Advanced Storytelling

Okay, kids, we're going to talk about breast feeding versus bottle feeding again in framing class today, so no giggling (you know who you are). I was looking over someone's shoulder on the Metro today and reading an article titled " HHS Toned Down Breast-Feeding Ads ", which reads like a continuation of the administration's meddling in public health : In an attempt to raise the nation's historically low rate of breast-feeding, federal health officials commissioned an attention-grabbing advertising campaign a few years ago to convince mothers that their babies faced real health risks if they did not breast-feed. It featured striking photos of insulin syringes and asthma inhalers topped with rubber nipples. -snip- The ads ran instead with more friendly images of dandelions and cherry-topped ice cream scoops, to dramatize how breast-feeding could help avert respiratory problems and obesity. According to the article, the formula industry didn't block the ads ...

With Elyzabethe over at YellowIsTheColor writing all about The Political Brain so much lately, I thought it might be a good time to blog about the Rockridge Institute , which I've recently re-discovered. Anyone who talks to me for more than two minutes about communications or policy knows my affection for George Lakoff. Rockridge is a think thank founded on his work on cognitive linguistics and progressive policy. It's goal is the same as Drew Westen's: reframe the public debate. The Rockridge Fellows put out some great essays on all sorts of topics, but what really got me drooling was their interactive Rockridge Nation . Framing examples galore! What I especially liked, because it's an issue near and dear to my heart, is the ongoing dicussion about the fallacy of a left/right linear political spectrum, and why moving towards the "center" isn't a good political strategy: In reality, there are basic progressive and conservative worldviews, and many peopl...

How many global warming videos start with "In 1975, two boxes of wine were consumed, one condom broke, and nine months later, a legend was born..." It's a short film (in five YouTube sized acts) calling for increased fuel efficiency standards. Unfortunately, it kind of falls flat on the call to action part-- I don't see why it needed to be a half hour. I think it works better as an inspirational video for environmentalists trying to get out their message across, since it basically just follows one guy trying to make what, in the end, is your typical celebrity-faces-the-camera-and-tells-us-to-call-congress PSA. I needed to get people's attention, so I...made a PSA? It started out so promising in Episode 1, with Ben Affleck running around in a corn suit and Joshua Jackson threatening to break a baby's arm if Congress doesn't listen... I agree with this guy that all the celebrities are unnecessary. It would have been funny anyway, and it doesn't help c...

Today I joined not one, but two social networking sites-- Pownce and Ravelry . I'm geeking out, even though I'm on dial-up, and am probably going to end up spending the entire weekend adding my knitting projects to Ravelry. Oh, I didn't mention is was a knitting network? Yeah, I meant it when I said I was geeking out. But not before I finish Harry Potter...

Hillary Clinton's Tentative Dip Into New Neckline Territory Okay, it was appropriately filed under "fashion" but is was on the front of the WaPo website. I cringed. Then I clicked on it: There was cleavage on display Wednesday afternoon on C-SPAN2. It belonged to Sen. Hillary Clinton. She was talking on the Senate floor about the burdensome cost of higher education. She was wearing a rose-colored blazer over a black top. The neckline sat low on her chest and had a subtle V-shape. The cleavage registered after only a quick glance. No scrunch-faced scrutiny was necessary. There wasn't an unseemly amount of cleavage showing, but there it was. Undeniable. The article goes on to talk about how sartorially conservative and masculine the Hill is, and Hilary's uncomfortable relationship with fashion as the First Lady, and her adoption of the black pantsuit as her uniform. Until now, apparently. There was the requisite "really, this isn't just about women, we swea...

Any of you other comm geeks going to watch this ? Hell, I'll watch it just for the costumes, but maybe we should start a drinking game--take a shot every time someone mentions Edward Bernays or Ivy Lee? No?

I don't know how this hasn't made the evening news. Then again, I had to hear about it from the Yarn Harlot , so maybe it has been. I'll let Stephanie explain: Tory Bowen says that she was raped. Actually, Tory Bowen, was pre-law at college when she had a drink at a bar that was the last thing she remembers until she woke up in a strangers bed, with a stranger, who was doing something she hadn't consented to. (That would be the rape.) She went to the emergency room, was treated and had a rape kit done and called the police. The police charged her attacker with 1st degree sexual assault and a trial was set. That's where things got weird. The judge decided that many words around this issue were too inflammatory. That they made the defendant sound guilty, and that they implied a crime...."Rape" is a legal conclusion- he thought. We cannot call it rape until a jury says it's rape. (Hear that women? You can't know something is rape until there's a v...

Okay, by now you know the Cluetrain Manifesto: Markets are conversations. Today at work I stumbled across a great definition of marketing, courtesy of Seth Godin: "Marketing is an act that starts a conversation."

The Ethicurean's Dairy Queen had a post today titled Truthiness and Real Food: Hellman's, get your paws off our framing! The title alone referenced, Steven Colbert, food and framing, so I had to read it. Turns out it touches on a lot more of the issues we've been covering this year in class. Hellman's Mayonnaise is starting a "real food" web campaign, and was trying to get bloggers to join in. I can't quite figure out what it all entailed, but apparently Unilever attempted to pitch an integrated marketing show (ie, "infotainment") to the Food Network, which turned them down, so they've now developed a "In Search of Real Food" website on Yahoo where people can share recipes and thoughts on "real", local, and fresh foods--and Hellman's mayonnaise. What’s keeping me up so late with annoyance is the insidious way that Hellman’s/Best Foods is trying to co-opt the idea of real food by velcro-ing their manufactured "f...

I'll admit the new Disney cartoon Ratatouille looked cute, but with the combination of being broke and still feeling well enough to look at food, I figured I'd pass on it for awhile. But according to Eating Liberally , I really should go see this movie. Its message? Yes, even a lowly rodent can learn to cook, but just like the rest of us, his culinary endeavors will succeed or fail depending on the quality and freshness of his ingredients. Am I the only one who finds this message pretty radical for an animated film supposedly aimed at kids? And it seems all the more astonishing when you contrast it to Pixar parent Disney’s Shrek the Third, with its endless tie-ins to processed foods that target toddlers’ taste buds. Apparently the villain in the movie sells junk food. How awesome is that? Now, I'm not naive enough to believe kids are going to trade in their popcorn for carrot sticks at the movie theater, especially after the Associated Press recently reviewed 57 programs a...

I had forgotten until today that I had posted my picture on The Age Project , in order to prove my suspicion that most people think I look younger than I am. Well, I was disproven. The average guess was 27, which is close enough. For those friends curious enough, the photo I posted is the same one I'm using for my Facebook profile.

I came across two great posts this week that brought together food, feminism, and healthy choices. Freelance writer Jennifer Jeffrey wrote a pair of posts entitled The Feminist In My Kitchen. The question: is the sustainable food movement women-friendly? I wonder if our little blogsphere sits here debating the provenance of our nectarines while the larger community of women – most of whom have no time for surfing blogs, let alone writing one – head out to work feeling more guilty than ever before, as the mountain of expectations and unattainable standards grows ever higher. Can we call ourselves feminists (simply defined here as people who desire the equality of all women, everywhere) and still suggest that an ideal dinner consists of handmade ravioli and slow-simmered marinara from vine-ripened, hand-picked tomatoes and a salad composed of vegetables that (let’s be honest) are Not Available at Safeway? By pointing out that convenience has been a friend to the working women, she could...

So I ran across a tribute to Paul Simon by the Library of Congress on PBS tonight. Now, I've finally gotten over my theater-degree habit of dissecting theatrical production values, but I think my pr/marketing/communications training has taken over. Let me explain. First off, the whole concert consisted of beautiful interpretations of Paul Simon's songs, illustrating exactly why he was recieving the Gershwin Award for Popular Song. Yes, there were big name artists performing (The Muppets doing Feelin’ Groovy? Awesome!), but many of them weren't so famous--like Allison Krause singing Graceland. So the show was really well curated. But then they handed it off to an event coordinator to run the show. I respect event coordinators, but they are not directors. It was obvious the show was produced in DC, not in LA. Instead of a host, there was a disembodied voice-over. Then Bob Costas (huh?) introducing a video that is obviously destined for a Library of Congress museum exhibi...

First off: It's sad that I get better wireless reception in my backyard than in my apartment, right? Sigh. I normally try to stay out of the quagmire that is the abortion debate, but as usually, elyzabethe wrote something insightful about feminist issues that I had to comment on. Actually, I had to comment on the framing war that was going on in the comments section between elyzabethe and another friend. Then I ended up emailing back and forth with her for awhile. Then someone at work mentioned how the "choice" frame is starting to lose ground, even though advocates don't want to admit it. I started scribbling notes, sighed, and thought, "well, I'm gonna have to blog about this." Elyzabeth rants often against anti-choice organizations and legislation, as is her wont as a libertarian feminist. She’s particularly good at teasing out how anti-choice (A, if you’re reading this, bear with me, I’m referring to ‘anti-choice’ as more than just the abortion issu...

Up until now, I haven’t really paid much attention to the (Red) campaign. I mean, I think it’s a great thing, but it just seemed a little close to charity/white man saving Africa. But this week I got a hold of the Vanity Fair issue on Africa (guest edited by Bono!), and I came across a (Red) ad that just said “Meaning is the New Luxury” in black on a background of, wait for it, red. For any student of advertising and PR, this was basically like saying “Hi, blog about me.” Because it’s true: we don’t buy products and services anymore because they work, we buy them because it makes us feel good about ourselves, our lifestyle. See: Persuaders, The . We know this. I just had never seen it spelled out so blatantly. It was kind of refreshing--no, really refreshing--after an entire magazine of tastefully-designed celebrity-endorsed socially-responsible product ads, including Kimora Lee Simmons for her own jewelry line, Natalie Maines and Terrance Howard for Gap(Red), David Beckham for Moto...

Time has a great special report on its website, called The Food Chains That Link Us All . I've only scanned it so far, but so far it's drool-worthy for a geek like me. The beginning of Mark Kurlansky's opening essay was awesome: C.L.R James, the great Trinidadian essayist, once wrote of his favorite sport,"What do they know of cricket, who only cricket know?" The same question should be asked of food. To write about food only as food misses the point, or the many points, about the great universal human experience between birth and death. Food is not just what we eat. It charts the ebbs and flows of economies, reflects the changing patterns of trade and geopolitical alliances, and defines our values,status and health—for better and worse. The famous dictum of the early 19th century French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, "Tell me what you eat and I will tell you who you are," should be expanded. Tell me what you eat and I will tell you who you a...

At noon on Monday, the Environmental Working Group launched a new farm subsidies database profiling the 358,070 people who've gotten over $34.75 billion in federal subsidies. Twenty-four hours later, the database was already getting 7,000 hits per hour on the new database. Two days later, the website still took five minutes to load. Why all the interest? Well, why did Microsoft's Paul Allen get $30,687 in farm subsidies between 2003-2005? Right here would be a great place for a pun about something smelling like manure, but I don't want to offend any cows, especially since they're organizing .

DairyQueen has a hilarious post on The Ethicurean about the latest E. coli outbreak, which I hadn't heard of. She picked up on one of the frames I discussed in my thesis, the modernization frame: Another day, another recall of ground beef possible tainted with E. coli 0157:H7, aka Revenge of the Industrial Food System. Actually, this is just an expanded recall, voluntary of course, because the USDA has no power to force the companies it regulates to recall their products. Kind of like being the parents of rebellious teenagers. You just hope you raised them right … so they don’t go out and kill people. In outbreaks like this the modernization frame--aka Revenge of the Industrial Food System--works against reform for two reasons. Either they're proof of the need for even more industrialization: As usual, this latest E. coli recall has brought out the proponents of irradiation. Those would be the parents that, having raised rotten teenagers, are fine with packing them off to adu...

I stumbled across the Columbia Journalism Review yesterday, and there's a lot of good stuff in the latest issue. An article titled The Op-Out Myth discusses the real trend of articles covering the faux trend of professional women turning their backs on the working world to become stay-at-home moms. The author makes a point that always seemed obvious to me when I read these "mommy war" articles: the women profiled are always upper-middle-class women with money in the bank and a well-paid spouse. How many moms does that actual describe? The moms-go-home story keeps coming back, in part, because it’s based on some kernels of truth. Women do feel forced to choose between work and family. Women do face a sharp conflict between cultural expectations and economic realities. The workplace is still demonstrably more hostile to mothers than to fathers. Faced with the “choice” of feeling that they’ve failed to be either good mothers or good workers, many women wish they co...

I meant to post on this about two weeks ago, but I got really sick, and am only now getting my appetite back. The Columbia Journalism Review featured an essay a few weeks ago on the new food writing: In the past few years a raft of reporters and writers have stepped forward with him to answer those twinned queries in all their anthropologically thick complexity. Their work draws together issues of taste, ethics, and politics, bridging the gap between James Beard and Rachel Carson. Much of their writing has an activist tone: last September, The Nation brought together several environmentally conscious writers under the umbrella of a “Food Issue.” But mainstream newspapers, too, now know that their readers expect them to report on the political and ethical implications of food–and to track trends generated, in part, by the new food writers. I had a lot more notes on this, but that pretty much sums it up. If I have anything to say about it, this kind of writing will take over, but it...

Round One wasn't really a fight, but whatever. Caught your attention, right? Elyzabethe posted about Montgomery County's trans fat ban, which inspired my post last week on the Guerrilla Nutrition Labels, which inspired her response . Well, over on my new favorite website, Culinate, there is a review of a --I guess you could call it a debate--between food and agriculture writer Michael Pollen, and Whole Foods CEO John Mackey. Apparently, Mackey impressed the Berkeley crowd with his commitment to reforming the food system. I have no doubt he's genuine, either, but this article points out some of the facts he left out of his (seriously) PowerPoint presentation. What got me especially (no surprise to anyone who heard me ramble on about Spinach and e.coli last semester) was his classification of Earthbound Farm as a group of small organic farms banding together under one brand name, allowing him to say that 78% of Whole Foods produce comes from small farms. I call bull...

It's 1:30 am, it's Friday night, and for some reason I come home from a party and I get online looking for social marketing sites. Am I in withdrawal from class? Whatever. I've discovered Deborah Schultz , a friend of Hugh's , and she's coined the term I've been looking for in all my digging on transparency , the long tail : "relationship marketing". She also started a del.icio.us account of related links, which I'll have to spend a good many hours exploring. Although her social networking map had one glaring error in that it is missing Facecrack . So on the issue of Web 2.0, I really don't know why I bother writing about it, since the five people reading this blog know more about it than I do. Besides, I need to get back to talking about framing, which is what this blog was supposed to be about. Why yes, I was trying to get as many links as possible into this entry. I think I'm just giddy from having been able to finally hand out some bu...

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Considering Montgomery County’s recent passing of a trans fat ban I thought this post would be timely. I would have liked to see more education and debate before the ban, since we all have to take responsibility for our own choices about what to buy at the grocery store. Guerrilla Nutrition Labels are part of a guerrilla art campaign by a Hunter College media arts student designed to raise awareness about what goes into processed foods. For those who want to join in, you’re invited to download and print off the labels yourself and do some culture jamming at your local supermarket. Cross-posted from Provisions .

My new favorite commercials are the Ad Council's PSA for adoption. They're hilarious. I'm a huge proponent of adoption, partly because I have a couple of adopted cousins who have basically settled the 'nature or nuture' debate for me. They lack my dysfunctional DNA, but they've got the family sense of humor perfected. Basically, the ads show parents being inept parents, with the tag line "You don't have to be a perfect parent...There are lots of kids who would love to put up with you." The one that's getting a lot of airplay right now is 'Phone' , and I think the kid in that one is pitch-perfect. The first one in this series they launched was 'Gift' , which I think was good-you get right away that the kids are adopted, but the situation is so "That's my family!" which is the point. The latest one is 'Hamster':

I went to a really fascinating presentation last Friday by the Beehive Design Collective . I was a little wary at first that it would be an all white, Latin American studies crowd, especially since in the ten minutes preceding the presentation I had to listen to some teenage self-described anarchists debate for ten minutes over whether police are just workers following orders, or if force against them is justified because they are the enforcement arm of the fascist state. I’m sorry: you do not qualify as an anarchist if you’re enrolled in a four-year liberal arts college. Luckily, the words ‘proletariat’ or ‘bourgeoisie’ did not make an appearance, otherwise I would have had to leave. But I digress. The Beehive describes their ‘visual lectures’ as giant comic book posters, but that doesn’t do them justice. Imagine the picture left blown up to about 6 feet wide by probably 25 feet tall, spanning 500 years, and you’ve got a rough idea. The symbolism and detail in their work reminded me o...

"Blogging is just the tip of the Cluetrain iceberg. And it wasn't the tip that sunk the Titanic."

Author Michael Pollen had an excellent article in yesterday's New York Times Magazine, on why we should all be paying attention to the Farm Bill being reauthorized by Congress this year. Basically, he wrote the introduction to my thesis much more eloquently than I did. The whole article is worth reading, but these two paragraphs sum up the issue well: And then there are the eaters, people like you and me, increasingly concerned, if not restive, about the quality of the food on offer in America. A grass-roots social movement is gathering around food issues today, and while it is still somewhat inchoate, the manifestations are everywhere: in local efforts to get vending machines out of the schools and to improve school lunch; in local campaigns to fight feedlots and to force food companies to better the lives of animals in agriculture; in the spectacular growth of the market for organic food and the revival of local food systems. In great and growing numbers, people are voting with ...

I’ve just finished reading Capitalism 3.0 (PDF), by Peter Barnes , founder of Working Assets . It’s a quick, easy read for anyone interested in anything from media reform to wilderness protection to fighting poverty. Barnes is arguing for a way to moderate capitalism’s distorting effect on democracy. Instead of calling for more regulation (since those, as we’ve all seen with current media, environmental, and economic regulations are too often watered down by corporate influence) Barnes envisions is an economic model that balances the corporate market with the common wealth: Much of what we label private wealth is taken from, or co-produced with, the commons. However, these takings from the commons are far from equal. To put it bluntly, the rich are rich because (through corporations) they get the lion’s share of common wealth; the poor are poor because they get very little. He describes a shift from the “shortage” capitalism of the 18th and 19th centuries, to the “surplus” capitalism w...

I've been given the chance to write for Provisions Library 's blog Signalfire, on agriculture and food issues, my other passion in addition to framing. I thought for awhile I'd cross-post here as well. Provisions is a social change activism resource library located in DC. First post: Spring will have sprung any moment now, and with that the opening of local farmers markets. In addition to Eastern Market, Fresh Farm runs a number of markets around the city, and the Twin Springs Fruit Farm of Pennsylvania has stands at a number of markets in Bethesda, DC and Arlington. Wherever you live, Local Harvest keeps an extensive directory of farmers markets, local farms, and CSAs across the country.

If you are a single man between the ages of 25-35 living in the DC area, and you identify with what Henry Rollins is talking about in this clip, call me. Tattoos not required.

I really have nothing to say about Virgina Tech- many are already saying it more eloquently than I, and in the end, it's something you really can't put into words. There was an interesting article in the Post today called "Students Make Connections at a Time of Total Disconnect" about how during all the chaos yesterday, students were able to keep in touch by IM and cellphone and Facebook. So many other stories about that generation and digital media are negative- how they/we don't know how to write in full sentences, how we're IM-ing instead of paying attention in class, how we're disconnected from community. But we're not-we're just connected differently. Like right now, as I write this, I'm simultaneously IM-ing a friend trying to make a major life decision, someone who I haven't seen in months and lives hundreds of miles away. But she reached out, and hey, once that IM pings, you've got to connect...

Big Green Purse gets some awesome press from my favorite newspaper. My press-release-writing skills get some recognition. If and when you hear about this site on the radio, I'll take all the credit. Ha.

I just invented that saying after an afternoon of researching research methods (speaking of meta) via the web. I clicked through so many sites and downloaded so many documents I got completely lost.

...since my post last week about the anti-Rove protest on campus. A bit of an identity crisis. Here I am, someone who has had major life-altering experiences (drug-free, thank you) at a May Day protest years ago, putting down activists I agree with. Have I become cold and heartless? Well, no. I realized early on that protests and radical actions were not my thing. But they work for some people, and I was assigned an article for a class that reminded me that even if they don't directly affect change, radical actions do have reasons: Activist organizations use disruptive image events, which are highly charged protests that involve visuals such as people being buried up to their necks in roads and grandparents chaining themselves to trees (DeLuca, 1999). Such events rarely put an immediate stop to the things activist organizations protest; however, according to a Greenpeace campaigner, success is judged by the protestors’ abilities to reduce complex issues to symbols that disrupt pe...

Admittedly, not my best frame, but I haven't been sleeping lately. I have, however, been a creative genius lately. Unfortunately, this creative genius has all come at 3 am and consists of a marketing campaign for Tanquery Gin (no, I have not been drinking), a public relations initiative for Facebook, and not my homework. Okay, not exactly true. Some of this extra brainpower has been useful for the client proposal I'm working on. Problem is, a proposal isn't supposed to be a campaign. Part of the assignment is to know how much to give away, and how much to hold back, so that you don't risk losing the client AND your ideas to another firm. On the bright side, I might be heading towards a stellar career in my chosen field, if I can move halfway around the world so that my ideas come during the business day. What, you don't think that will work? Honestly, as much as the whole insomnia thing sucks, I am kind of reassured about my abilities. Nothing brings on self-doubt l...

I love the idea of gay families crashing the White House Easter Egg Hunt. I also love alternatives to mainstream anything. But this ? I don't know if I can get on board with kids hunting for fake cluster bombs, just to make a 'statement'. It's like giving your kid coal for Christmas because the President's been a bad boy this year. The organizer says this is primarily supposed to be funny, but if I were a kid, finding an Easter egg with no candy and the theoretical ability to kill me, I wouldn't be laughing. I'd probably end up scared of rabbits for the rest of my life, too. However, I do find some of the other aspects of this event laugh-out-loud awesome: The event, which runs from 8 a.m. until 2 p.m., the same hours as the White House Easter Egg Roll, will include a search for weapons of mass destruction for the adults. "They'll all come back looking confused five minutes later, saying they couldn't find anything," Hennessey said. Anothe...

I was at a dinner party tonight where I talked to a Washington Post reporter who told me that the Post gathered all its employees together to tell them that its going to be placing more of its resources in its online edition. Which, really, should come as no surprise to anyone who has payed any attention to the media landscape in the last five years. But hey, it's a scoop. Also, they're planning to eventually offer the online content formatted like the paper edition, meaning you'll be able to 'page through' the paper like you would a traditional newspaper. The younger people in the room didn't find this as exciting as the older generation, seeing as we're already used to 'browsing' hypertext.

I had a whole big post here about grassroots organizing and the web, using knitters as an example, but dude: One Yarn Harlot post = Hundreds of knitters invading Manhattan. Knitters on the Today Show . Do not mock us.

I've been giving myself a little Web 2.0 tutorial this morning, and ran across this video . Pretty cool, both content-wise and aesthetically. Not earth-shattering, but it did kinda make me go "yes! we are the web! we can change the world!" Kinda.

The Cluetrain Manifesto Maybe I'm just a sucker for anything that calls itself a 'manifesto,' but I can see myself having some really interesting conversations with some of my friends on this. I haven't read it all, but from the introduction: What if the real attraction of the Internet is not its cutting-edge bells and whistles, its jazzy interface or any of the advanced technology that underlies its pipes and wires? What if, instead, the attraction is an atavistic throwback to the prehistoric human fascination with telling tales? Five thousand years ago, the marketplace was the hub of civilization, a place to which traders returned from remote lands with exotic spices, silks, monkeys, parrots, jewels -- and fabulous stories. In many ways, the Internet more resembles an ancient bazaar than it fits the business models companies try to impose upon it. Millions have flocked to the Net in an incredibly short time, not because it was user-friendly -- it wasn’t -- but because...

This post is kind of a continuation on yesterdays's post, a meditation on the intersection between philosophy and business. Blogs and marketing Another Gaping Void blog entry that seems perfectly suited for me and the other PC students. A little late for our 'corporate blog' assignment, but god, does it make me want to get out there in the real world. Basically, I want to figure out what job I have to get so that I can hang out with people like Hugh MacLeod but not have to make pitch calls. Making pitch calls is the third circle of hell. The fifth through seventh circles? Again, I refer to Hugh:

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we've reached the flustered-and-idealistic-grad-student-comes-face-to-face-with-impending-graduation- and-the-real-world phase of the year. I found this entry, A Corporate Whole in Philadelphia , a few weeks ago on Daily Kos. It reminded me of two things. The first was a Halloween party my senior year of college where a recent graduate came dressed entirely in white and red (including striped socks), and whenever someone approached her, pulled a Target job application out of her pocket and announced cheerily, "Hi! I'm a Corporate Whore! Would you like to work for Target?" It turns out that this formerly radical lesbian, though still a lesbian, was not so radical anymore, and was actually loving her job as a computer tech at Target headquarters. She'd come to terms with it, and could laugh at it. Still the best Halloween costume I've seen in awhile. The second was in a planning meeting for the annual May Day Parade in Minneapolis. The...

I feel like my last few posts have gotten a bit off-topic--I intend for this blog to be mainly about communicating, not just about myself. Anyhoo... For my marketing friends (I still don't know if I include myself here) I've been meaning to mention the Gaping Void blog for awhile. It's the blog of a London-based marketing guy. It's worth checking out just for his business-card cartoons, but he also links to a lot of cutting-edge web-based marketing people. And I think it's about time for my inevitable monthly link to Framing Science . I think I actually shouted out loud when I saw the Sports Illustrated cover on global warming. Awesome. If there's one communications thing that bothers me, it's preaching to the choir about music, and this most certainly is not. In any sense of that awkward metaphor.

Actually, after reading this catchism on Comedism , posted on Daily Kos , I realized that my family has been pretty evangelical Comedists my entire life: The basic beliefs of Comedism are not that different from other religions. Life is fleeting and a test for the hereafter. Like the Buddhists, we believe that on Earth you strive for a state of bodilessness . You can foresee this nirvana in the sort of full out belly laugh that you get from a really good joke. When you laugh so hard that your spirit is ultimately joyful, but your sides ache, you can't breathe, you roll around on the floor unable to stand, you realize that it is the humorous soul and not the things of the body that are important. We believe that the key to acting well is understanding the nature of the joke. Jokes have two parts, a set up in which a normal situation you think you understand is sketched...and then the punchline that forces you radically rethink how you understood the world of the set up...The hu...