Talking to My Cats: 12-04-07

If you work for a good company – a company that is attractive, with a great sense of humor, and a nice personality – there's an excellent chance your company will be involved in an M&A sooner or later. M&A, boys and girls, stands for "mergers and acquisitions," the process in which two corporations meet, fall in love, get married, and live happily ever after.

These are always "win-win" situations.

Often, the larger company will gain market share by acquiring the smaller company's customer base. The smaller company gets to be part of a larger enterprise with more scale and more resources, allowing it to do things it could only dream of in the old days. The boards of directors and upper management from both companies will invariably reach an agreement that is in the best interest of all stockholders, customers, and employees, based on the highest ethical standards. It would never occur to them to try to enrich themselves.

Generally, the two companies will perfectly complement each other, with virtually no overlap – one being the yin to the other's yang. The strengths of one cancel out the weaknesses of the other. And vice versa.

Talking to My Cats: 11-27-07

There is no truth to the scurrilous charge that working in contemporary PR is in any way akin to Winston Smith's job in George Orwell's 1984. Smith worked in the Records office of The Ministry of Truth, rewriting the past. If a prominent member of the party fell out of favor, that individual became an "unperson" and all references to said unperson were expunged. This often required the deletion of him or her from any and all photographs. (If only Winston had had access to Photoshop.)

PR's task these days is often quite the opposite, the somewhat subtle task of rehabilitating past actions of key figures, revising the past to fit present objectives. This works particularly well with dead people who are, well, conveniently dead. No one except their heirs can contradict the virtuous new garments we weave around the departed to justify our agendas.

That's why all the Republican presidential candidates are trying to appear Reaganesque rather than Bushlike. By recasting Ronald Reagan through a distorted nostalgic lens that ignores certain awkward facts, they promise a return to a fondly recalled time that never actually was.

Talking to My Cats: 10-23-07

For those who whine about blogging transparency: My real name is Bruce Pilgrim. (You wouldn’t make up something like that.)

I'm in my mid-50's, having slogged through a long and extinguished career in PR, marketing, journalism, and idleness. I go about 180, roughly 6' tall, with poor hand-eye coordination, graying hair, and small flabby manboobs. (You wanted transparency, didn't you?)

Want more? I'm a secular humanist, male heterosexual mammal, liberal Democrat, tree-hugging proponent of socialized medicine, getting the hell out of Iraq ASAP, and increasing income taxes to get the budget back into some semblance of balance. I live outside of Cincinnati with my spouse and two cats. I drive a 2003 Taurus (because I can't afford a Prius.) I think Macs are better than PCs, and I sometimes wonder if there might be something to that astrology thing. (A barmaid once insisted on knowing my sign, and when I refuse to tell her, she said "You must be a Leo.)

Talking to My Cats: 10-2-07

Baghdad Bob advises PR types to "Blog, you fool, blog! Slam the competition under a fake name, obfuscate, plant rumors and innuendos." He's also says you can get cool bribes such as new Nikon cameras and speaking fees, plus there's assorted junkets to cutting edge conferences, seminars, and other circle jerks.

Blogging is not only way cool, it's fun. There are no rules! You don't need no steenking credentials, journalistic training, writing skills, or ethics. You can even skip spellcheck, which as we all know not only takes F-O-R-E-V-E-R, it’s also a stone drag on one's spontaneity.

Set up an account with Blogger, and within minutes you can beat your chest , whine, complain, and kvetch. You could be the next Matt Drudge! You're a commentator, a force to be reckoned with, and one of these days PR people will want to have relations with you! (Calm down, boy, not those kinds of relations. They just want to kiss your butt in exchange for mentioning their products.)

Time out for a brief interlude:

I really, really, really hate the word blog. This nasty little portmanteau, so the story goes, is a fusion of two words: web and log. In this wonderful wild world of Web 2.0, no one seems to take the time to consider quite serviceable words that were already available: online and journal. (Which likely would have been merged into onjourn or journline.)

The reason for choosing log instead of journal, I am sure, arose from some geek's Star Trek fantasy. ("Captain's Log: Stardate 112996. What's the deal with the Romulans? They're, like, violating the neutral zone again, and they are so off my friends list...")

The only things worse than the word blog are its many mindbloggling offshoots: vlog (video blog), splog (spamming blog), dlog (a blog about dogs, I think.) I'm pretty sure we'll soon see more variations on this lousy theme, including blogs about celebrities (agogblogs), forestry (bloglogs), amphibians (froglogs), wetlands (boglogs), and pornography (flogs). I must confess a certain fondness for a gulog, which Wikipedia defines as "a blog so dismal and depressing, it's as if it was written in a Soviet labor camp."

Now back to our regularly scheduled blather: