parts of town, across the street at the Intercontinental, the working journalists lined up for a freebie buffet lunch of sandwiches, potato chips and soft drinks. However, although there were at least two platters of sandwiches, they ran out while there were still several people on the line. But nobody had any complaints. The last few people on the line helped themselves to heaping plateful of chips, which they carried back into the press room. When asked if he considered that a healthful diet, one reporter just shrugged and kept on walking.

On line to collect his iPaq, Canadian environmentalist David Runnalls was chatting about the PrepCom going on at UN Headquarters for the World Summit on Sustainable Development, scheduled to be held in Johannesburg later this year. He said the summit is shaping up as "a disaster," and suggested that, at the very least, it be moved somewhere else "so that South Africa won't have to host two disasters in a row"--a reference to the tumultuous World Conference Against Racism, which was held in Durban last September.