Saturday, April 26, 2008

PR Idea of the Week

Thinking that anyone cares about your witty thoughts on a blog is one level of vanity, but thinking that anyone cares about your moment to moment activities is an incomprehensible level of self-importance. Or so I thought.

Turns out, using
Twitter to share 140 characters of your up-to-the-minute thoughts and observations, is part of daily life not just for tweens but for savvy urbanites and even journalists.

CNN is now reporting that


James Karl Buck helped free himself from an Egyptian jail with a one-word blog post from his cell phone.

The one word: arrested.

I am not on Twitter and I think about the challenge I might have in sharing my life with others in the constraints of a tiny cell phone screen, let alone in one-word increments.

Twitter: Business trip to NYC, missing the kids

Real life: Schlepped to New York for one-day meeting; forgot it was “that time of the month;” had to call in-laws to check on kids since husband is busy giving haircuts to 150 small pigs

Twitter: Busy day on the farm

Real life: Loading five trailer-loads of pigs for our auction at local fairgrounds; answering phone calls from other farmers who want to talk to husband; consoling the two and four-year-old who are left behind; gathering ancient laptop, dot matrix printer, notepads and pens to clerk the sale; refereeing fight between two and four-year-old

Twitter: House is a mess

Real life: Completely out of trash bags; husband has deposited rank sweatshirt and gloves in kitchen; pile of shoes and boots by back door now taller than two-year-old; muddy/manure footprints lead to refrigerator; dining room table covered with school papers

Someday, when blogging becomes as passé as email, we’ll all have moved on to Twitter-ing. I hope the cell phones are ready.

Saturday, April 19, 2008

He was RIGHT!

I promised my husband I would blog about this, because he wants the world to know HE TOTALLY CALLED IT.

About 5:30 a.m. Friday morning I awoke to hear my husband saying, "Are you doing that?" The bed was wiggling and the door knob was knocking up and down.

No. I'm not doing anything.

The whole house is shaking. I think it's an earthquake.

It's not an earthquake. Maybe we're being haunted.

He turns to go back to sleep.

Me: If the house is shaking, don't you think that warrants some investigation! I'm thinking that the water heater probably just exploded.

He gets up and wanders around while I dream of Richter scales and broken windows.

Turns out we DID have an earthquake (yes, he called it). There was no damage but that didn't stop the local media from covering it like we just discovered we're getting ready to split from West Virginia.

Friday, April 18, 2008

Swine Lecture Series - The Secret Code of Farmers

Due to the hugely positive response to Pigs 101 [actually, no one said anything, but I'm sure you liked it], we are continuing our agri-cultural offering in what we're calling the "Swine Lecture Series." Our first talk focuses on exposing the secret code that pig farmers have been using for generations to communicate among themselves. This lecture will give you a behind-the-scenes look at their world. Enjoy.

It's a little known fact that farmers have secret ways of communicating, small code phrases that only they can decipher--until now. For instance the honey wagon is not actually a carrier of sweet nectar, it is a tanker full of the foulest liquid manure. The fertilizer truck does not come to help your garden grow, it comes to pick up the livestock that didn't make it through the winter.

But only hog farmers have more detailed, numerical codes; codes that Dan Brown would envy. Since I have infiltrated their world to study them intensely, I will share their most interesting and secretive code, known only to certified swine operators and eager 4-H kids as ear-notching.

The genius of this code is that it is hidden in plain site, right on the pigs. See if you can detect a secret code in this picture.

Oh, clearly the farmer is trying to tell his fellow swine enthusiasts that this pig was the 6th pig to be born in litter number 14. How did I do that? Well, it's simple, the two hunks out of his left ear (his left), each mean 3, so you add two notches to get 6. On the other ear, the code is deciphered as two 1s, a 3 and a 9 = 14. Got that?

Basically, the ear is sectioned off and taking a hunk out of the ear on that section correlates to a number. My husband is proficient in this code, which is good, because if he took as long as I do to decipher, the squealing little pig in his hands would long have escaped before he could make the notches.

Why do this? It's like the bar code for hogs. Farmers use this code to know which pigs are related to which pigs--comes in handy during mating season. And they need these codes for conducting inventory, i.e. which little piggies went to market and which stayed home.
oh, huh? You're kidding?

Sorry for that interruption. My husband informs me that we are actually looking at the 2nd pig in the 86th litter. It appears that my understanding of the secret code is weak at best.
Or did they change it?

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

PR Idea of the Week

This week's PR highlight comes from the following company:

Founded in 1901, [this company] is dedicated to bringing innovative, performance-driven, value focused products to the marketplace.

Huh? You mean, you've never heard of them and their unique quest to bring products to the marketplace that are both innovative AND performance-driven. Sheesh. They're like my favorite marketplace source for, you know, innovative products that perform.

Turns out, they create bakeware solutions that enable domestic leaders to successfully create industry-leading nutrient results.

Bad boilerplate aside, they did host a nice event in NYC that included some cookies that gave me a sugar rush just reading the recipe. I will be making these!

Sunday, April 13, 2008

Dirty Jobs

Our six-year-old's favorite TV show is Dirty Jobs on the Discovery Channel. If you ever have the chance to watch the show where he works on a pig farm (not the one where he feeds Las Vegas leftovers to pigs), you'll know exactly what my husband does on a daily basis.

As a man who has an officially documented "dirty job," you'd think my husband would be pretty tough--and he is. He spends every day walking around with pig "poo" (to use Mike Rowe's word) stuck to his pants. When pigs give birth, he is the midwife, not hesitating to insert his bare arm into regions of the sow previously considered private.

He collects boar semen using a method I am not comfortable describing, even on the Internet. And should one of his charges pass on to "hog heaven," he again uses his bare hands to haul away the carcass.

So imagine my surprise when the man who oversees the birth of more than 400 beings a year was squeamish at the delivery of one little baby. Contemplate my shock when the man who regularly spends the day covered in poo, is coughing and gagging over a dirty diaper. Granted, our son was famous for his volcanic eruptions of outfit-ruining proportions.

It turns out he's not the only one with a dirty job. This leaves me to change diapers in the back of the minivan while he helpfully gags and holds a plastic bag at arms length. I get the fun task of bathing our daughter after she spreads poo all over herself and her crib. When puke hits the bedding at 3 a.m., I'm the one wadding it up and heading to the washing machine.

When we were first married, I got urinated on by a gilt at one of our pig auctions. Note: NEVER stand behind a female pig. My husband told me to buck up, and I stayed in my wet jeans all evening--even eating at Bob Evans. I really wish I would have reminded him of that the time our son managed to get poo on his father's shirt, pants and shoes while wearing a diaper.

It's a dirty job but someone's got to do it.

Thursday, April 10, 2008

(Bad) PR Idea of the Week

I swear, I was trying to get my PR mind out of the gutter. After covering vasectomies, then nipple piercings with this feature, I figured this week we could talk about something non-controversial--like Wal-Mart. But then I saw this and couldn't pass it up.

Those #$%$^%! lawyers. They are always making PR so much harder than it needs to be! Take the poor, poor PR people at Del Monte who are just trying to tell the world about their plans to feed dog bones to poor children.

Then the lawyers go and get involved and make them put those lovely (R) and TM marks on every third word. Copyright lawyers awake in cold sweats frequently after nightmares that their company's marks have become the next genericized word like thermos, popsicle, or frisbee.

The problem comes, of course, when your Milk-Bone(R) becomes Milk-BONER in the headline--after some evil email system strips out your special symbols.

I really feel bad for the poor earnest, clueless soul who worked so hard to craft this press release. And since I care, I have a request for them: please, please send us press releases about your other industry-leading, paradigm-breaking Del Monte foodstuff solutions--we see you also offer Meaty Bone(R).

Saturday, April 5, 2008

Happily Ever After

Last weekend, in a brief moment of remote control ownership, I tuned into basic cable and saw a very disturbing show called "Rich Bride, Poor Bride." I watched two episodes and didn't see what I would call a "poor" bride--although actually, after they blew their budgets, both brides probably did end up poor. One couple spent about $75,000. They talked her out of having live peacocks at the reception.

That makes me think about my own much simpler but very nice-for-Farmersville wedding over a decade ago. In many ways it was a disaster.

We were engaged for a year and a half; we had plenty of time to plan but fates conspired against us.

By the time we got to the week of the wedding, we had buried two people on the guest list and paid our respects to a distant uncle. One of the people we lost was my husband's grandfather who died Monday, we had visitation Wednesday, funeral Thursday, rehearsal dinner Friday, wedding Saturday. How his grandmother handled it is beyond me.

On a lighter note, there were plenty of other problems awaiting the bride. My first-ever manicure was cancelled at the last minute, leaving me no time or energy to reschedule. The day of the wedding my hairstylist stood me up. Luckily, this was small town America and my mother tracked down the owner of the shop who came in with shaking hands to work on my hair--and she still charged us.

My husband's uncle who hadn't lived here for decades got in his head that he knew exactly where the church was. When he showed up at the Methodist church in town (instead of the Presbyterian church in the country), he did what any small town America person would do. He stopped a random person on the street and said he was looking for our wedding. And they knew all about it.

What else happened... Oh, yeah, the cake almost fell over when we cut it. And it POURED DOWN RAIN.

I had this vision that when we exited the church all our friends and family would be there showering us gently with a curtain of bubbles. Instead my new and blessedly devoted mother-in-law almost hyperventilated trying to create the same effect by herself when we got to the reception.

So a decade-plus later of wedded bliss we look back at the aftermath. If our wedding was a movie, there would be the voice over at the end that tells you what happened to all the players afterword:
- The cake lady closed shop
- The hairstylist left and formed a new shop--and she had the nerve to call and ask if I would move with her
- The photographer later botched a wedding, harassed the bride, and ended being criminally charged
- The reception hall is now closed and slated for demolition
- The DJ went back to his day job as a barber
- My brother got married on the same weekend a few years later and it POURED DOWN RAIN.

Wednesday, April 2, 2008

Pigs 101

If I just wanted to phone it in, I could post adorable photos of pigs, give them a cute caption like, "I can has pork chop!" and call it a night. But this is a FULL SERVICE BLOG, run by a professional communicator. So there will be a message.


Welcome class to Pigs 101. You'll note in your syllabus that we'll be covering race, gender issues, reproductive culture, and species anatomical priorities.

I. Race
Note how the little Hampshire piglet, is devoted to his Yorkshire "step-mother." Pigs will take on the offspring of other mothers without regard to breed. I guess if you weigh 400 pounds and have six kids, you think, "what's one more."


II. Gender
Female swine are called gilts when young and sows once they have their first litter. Males are boars and barrows if/when they lose their "manhood." Your bacon and ham comes from barrows and gilts who are raised for six months to a weight of around 270 pounds.


III. Mating
It only takes one boar to mate with many sows and gilts. In many cases, the boar and his mate never meet--his contribution arrives in a clear bottle, delivered overnight by UPS.



IV. Little Known Facts

Pigs don't like to be dirty. They will designate a part of the pen for pooping, a part for eating, and a part for sleeping. They have no ability to sweat or really cool themselves, so when they get hot, they look for crystal clear pools of water but since that's not usually available, they settle for mud.

Pigs are also very smart. Farmers are able to use complex feed bins and waterers that the pig has to "activate" with his nose in order to use. Cows and sheep are way too dumb to do that.

Pigs have pedigrees, like show dogs and horses. They have a registering body called the National Swine Registry, just like the AKC. My husband raises purebred hogs and most of his have registration papers.

In fact... ring, ring, ring

See you next semester for Pigs 201. We'll be learning about the farmer's secret pig code, the finer points of pig transportation, and how to distinguish between a pig that's worth $100K and one that's your next dinner.

Appointment Pooping

  NOTE: If you do not want to read about my healthy bowel movement, well too late you just did. I recently became you-better-get-a-colonosco...