It's me, Pete... from the podcast.

The Gerbils in the Henhouse

Ahh, the Gerbils are at it again. Got this in my inbox on Wednesday, the day before we’re all out of there for the holiday…

Announcing Company Wide Internet Content Filtering

To protect the Company’s business interests and our employees, the Company has implemented a tool that provides for increased security of our systems. With the participation of various departments, selected categories of Internet content that create risks to the Company and our systems were identified and will be restricted from access. This new product will protect our electronic world from harm caused by Internet searching and related activities and help to ensure a safer computing environment.

An additional feature of this tool is that it provides for greater monitoring of Internet traffic which will allow us to better monitor our systems for appropriate use. Therefore we would like to remind all of our employees that as a regular business practice, activity on the Internet will be monitored for fraud, waste and abuse including personal and other non-business use. Any evidence of inappropriate use may result in disciplinary actions. Any evidence of criminal activity may be provided to appropriate agencies, including law enforcement agencies.
This new service is being deployed throughout the enterprise and will be enabled for your region on Monday, Nov. 29, 2004. Following this date, should a problem related to being denied Internet content that is required for legitimate business purposes, please contact Company Tech Support at 1–800-XXX-XXXX.

Information Security Office

To sweeten the 1984-ishness of it, please note that I didn’t change anything in the above passage but the phone number. That’s right, the idiots referred to us as “The Company” over and over and over.

Sophie the Bat

I took the girls to the Turkey Trot today, which stops up at the elephant pen at the zoo. They ended up taking an hour to walk the place after the race, during which time I was sound asleep in the car.

When we all finally reconvened, I asked Sophie what she liked about the zoo. She recounted the usual: elephants, giraffes, meerkats … she even picked up a lesser kudu this time. Then we got to the bats.

“What were the bats doing, Sophie?” Kira asked her when we got settled in the car.

“They were eating fruit and apples.”

I said, “Wait a minute. Does Sophie eat apples?”

Sophie thought hard for a second. “Yes.”

“And bats eat apples too?”

“Yes, dad.”

“Sophie, I think you’re a bat!”

She looked at me, then at her hands, then up at Kira.

“Mom. I think… I’m a bat!”

Happy Thanksgiving.

More on Bush Administration VNR Strategy

I’m not up on the history of a presidential administration’s use of video news releases to the scale of our current custodians, but they’re following up on their latest medicare chapter with one on education.

The VNR process seems just crazy to me these days, as we’re all trying so hard to balance the competing interests of mass communication and rebuilding customer trust. Yet, the communications office has chosen to flood the markets with these things once every couple of months, generating more meta-press on the act itself than root press on their target issue.

Amazing. Because of Pizza.

Right now, Kira is eating a wonderful Russian soup with beef, beets, and onions — all good stuff. It’s wonderful, but not so much for 2-year-olds.

So, I came in and whipped up a tortilla pizza with pepperoni, cheese, and mushrooms and tossed it in the toaster oven. I gave it to Sophie, and after one bite, she says to Kira:

“My dad is just amazing.”

“Why is he amazing, Sophie?”

“Because of pizza!”

Most days, being a dad is fun. Some days, it’s simply exceptional.

The Meaning of Life

Clearly, I’m on a kid’s say the darndest things kick. Acknowledged. Let’s move on to tonight’s tale. 

Curt’s over for family dinner. We’re eating Yumms (cause they rock) and discussing how cool child development is. Sophie is talking about the water we’re all drinking “…and Curt has water and mommy has some water and Sophie has water and so does Curt have some water…” etc. 

Curt leans over and says to Sophie, “Sophie, what’s the meaning of life? What does it all mean?” 

Sophie tilts her head to the side. She says, “It means…” and holds us there, pregnant pause. I think she made eye contact with each of us in the span of about eight seconds. “It means… Curt’s house.” 

So there we have it. Curt’s house is the meaning of life.

Demographics and Segmentation

The art of PR is all about knowing your audience. Who do you need to persuade, and what’s going to convince them? The Kerry and Bush campaigns have very different answers to that question.

The Kerry team takes a laser-focused approach – identifying issues, then targeting each message to a narrow audience segment. Healthcare for moms. Social security for retirees. College tuition for students. Check, check, check. They were efficient. Precise. Did everything by the book.

Meanwhile, Bush goes broad. His people step back and ask: what basic, visceral messages will resonate across demographics? They realize fear and hope are universal. So they tap into those big, lizard-brain emotions. Protection from terror. Traditional values. Strong leadership.

Their communication style matches their strategy. While Kerry dutifully recites policy points, Bush tells stories. He paints pictures. He speaks to the heart, not just the head.

In the end, passion defeats the logic. Bush rallies enough of the masses to clinch that razor-thin win.

Now the question is, what lessons will Democrats take from 2004 as they look to 2008? Will they stick to the traditional playbook of narrowcasting? Or adapt the campaign in bolder, more emotional terms?

Let me be clear: I don’t think we need a fiery liberal at the top of the ticket. But we do need a candidate who can connect with a broad coalition of Americans. Someone who sees that real change comes from moving millions, not just mobilizing the fringe. A leader who campaigns with empathy, not just facts.

The world expects too much progress in one year and too little in ten. We tried to transform a landscape in 18 months that had been eroding for decades. Quick fixes make poor foundations. To build something that lasts, we must practice patience and care.

The Kerry strategists weren’t wrong. But neither were they completely right. In politics, as in life, the most effective path blends heart and mind. The task now is to chart that balanced course.

SNL Presidential Debates

I just watched the Saturday Night Live Presidential Debate special that was on Monday night this week and I’ve discovered another reason for us to feel ashamed of our collective selves. If SNL is to be any sort of bell weather for our life and times, we’ve been re-living political history for at least the last 30 years without even knowing it. For example:

  1. In the ’76 Debate spoof, Belushi’s Rolling Stone reporter accuses Dan Ackroyd’s Jimmy Carter of being a “flip-flopper”
  2. In ’88, Dana Carvey’s Bush stumbles over himself horribly, yadda yadda yadda, something about a “thousand points of light,” at which point what’s-his-name’s Dukakis says, “I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy.”
  3. In ’92, Bush-Clinton-Perot, well… Carvey’s Perot is almost funnier than Ralph Nader, playing himself, debating puppets.

November 3, 2004

We went to bed at 10:00 last night, long before the final states were called by the networks. Fascinatingly difficult night, that.

My folks moved to Wales this year. Just before they left, my dad called and told me that if Bush won a second term, they weren’t coming back. Yeah, yeah, he was joking, but this morning, I had this waiting for me in my inbox:

My sincere condolences on the loss of your country for another four years. As we seek asylum here in Europe, we want you to know we’ll be in constant touch. Should you be driven from your home by fundamentalist Christians under the rule of “Bush” for watching “The Simpsons” or some other violation against the State, you’ll be able to reach us immediately, and we will try to get to you and save you.

We’re both involved today in an emergency underground here in the UK. We were simply hoping for the best and preparing for the worst. We have good, intelligent leaders who we believe will offer us the best resistance to the American sprawl should they venture to this island in the North Atlantic.

Until we meet again. Our love to little Sophie. Tell her we’ll send for her as soon as things cool down.

Dad

It’s starting to remind me of the hit series “V,” or, you know, the Holocaust. (Here, I’ll be busted for likening our current political situation to war crimes and other atrocities, but I can’t help but feeling this eerie parallel between the early popularity of Hitler’s propaganda with the German conservative right and the blood red that covered the electoral map last night. If Germany, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, N. Korea et al have taught us anything, it’s that regimes must all start somewhere.)

Then, I picked this up on boingboing.net:

Kerry concedes.
Four more years of a nation led by criminals. I was making coffee with one eye on CNN when the news broke, and I called my dad, a man who’s spent many years fighting for good things, sometimes at great personal cost.

“Get over it,” he said, “The way you feel now is exactly how I felt when Nixon won a second term — crushed. I just couldn’t believe America was that stupid. “But remember what happened to Nixon that term.”

“Change comes from discontent,” he said. “And right now, there’s a lot of discontent.”

I love Xeni Jardin (cat’s out of the bag. BFD). She goes on with that post, but I think the opener really sums it up. I look around me at all the people who are in my life: bright, witty people grounded in honesty and integrity. These are people for whom moral values mean more than electability. They’re vibrant people, concerned about the direction we’re headed and longing for something different. How is it that this sentiment, which is so rooted in reality for me and those around me, is such a farce for more than half of our country?

As a marketer, I handle Canada as part of my territory. I spoke to a friend of mine at Channel M — Multivision Television this morning who asked if I was wearing a black armband today. He said that Canadians are stunned. He asked how we could put a party in office that’s so full of shit. I wonder.

It’s funny. I was so confident that we were going to take this one that I’m not sure I did enough on my own. I wrote a bit about it, but since I haven’t worked toward any real readership here, I can’t claim to any wild success in the PR arena. I leave that to friends like Curt and Kath. I feel changed now, though. The lines, the hours that people waited to cast their votes, and the passion with which people fought for this one showed that voting is no longer enough.

It takes talking about the issues by the water cooler, not hiding in the corner and whispering. It takes publicly denouncing false promises and bad policies as cancerous, not relying on the vocal minority to do the talking for us. There is no general public. They do not exist. This game takes practice, and this party just wasn’t ready for it.

On Writing and Catching Up

I’ve done it.

Not sure why, at this point. For the last four years, I’ve tried my damnedest to win NaNoWriMo, to just get to that crucible of 50k, and it’s never happened. The first year, I was just lazy. I tried it with Curtand, and it never got stuck. The next year, I don’t know — busy with work or some such thing. In 2002, I got pneumonia. That was a winner. And 2003? It seems a sign of senility, but I don’t know where the hell I was in 2003.

What I do know is that I’ve gotten better each year. Somehow, I’ve managed to put a few more days into each November trial, so the way I figure it, but the year 2026, I should be close to the mark.

Feels funny, having not written in so long. Most of my troubles, I’m sure, could be washed away with some practice. I was perusing some of the Fatherhood writing I did last year as Soph was coming around. I’m proud of that, that I have some documentation of her time with us as an infant — I’m sure it will be special to catch up with it all when she’s grown. And there, I’ve let her down by not keeping up with the last year. She’s amazing and deserves more from me there.

So, here goes something of an update: Kira’s still in school. She has just started her second year of her master’s program in speech pathology at Portland State University and seems to be loving it. It’s fascinating to see someone so perfectly suited for a profession; it’s hard to find that sort in marketing. Everyone seems to want to be something else. Anyhow, she’s doing well. She finally realized what it means to be “over-extended” and quit her gig coaching at the MAC evenings and weekends. Nice to have her around the house.

Sophie is still at Peggy’s during the week. She’s loving it, but it’s killing us. Timing is everything, and we’ll get her back on a better schedule over the holidays.

I’m not sure where I left off, but I’m thoroughly enjoying my teaching at the University of Phoenix. Now, here’s a group that’s gotten some undue bad press of late. Whatever the news says, the classroom experience here is fantastic. These folks are there for business. We’re headed into week 5, the last week of our public relations course on Tuesday.

We’re expanding into Calgary, Alberta come January. I’ve been building out our media plan for the city on a shoestring. It’s enormously frustrating at times watching my budget get devoured by cost-per-lead initiatives that don’t seem to deliver across the border. More on this later.

The folks are in Wales, Cardiff University, and Dad’s started school officially. Sounds like he’s loving it, taking classes in everything from news in the public sector to online journalism — Photoshop is on the calendar — kudos to him for stepping into it all again.

That’s everyone for now. Just coming back here has made me realize how behind I got on the site redesign. The header graphic is all out of whack, the sidebar is funny, and how in the hell do I use CSS to move the calendar element a few pixels to the right? I’ve got to write some music for an office presentation — or maybe just record “Christmas Time is Here” (Uber-classic Charlie Brown era goodness) — and make people happy that way. Oh, and I have some 28 papers to grade this week. Whatever happened to growing old on a beach, greying, bearding, and writing?

Crawford, TX Paper Endorses JFK

Here’s an interesting twist of fate. Following the debates, a local paper in Crawford officially endorses JFK:

Kerry Will Restore American Dignity: 2004 Iconoclast Presidential Endorsement

We made our big, militant bed. Now we have to climb in…

This is the sort of insanity that has spun from the actions of the Bush administration. It’s the manifest creation of a global culture of war and war-mongering that’s come not only to represent what our “New America” means to the rest of the world, but that’s come to define the de facto standard of war-play for the rest of the world, too. From the article:

“We will not sit (with arms folded) to wait for what others will do to us. Some military commanders in Iran are convinced that preventive operations which the Americans talk about are not their monopoly,” Shamkhani told Al-Jazeera TV when asked if Iran would respond to an American attack on its nuclear facilities.

“America is not the only one present in the region. We are also present, from Khost to Kandahar in Afghanistan; we are present in the Gulf and we can be present in Iraq,” said Shamkhani, speaking in Farsi to the Arabic-language news channel through an interpreter.

“The US military presence (in Iraq) will not become an element of strength (for Washington) at our expense. The opposite is true, because their forces would turn into a hostage” in Iranian hands in the event of an attack, he said.

The controversy over Kerry and the swiftboat nonsense aside, who is there to whom we can point that will pledge to adopt principles of peace and political deceleration?

“Tower Stories” hits shelves [update]

Received this from a dear friend. Thank you, Damon, and congratulations on a job well done.

Dear friends,

I’m proud to announce the publication of Tower Stories: the Autobiography of September 11th. Foreword by Tom Kean, Chairman of the 9/11 Commission.

This book presents interviews I conducted with survivors, witnesses, volunteers, paramedics, policemen, firemen, political experts, and family members immediately after 9/11. My goal was to create the most comprehensive first-person oral history available so that September 11th might always be remembered as it really happened. In this way, we might come to a deeper degree of understanding . . . what happened that day, why it happened, and how we are forever changed.

“This volume defends the understanding, as also the horror, of that day. We are indebted to mr. dimarco for the effort and for the editorial acuity.” – William F. Buckley

Portions of the book’s proceeds will be donated to a worthy charity founded by a victim of the attack.

Tower Stories will be available in bookstores everywhere in hardcover from Revolution Publishing by late August; advanced orders can be placed now on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.com.

Best wishes,

Damon DiMarco

[update]

Looks like there’s a signing coming up…

There will be a book signing for Tower Stories at Rocky Sullivan’s bar (129 Lex between 28 and 29th) in conjunction with Shakespeare and Co. at 8 p.m. on Wednesday, the 25th of August. Copies of the book will be available, and of course, the bar will be open. Hope you can attend.

Gizmodo: A Love Story

Gizmodo’s new pen, Joel Johnson, has taken some getting used to. I was used to Pete, the old friend who never knew me, and Joel was the undeserving up-and-comer, the usurper. I was bitter. I now know where the love is and how Joel fits into my life, and I think the man captures it himself when he writes:

Available in both a ceiling lamp model (around $380) and a table lamp (around $130), the PuffMuffs are designed to output a soft, diffused light (like when you tape a hamster to a flashlight, let’s say).

And again, my heart is a flutter. This guy should be read.

How are you using MoveableType

How are you using MT?

Thanks for asking, Mena.

I’m not a developer. I don’t offer any commercial blogs. Since taking up with MoveableType over a year ago, I’ve set up two blogs for myself (since consolidated into one), a blog for my dad, a blog for the Community Higher Education Consortium for Oregon and SW Washington (a non-profit alliance of accredited colleges and universities improving education communication of non-traditional students), and a blog for the alumni of my college a cappella group (again, non-commercial). I have one other blog that’s still hosted on blogspot (never made the transition to MT — laziness — a team blog on switching to the Mac).

By my count, that’s six blogs total (five, if you count my merged personal blogs). My concern is not so much the number of blogs in the license — I could rationalize that the CHEC blog and my dad’s blog aren’t really mine per se, even though I run them. That would take me down to three. It’s really the author’s limits. The Education blog has 7 authors now and is likely to go up to 9 in the fall — one author accounts for each member of the committee leadership council. We don’t actually have any money, we don’t take dues, and we’re ethical. We just wouldn’t be able to justify MT3.0, and that’s the bummer.

The Mac blog is a team blog, but there are only two of us on the team right now. I can see going to 3-5, but no more than that.

I guess my big request would be 5 blogs, multiple authors (up to 10 is some nice breathing room), non-commercial. I’ll jump through other hoops for you to help you make your nut, and I’ll even pay the $60 bucks, but I just need a healthy multiple-author component.

Again, thanks for asking. And congratulations on the developer release.

CU Football OK’d — No Charges Filed

I’d simply love to say that I’m proud of my alma mater, but I just can’t do it. This is a pretty sad case, made sadder still by the post-mortem: “not enough evidence.”

Update 2024-01-20 – Daily Camera

The original post above comes from a Reuters article that is no longer online. But in searching for it, I found this piece from later in the year that I’d missed. Turns out, there was a bit of justice leaking out of these events after all.