Why can’t I plug into an old guy when I turn ten years old and gain all the knowledge, wisdom and skill he has? Why do I need to start from nothing and work an entire lifetime to gain knowledge, wisdom and skill on my own, only to have it lost when I die? Why do each of us have to start from nothing, work an entire lifetime to gain knowledge, wisdom and skill?

I should be able to know that jealousy, envy, lust, pride and all the other seven deadlies have consequences that lead to no good. I should not have a dread fear of change because I should know everything is ok. In more important cases, I should know that a lack of respect leads to war which leads to the needless death of other human beings. If I was able to plug into an old guy, I could advance the human race from where HE left off, not from square one.

Is it any wonder that humanity has not changed throughout its entire existence, regardless of how much better our technology is?

Video discovered at inoveryourhead.net

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Lagom. It is a Swedish word that does not have a direct English translation, but it means kinda like “enough” as in “just enough” or “there is enough for everyone.” But, even those examples are not quite right, but language being what it is, it will have to do.

Over a span of about a year or so, little by little, I’ve become a fan of Julien Smith. Not a gushing kind of groupie fan, but one with a mildly curious fascination with someone who understands lagom and is content with others not. And being ok with that. Then by chance, I saw him speak about the inner ring on this video clip on Tim Sanders’ blog (you only need to watch until 1:26 or so, but if you want to watch the whole thing, have at it.) Julien does not publish prolifically on his blog, but when he does, you get a sense that he has thought about the post for a long time.

I meet people all the time who are “increasing revenue, market share, friends, followers, money” or are “moving to the next level” or buying a bigger house, etc. Why? To what end? I often wonder if they have ever set goals of success or if they are always defining success as one more dollar, one more twitter follower, one more….

They are like an impatient dog who can’t wait to get to the next block, and the next and the next when all he is doing is rushing the walk and ending up back home sooner. I much prefer dogs who stop and sniff the bushes longer and maybe holds her heads up to catch the breeze through her ears.

Lagom. Some say it limits ambition. I say it is defines sanity and peace.

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In November, the Democrats were on the ropes. The GOP had just elected themselves a golden child with Scott Brown and tilted the scales back below sixty votes in the Senate. They had won two gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey. The media was calling the Health Care Reform bill dead. Time between now and the next election cycle was getting shorter and the drums of defeat were beating loudly.

But then the bill got the biggest shot in the arm from the insurance companies. They increased their rates 39% in California, cut off cancer-survivors in Youngstown, Ohio, jacked up rates all over the country and even sent this poor puppy a letter that increased his health insurance costs by 21.8% over last year.

That was the second wind.

Had the health insurance companies instituted a premium freeze for 2010, not cut off existing customers regardless of circumstances and sent letters out with the message, “We’re all in this recession together, so we’re not going to increase your premiums,” they could have taken the wind right out of the sails of the Reformers. They would have convinced the average American they were not greedy, money-grubbig heartless bastards, but caring, warm folks who only had your health in their hearts.

They would have gained the entire GOP and most independents as free PR agents for their industry. “They get it, we can make a difference!” would have been the rally cry and the Obama Administration and progressive Democrats would have been left fighting an enemy that simply no longer existed. By August, the country and Congress would have been embroiled in a mid-term election with Democrats fighting to explain why they spent so much wasted time fighting the benevolent insurance companies. Most likely they would have lost a few seats and the balance of power would have tipped a bit. President Obama would have then had two years of accomplishing nothing and the insurance industry would have been healthy for the next several decades, free to plunder and pillage recklessly while Obama’s successor’s successor worked up enough public passion to start another health care reform movement.

But they didn’t. They rushed hard toward the profit line, cutting off aunt Sallie who had cancer and facing a home foreclosure. They dropped health insurance for residents in Flint, Michigan where unemployment is 27%. They continued to increase premiums an average of 22% across the country, claiming it was necessary because of rising health costs. They tightened their grip on the wallets of those lucky enough to remain employed and even tighter on the small businesses and entrepreneurs trying to weather the economic downturn and tight credit markets. And yet, they continue to post record profits.

Sometimes you have to retreat back a few steps to advance forward.

But they didn’t.

Bad business, bad public relations. On that account alone, the health insurance industry deserves to go the way of the horse buggy, passenger train and telegraph industries.

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Pretty harsh title, I admit but it is really just there to get your attention. Did it work?

People don’t care about great ideas. They care about great personalities with average ideas they can understand. How else can you explain Sarah Palin’s book, Going Rogue: An American Life (Please don’t buy it.) or the raving success of some social media people who are constantly blogging, tweeting and presenting on remedial ideas as if they were Moses bringing down the Ten Commandments from Mount Sinai? (I linked cause I know some of you are asking yourselves, what the heck are these ten things the pooch is talking about? Mt. Sinai too.)

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t begrudge them their success, not even Sarah Palin. Really, honestly, she has that something that is appealing and she knows how to work it. But she is a great personality and that is all.

I have three great books in my head but my friends in the publishing business tell me that there is not a snowball’s chance in hell that any of them will get published without me first becoming a great personality. I struggle with that because the Internet is supposed to flatten things out, give all good ideas equal weight, flush out the charlatans and poseurs with facts.

Remember the old Peter Steiner’s cartoon, “on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog”? It was supposed to exemplify the anonymity of the person and force us to focus on ideas instead of personality.

It didn’t really work out that way because human beings need great personalities behind ideas, not just great ideas. And given the choice, we choose a great personality.

Even if that person turns out to be a dog.

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The puppy what nuzzled my knee at SXSW 2010

I was given a marvelous opportunity recently, namely representing DogWalkBlog at SXSW. Jumped on that offer immediately, because who wouldn’t??

I was also given a few tasks to accomplish while I was there, mostly along the line of “see if you can find Chris Brogan, aka @chrisbrogan, and say “hi” to him. Some of these I completed with great success. Others, not so much.

Chris Brogan I saw before I was even registered. I had been in the registration area barely five minutes, when I looked up, and there he was. I really thought that finding everyone else on my meet and greet list would be a piece of cake. Silly me.

SXSW is simply packed with people. Masses and super-mases, moving, standing, talking on cell phones, tweeting on cell phone, sitting in chairs or on the floor and typing away like mad things (more or less as I am at this very minute). Through it all there is the constant buzz of thousands of people talking.

There are two ways to approach SXSW, maybe a third if you mix the first two together. Last year, I mostly socialized. I went to parties, and parties in between the other parties. I talked myself hoarse and tried not to drink too much (mostly because I had been hit and badly mashed by a big-rig truck the month before).

This year, I was determined to attend as many presentations, panel discussions and core conversations as humanly possible. Some have been fabulous, some a little ho-hum, and a one was disappointing, but on the whole, it was a great time for me.

What follows are my impressions of what I have seen so far, touching on those presentations that most impacted me.

Day 1:
The highpoint of my first day, aside from meeting Chris Brogan, was a panel discussion on “Eight Ways to Deal with Bastards.” The content the panel presented and discussed was actually useful, concentrating on the four contexts in which most of us meet the bastards with whom we much deal, and good ways to diffuse otherwise potentially explosive situations.

The panelist who simply blew me away was a lady named Jane Waldron, aka @Chookooloonks. Lovely to look at, delightful speaking voice, and intentionally hysterically funny. She told me later that she was from Trinidad. You would never know it to hear her speak, although, just for giggles she lapsed into a very Trinidadian patois for me, and after scraping my jaw up off the ground, I wanted to vote her in as Queen of the Universe for Life. She’s the type of person you’d gladly follow into battle even knowing that you wouldn’t be coming out of the fray alive.

Day 2:
My apex presentation this day was about “How to Bulletproof Your Finances.” It was really intended for people much younger than I (by 20 to 30 years), but the beauty of it was that I took a ton of good information away with me, information that I wish I had had available when I was 20 or 30 years younger, but that I can still apply to my life today. That one was with Ramit Sethi, aka @ramit (who has written a book, as it seems everyone at SXSW has, the difference being that I might actually buy this book).

Midday, I embarked upon my second meet and greet mission. This time for Julia Roy, aka @juliaroy, manning a booth for @imagespacemedia. I had a lovely conversation with her, and managed to score a free lunch in the process. If there is a God, may he/she eternally bless these folks for providing real non-candy solid food for the masses. (I pulled off the free lunch trick again on Day 3 … amazing, right?)

The disappointment of the day was a panel discussion called “Engaging Your Queer Audience.” It wasn’t disappointing because the panel was not interesting or didn’t present well, and to be entirely fair, it was probably only a disappointment for me. That was because, based on the catalog, I expected it to be about how straight people could open dialogs with and market to the gay community. Turns out it was more of a discussion by and for gay blog writers on the unique problems facing gay blog writers. I’ll cop to expressing my frustration at the end of the discussion, and I ended up having a much more informative discussion with some of the participants after the program was finished.

Informative, and yet still frustrating; this was because I wanted to find out how a straight transactional (business/estate planning) attorney goes about marketing to the GLBT community without pandering to them or misleading them into thinking I am gay, or downright insulting them? The answer I received was surprising, in essence it was “I know plenty of gay attorneys, so I would never hire a straight attorney” and “How many of the attorneys in your firm are gay?” Since I don’t understand how sexual orientation makes a person a better or worse attorney, and since it would never occur to me to ask someone about their sexual orientation in a work context (and isn’t that sort of thing flying in the face of Federal Anti-Discrimination laws?), I began to see a serious communication disconnect.

The conversation was pleasant and interesting, and I liked the people I was talking with, but I found myself wondering how the gay community can complain about the straight world not accepting (or ignoring) their sexual orientation when they are not willing or able to accept or ignore ours? Doesn’t the good of the human community as a whole mean that both groups have to give a little?

Day 3:
The time change didn’t help things much, but when I had driven half way into Austin before realizing that I had left my SXSW badge at home, I think I should have taken that as a hint that this was a day I should have stayed in bed. Drove home, grabbed badge and missed half of what I’d be willing to bet was a fantastic presentation called “Perfectly Irrational: Who Put the Monkey in the Driver’s Seat?” by Dan Ariely, aka @danariely. The little bit that I saw was well worth the drive and meant that two other books were going on my wish list.

Midday (while trying to find a dog to photograph), I felt what I can only describe as a large and cold finger poking me at knee level at the Daskeyboard booth. How lovely, you think “I want to find a dog to photograph at SXSW” and one magically appears! Yet another of my quests completed.

By the time I went to the panel discussion “From Trolls to Stars: The Commenter Ecosystem,” I was dragging. I went by the trade show floor one more time to see if I could find Hugh MacLeod aka @gapingvoid to tell him that all the mutts at the Walk loved his work and his book “Ignore Everybody.” That done, and having picked up enough free t-shirts to dress a small army of large or extra-large people (so shoot me, I like my t-shirts on the baggy side), I had decided that, parties or no parties, I was going home for the day.

As I headed for the exit in the Austin Convention Center, someone behind me stepped on my heels. Who ever it was apologized, and as I turned to acknowledge the apology, someone who must have been moving very fast slammed into to me so hard that they actually spun me around. I never did see who this human equivalent of a Mack truck was, or which way they went, but with the next step I took, I realized that my big toe on my right foot was broken. In this case, I should say “broken yet again” because this particular toe has been broken at least five times in the past 40 years.

I took this to be the universe’s way of telling me that my complete disregard of the hint provided to me this morning had left me open for the follow-up baseball bat to the head. Not as subtle as the hint, but certainly effective.

So, here I sit, staying off my foot as much as possible, downing the occasional Vicodin, and thinking that I met a lot of really nice people, ate some great hotdogs, learned so much, and generally had a great time (notwithstanding the whole broken toe thingie).

Would I go again? You bet!
Even if I had to pay for my own ticket? Hell yes!

Do, I owe @dogwalkblog a huge debt of gratitude? More than he will ever know.

This is Ricky Maveety @rickymaveety reporting for @dogwalkblog from (or at least within 45 miles of) SXSW.

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I love Cesar Millan*, but he has made my life hell, along with Emeril LaGasse, Mike Holmes, and Alton Brown. But those other guys are a completely different — though not unrelated — post. Maybe later.

You see, Cesar has made almost everyone else in the pound an expert on dog behavior with an endless supply of advice, tips and techniques “I should try instead.”

Throughout February and beyond, it has been snowing, raining or bone-chilling cold. No, wait, last Wed was really nice. So was Thursday. I digress. That is one hundred twenty-nine walks through snow drifts, snow plow mounds, shuffling along on ice, two pretty nasty falls, one cracked elbow and one racked-up hip joint. Yet, we walk on, three times a day, rain or shine, snow or frost.

And not one of my “experts” was walking alongside me. Not one of my experts volunteered to scoop and carry the poop. I may not be doing it all right, but at least I’m out there every day doing it.

Cesar, I don’t begrudge you your success, but can you please add a disclaimer to your show? Can you add a warning to anyone who does not own or walk a dog to please keep their big trap shut to those who do? We would really appreciate the extra support.

To the rest of you, go walk yourself. It’s long overdue.

*See? That’s me watching The Dog Whisperer.

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There is (or was) this huge pile of snow at the end of our lunchtime wrestle lot. For weeks, we’ve been playing “King of the Hill.” As it melts away, the game is becoming more and more intense as the snow becomes more scarce.

Anyway, Sallie (white dog) mostly wins the game. Charlie tries.

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If you are going to Austin for SXSW next week, help us prove that SXSW is going to the dogs. It is real simple.

1. Take a photo of a dog you see at SXSW.
2. Tweet out with your photo using your favorite photo service, TwitPic, TweetPhoto, Yfrog, whatever. Enter as many photos as you wish.
3. Include the hashtag #sxswdogs in your tweet
4. We’ll pick it up and post the photo in a SWSW gallery on DogWalkBlog.

Then, after SXSW is over, we’ll pick the top 10 dog photos using our super-secret, patent-pending butt sniffing algorithm (not really, the contest will be super subjective!) and post up the top 10, where we’ll open it up for a vote. You can vote early and as often as you like.

The winner of this contest with very few rules will win a free DWB t-shirt and barking rights.

That’s it! Very few rules. Must be a dog photo, must be taken AT SXSW (no, we’re not going to check, but if you want to go through life cheating, fine. You have to live with yourself) and must be tagged with the hashtag #sxswdogs.

So, game on!

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Life and work has been a lot like our dog walks lately. Up until this week, there has been a lot of snow on the ground, so the dogs walk while I spend a lot of time slogging through snow, shuffling on ice and climbing over snow banks, all the while trying to keep my gloves on and the “little bag of treasure” closed.

As a result, we have gotten out of rhythm.

I’m having one mutt tug and pull me along; the other I’m cajoling, coaxing and threatening to keep up.

We need to find that rhythm soon, for our physical and mental health. All of us.

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Most dog videos are not really funny, but this is so very clever, I had to share.

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I am replacing a folding closet door with a pre-hung door. This involves some framing and sheet-rocking. I’m almost done with the door, thanks for asking.

I’m at the last part of the project where I’m putting sheet rock on the inside frame around the door. The closet is about four feet wide by about three feet deep, so there isn’t a whole lot of room to move around. As I’m putting mud in the corners for tape to tie in the new rock with the existing wall, I found myself muttering, “there has to be an easier way to do this.” My mind wanders to the sheet rock tool display at Lowes where they have all sorts of gadgets and widgets and doohickies for the homeowner to become a professional in 1-2-3 easy steps. Admit it, you have a garage full of this crap.

And then I had an epiphany. There already is an easier way to tape and mud inside corners. Just get better at it and it will become easier.

This is no small revelation. How many times have we sought to short-cut acquiring skills by buying a gadget that promises to give us the ability to do something without learning. We buy books all the time that promise to give us the secrets to success. We read blogs in earnest on how to succeed in social media hoping to find that one secret door. Right now, they are running some infomercial on early-morning tv about building an e-commerce Web site in three easy clicks. Adobe makes some of the best design software in the industry and I shudder to think how many people have purchased the Creative Suite thinking they could be an award-winning designer without understanding basic design principals. How many people bought a Slap-Chop when a good knife and some time would have given them the skills they were trying to gain through a short-cut. (BTW, Slap Chop doesn’t work; save your money.)

There is no short-cut to learning skills. Learn some and quit looking for the easy way to success. You’re just wasting time and money you should be dedicating to learning.

Here is the link for the Slap Chop infomercial. I know you’re dying to watch it. (something the same, but different)

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I will die. It is a fact that I can’t overlook, regardless of how much work I put into denying it, putting it off or otherwise just trying to ignore it.

So, faced with the fact that I will not be escaping death, I have done the following:

- I have written my last blog post. This may or may not be published upon my death, but it is written and saved as a draft. It gets tweaked from time to time, but it is what I want to leave with.

- I have written my eulogy. I guess I really don’t care who delivers it, but the content is probably too important to trust to whatever hapless relative outlives me the longest. If I could choose though, I would have Tina Fey, James Lipton, Ellen Degeneres or James Earl Jones read my eulogy (all for different reasons.)

- I have written my obituary. It is really short and does NOT mention any of my present or past employers, though I am open for a mention if they kick in some advertising money while I am still alive. The obit is also written as a 140 character tweet and has a 160 character Google-friendly excerpt.

- My blog here and several others are backed up to a portable device with a Web browser so that my writing will be preserved. I have no idea if anyone will care or if it makes a difference a few hundred years from now but wouldn’t it just be a really cool joke to play on some future scientist who claims to have found evidence of a talking dog with independent thought and judgment? Yeah, that’s how I bark.

We spend a lot of time crafting our “personal brand” in life yet we pay little attention to our personal brand when we’re dead. Do you really want your life summed up in 160 characters by someone who didn’t know you — or worse, thought they did? Anyone who has ever submitted a creative work to an editor whose job it was to summarize it in a few sentences or been introduced as a keynote speaker should be screaming “NOOOOOOOO!!!” right about now.

It is easy to dismiss all of this as unimportant because if you’re dead, what do you care? You should care just a little because having spent a lifetime crafting yourself only to have your final history written by a stranger makes no sense.

Spend a few moments today seeing life as someone would after you are gone. All of this stuff I’ve done above actually took years, one small moment at a time. It is heady stuff contemplating your own death.

Even if you only get a glimpse of how you should steer your life just a little bit differently, it will be an exercise worth doing.

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I watched a video on Chris Brogan’s blog where he spoke at Like Minds and he mentioned the Roger Smith Hotel. As frequently happens, my mind wandered as Chris rattled on (sorry Chris!) and so I went out to Google and checked out the Roger Smith Hotel.

Turns out they have this dog named Henry who makes his own bed. Funny stuff. Video below.

So, I’m now following @rshotel and they are my new New York Hotel. Is this the way all this social media stuff is supposed to work? I dunno, but it seems if you want folks to stay at your hotel or visit your business, get a dog. The Broadmoor has Ruger, the Roger Smith has Henry. I wonder what other hotels have dogs?

If you do, comment below. And when we’re on the road, that’s where we’ll be staying!

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My editor wrote this over at GerardMcLean.com and I had to share. It is something that I privately champion at every opportunity, and this being one of those time, here you go.

UPDATE: @Neenz just published the Paralympics page at Alltop.com last night, Mar 5. If you know of or write a blog on the Paralympics, submit it here to be included.

I first got schooled in the Paralympic Games from Kim* during a telephone conversation my first week on the job back in 1996. For those who don’t know, I used to sell exercise bikes to paralyzed people. True.

“I am a tennis player,” she said.

“You mean you used to play tennis?” I asked.

“No, stupid. I play tennis. Wheelchair tennis. And I’m training for the 2000 Paralympics in Sydney.”

“The Special Olympics?” I said.

“No, I’m in a chair, not a f***ing r*tard!” she shot back angrily.

She was not one to mince words. She had also served four years in the US Navy and she swore like a sailor.

By the time I left the company several years later, we had gotten to be pretty good friends. I wish I had kept in touch, but that wasn’t what Kim was all about. She was one who lived in the moment, curious and anxious for the future with no regrets for the past. She never made it to Sydney, but it wasn’t for lack of trying.

That was my introduction to the Paralympic Games. They are held two weeks after the Olympic Games everyone knows about and gets broadcast on TV. Here is the Web site for the Games in Vancouver.

Eventually, I hope the Paralympic Games are played alongside the Olympic Games as paralympic athletes are every bit as tough as their able-boded counterparts. It seems to me that even when NBC doesn’t see the value in broadcasting the Paralympic Games, Social Media should be all over it. The Paralympics are like a really cool blog that you accidentally stumble into that you didn’t know existed, but changes your world view forever. If you want to see some real athletic ability, I encourage you to watch this year. And London. And Russia. And Rio.

Get involved on twitter. Encourage Guy and Neenz to establish a blog directory for the Paralympics on Alltop.com that doesn’t lead to disability. Write a blog article about how you feel about the Paralympics.

Do something inclusive. We’re all in this together.

*Withholding last name, but in case she ever reads this and I have permission to fill in the last name, I’d be happy to.
**Please don’t contact me about ELA being out of business. That happened way after I left.

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I spent this Sunday morning listening to a fair amount of Peter, Paul and Mary, Bob Dylan and a few other more obscure artists who moved and continue to move an entire generation. The first thought I had was “how sad that they will never be able to create another PP&M song.” The second thought I had and tweeted out was, “I wonder what 20-something know-it-all sh*t will become the voice of this generation in 40 years.”

But in reflection, I think the hardest thing ever for an artist is to know when it is time to stop creating and begin to start passing the torch. We’ve all seen the athlete who has had a stellar career and just can’t believe his career is over. Just one more season, he begs as he spirals into a late-night talk show joke instead of as a revered elder of the sport.

Fame is intoxicating; money is even worse. Our culture rewards those who talk more than it does those who support and listen. It must take an incredible amount of courage to recognize when your voice is no longer the most important in the room, that you have said all that you need to say and that it is someone else’s turn to be heard.

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I was reading my Wall Street Journal today, page after page of blah, blah, blah and then I came across this story on page B8. It stopped me dead in my tracks.

I am not following the Winter Olympic Games nor am I really a fan of Bode Miller. I didn’t even read the article, but what I did do is stare at the photograph.* Here’s why.

Notice how much of the ski is touching the surface of the snow. Notice how “off center” Miller’s body is. Now, imagine how that feels at 90mph (I don’t know how fast he is going, but pretty dang fast.)

And it strikes me that downhill skiing is a lot like doing something that you are passionate about. You hurl yourself headlong into it without thinking about the risk. Your actions and reactions are instinctive, you trust in yourself and your skills and when you doubt yourself for a split second or become aware of the cheering (and sometimes jeering) fans along the fence, it all unravels quickly.

You may crash, you may win a gold medal, but if you don’t hurl yourself out of the gate, you’ll never know.

*I kinda stole the photo from the WSJ and they may find out about it and not share the same enthusiasm I have for showing it to you… so, until I get that cease and desist letter, posting it up here is my downhill ski run of the day.

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I’m all for a good parody like the next puppy and although the assumption here is that a large percentage of the working, white middle class probably watched the Super Bowl Big Game and may have seen the Google ad (it ran once), the GOP may have been smarter to parody a Budweiser commercial instead.

Nonetheless, three issues with this:

1. It screams “No new ideas here!”
2. What the heck is a boondoggle? Most of your constituency has no idea because they read as much as Palin does.
3. You really want to scrap with Google?

Really? You want to fight with a dog? Go ahead, comment if you must.

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Just a quick bark out to Robert Gibbs, White House Press Secretary, who joined us on Twitter a mere 55 minutes ago. Now, we’re just waiting for Bo to get here.

Big fans, especially with the “hopey-changey” retort press conference.

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Yesterday, we had a guest speaker – Sarah – come into the DogWalk to motivate us to get out there and walk regularly, even if there is two feet of snow outside, kids home from school everywhere and cars zipping by us as we walk in the street.

Then, Charlie noticed that Sarah had some writing on her paw. Fortunately, we were able to take a picture and zoomed it up for you.

The paw read:
- Walk, Pee
- Torture cat (crossed out)
- Evolve
- Hope, Change

Enjoy the walk.

*Footnotes: Ironically, the typeface we used to write on the paw is called Dear Sarah. Thanks @barackobama for the last item on the list, thanks @whitehouse / Robert Gibbs for the inspiration and your sense of humor and thanks @sarahpalinUSA for the pit bull reference at the GOP Convention without which, we probably would never have noticed ye.

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I’ve been half French all my life. It’s not something I chose or can change. My mother’s maiden name is Clavette.* Her mother’s maiden name was Pelletier. And that goes back a very long way. We only ended up American because the French apparently were really bad at making compasses and the family ended up on the wrong side of the St. James in northern Maine.

Shortly after 9/11, this country vilified the French. Fortunately, my dad was only half French himself, but got his English/Scottish-mix name from his dad. It would have been a pretty terrible time to be in Pro-America, stuck with a name like Clavette, surrounded by hillbillies with guns and pickup trucks. Remember Freedom Fries and the violent denunciation of everything French?

And now since the New Orleans Saints won the SuperBowl, we can’t stop hugging the French. Everything is Geaux this and -eaux that. Even the Pope is French in a Wall Street Journal photo. A French Pope; like that worked out so well the last time around.

As long as you’re a winner, everybody likes you. When you’re no longer a winner or you disagree with us, you can geaux away.

Sad.

*Forget about hacking my credit card accounts, I lie about that to banks

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We ventured out to the Englewood Hills school grounds to wrestle in the snow. It looks pretty intense, but it was all in good fun.

When we were done, the snow looked like the putting green in the episode of the Munsters when Herman went golfing.

Enjoy the video.

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Fans of the show Ace of Cakes will know what I’m talking about when I say that the Hershey bar cake Duff and crew made earlier last year was a bit of a puzzler as the wrapper was right-side up with Hershey, but the bar pieces inside were upside-down. So, the cake was made with the chocolate bar pieces upside down.

Ever since that episode, whenever I bought a Hershey bar (about 3 times a year) I peeled back the label like I was Charlie in Charlie and the Chocalate factory. The chocolate pieces were always upside-down. Until today.

Every year, we attend the NSCAA soccer show and I buy graham crackers, marshmallows and Hershey chocolate bars for Tim Lewis from Australia. Apparently, he had not had a s’more until 2006 where we rectified that life omission. So, every year since, he gets a s’more kit. In exchange, he gives me a bag of Minties candies. This year, I forgot to grab the chocolate, marshmallows and crackers. So, they were sitting on my desk when I got back, ready to ship. (Tim, I promise I’ll get to it right after the blizzard blows over, I swear!) and the chocolate bars were calling to me. So, I grabbed one and peeled back the label.

RIGHT SIDE UP!!! Oh, this was too good to be true. So, I had to have another.

Up-side down. Huh. Could have been a fluke and since I didn’t document the event, I had no way of proving it.

In the interest of science, I had to unwrap another bar. Dang! RIGHT SIDE UP! iPhone camera, take a photo. And the lot number as well on the back.

So, we still don’t know why the bars inside are upside-down because it appears they are right-side up as well. Anyone at Hershey have a definitive answer? In the meantime, feel free to speculate amongst yourselves in the comments.

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You are reading DogWalkBlog.com, produced and written in Dayton, Ohio. We are talking with Rufus, one of the key writers of the blog where he reminds us why you, time and place are important for blog credibility and reader orienteering.

I was reading a blog from a linked tweet this morning and halfway through it, my mind jumped to a question we’ve probably all asked ourselves halfway through. “Wait a minute, is this a blog post written by the person who tweeted or is this a guest blog post or a link that was passed along by the person I’m following.”

I’m on an iPhone, so I scroll up to the top hoping to get some quick info, like the author’s name, date it was posted, maybe the location. Nope, nothing. Since I was reading it on my iPhone, everything was in a zoomed-in column and the author’s info was probably in the side bar. What a pain, I’m not zooming out for that. But my sense of irritation was so high at this point (mostly because I was trying to establish credibility for some of the statements that were being asserted) that I just quit reading and went back to my Twitterstream.

And I got to thinking about a post I read yesterday by Julien Smith. In the post, he was reminded during a recent radio interview of the value of constant station identification breaks and the recaps and reminders that a good radio interviewer will always do.

You are reading DogWalkBlog.com, produced and written in Dayton, Ohio. We are talking with Rufus, one of the key writers of the blog where he reminds us why you, time and place are important for blog credibility and reader orienteering.

And if the blog post this morning was an anomaly, I would not be writing this post now. But, it is not. Whether by lack of training, ignorance or good old fashion hubris, hundreds of thousands of web sites that should tell the reader where they are, don’t. “Everyone knows who we are,” is a familiar retort.

No, we don’t know who you are. Is the Springfield College in Ohio, Illinois, Massachusetts, Tennessee or in fictitious Simpsonville? You would never know unless you crawled all over their Web site. (MA, down in tiny type at the bottom) How is this good for recruiting?

And folks who should know better — newspapers — are the worst offenders. Sure, we all know where New York, Chicago and Los Angles are, but where is The Richmond Times-Dispatch published? What community does it serve? Richmond, Indiana? Virginia? I dunno. And it is too much work crawling around trying to find out.

You are reading DogWalkBlog.com, produced and written in Dayton, Ohio. We are talking with Rufus, one of the key writers of the blog where he reminds us why you, time and place are important for blog credibility and reader orienteering.

Purists of the Internets would argue (did you catch my strawman argument? Pretty clever, right?) that the world is flat and that one’s experience, field of vision, place of residence, etc really don’t matter. It is the ideas, the engagement, etc, etc that really matter. Actually, it is not. When you have a homogenous view of the world that is created by your physical environment and fueled by willful ignorance, you end up writing crap like this book (review will not be forthcoming as I think “crap” sums it up nicely. Yes, I read it all the way through.)

And lastly, perhaps the worst offenders of all are local youth sports clubs. Unless you are THE Arsenal Football Club, please put your location front and center on your Web site. Above all, place very much matters to local youth sports teams.

Perhaps we can have little hide/click Blog Identification tags located in the content every three paragraphs so the reader can click on them and know immediately where he is and who you are. That would be a cool thing that newspapers should adopt. (I may even write a plug in for that.) But mostly, if we think about attracting new readers to our content, we would be less apt to assume everyone knows who and where we are.

Am I right?

You have been reading DogWalkBlog.com, produced and written in Dayton, Ohio. We were talking with Rufus, one of the key writers of the blog where he reminded us why you, time and place are important for blog credibility and reader orienteering. Tune in next week where we will bring you more exciting stuff, seen from the dog’s point of view. I’m your editor and host. Have a good day!

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I ran across this video by Tom Peters. Watch it.

Peters makes some powerful points about education, but I don’t entirely agree with everything he says.

Creativity is not a refusal to color inside the lines. It is a conscious decision to color outside the lines, knowing what the lines mean and why they are there. Refusing to color inside the lines without knowing why you choose to do so is just being rebellious, lazy, stupid or demonstrating a true lack of motor skills. The teacher and parents should have perhaps dug a bit further into WHY little Johnny didn’t color inside the lines to determine the difference between making a choice and not having the ability.

I think far too much sloth is excused away as “being creative.” That is an insult to those who are truly creative and those who seek to explore and expand their creativity. Almost every English student or crappy blogger who fails to learn the rules of capitalization and grammar will cite EE Cummings. Every crappy art student who fails to learn technique will cite Pablo Picasso. These are the students who should be given a letter grade of “E” for Excuses. They are not stupid, but they are not industrious enough to put the time and energy towards honing a skill; to becoming a true creative genius. In the world of creativity, they will remain average.

I also think that there is an appalling lack of knowledge acquisition in the schools today. I fear that we will all swing so far the other way toward “educating creatives” that we will fail to have a common culture for conversation. We are already experiencing this with GenY and the march toward personalizing the Internet for the individual with local Twitter trends, newspaper Web sites that allow you to build a list of articles that only interest you and crowds of people, all walking together but talking to someone on the phone who is not present.

On the other hand, we should not be confusing education with job training. Job training is forcing someone to sit in a seat for hours, coloring inside the lines. Education is exploring why the lines are there and creativity is exploring why the lines should be there at all and if so, where the color should be relative to the lines. Just because the economy is swinging from an information one toward a “creative” one does not mean the schools should all swing education towards making everyone creative. That is about as dumb as making us all factory workers. I hope Tom Peters understands that little bit of irony.

Some people are not creative. Some people are built to be the 4.0 “fall in line” folks who do what they are told. The world needs them too. Who else will make sure the computer code that fuels the creative crap on the Internet is bug-free?

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Ok, pretty strong statement, but what the heck, it will rank high in Google and get some people to start thinking about the unintended consequences of stupid company policies. So, Women Who Blog, if you are out there and have even the least bit interest in this, sharpen the pens.

I tweeted this out:

Airline luggage fees are unfair to women.. until they stop packing so many damn shoes. Class Action discrimination lawsuit? Hmmmmm

And @JessicaKrogman came back with:

@dogwalkblog I agree. I had to pay $60 both ways to & from New Orleans this weekend on Delta. I packed 5 pairs of shoes for the weekend.

@dogwalkblog I agree! I need comfy shoes for walking. Heels for a night out, options, etc… delta should understand this.

Luggage fees are unfairly skewed toward women as they carry more clothing and have a need for more shoes. Men, on the other hand, can go to a business meeting across the country packing a pair of Dockers, a dress shirt and wear the shoes they need. Underwear optional, but that is an entirely different post.

It may not be a sound legal argument against discrimination, but neither was the Motrin Moms claim or the United Break Guitars claim. But, they were effective in shaping the perception of each brand.

Are luggage fees discriminating against women? I dunno, but if folks care enough, we’ll soon find out.

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