I have to credit this to my brother, Jim.  This was the letter he sent to folks at his firm.  I did a short write through and sent to folks at my firm.

Dear Friends of the JuiceBar,

I grew up in New Orleans.

Our family had season tickets for the first years of Saints existence.  My dad took me to the very first Saints game in 1967.  I was 11 years old.  Tulane Stadium.  The Los Angeles Rams kicked off.  Rookie wide receiver John Gilliam caught the ball and ran the kickoff back for a touchdown!  A touchdown!  Our very first play.

Saints then went on to lose 13 to 27.  It has been downhill ever since.

I have been a Saints fan for over 40 years and experienced only 9 winning seasons.

Having the Saints in the SuperBowl is a surreal and a bit delirious.

As you also know, New Orleans citizens look for any reason to party.  The song Stand up and Get Crunk is being blasted out of speakers all across the ‘Nawlins’.  Regardless of tonight’s outcome, I encourage you to stream it, download it and play it on Sunday evening.  Don’t forget the volume. If you feel inspired, do a little dance with beer in hand in tribute to those who have suffered for so long.

Know that you’ll be joining every New Orleanian in the country – whether they’re in the Crescent City or not – whether the Saints win tonight or not …

“Laissez Les Bon Temps Roulez”.

Geaux Saints!

I have long maintained that the biggest asset of any individual, brand or organization is ALWAYS is also its greatest liability.

Really.  I really say this.  A lot.

Don’t believe me?  Just ask folks that work with me.

So now the rage in social media is “streaming.”  That is not what I’m doing now.  I’m blogging.  And now I find out that blogging is passe.  Twitter stream.  Facebook stream.  Posterous.

Experts say blogging is so … “slow and methodical.”‘

We don’t want that!  What we need today is “fast and chaotic.”

While fast and chaotic may indeed be a more accurate reflection of everyday life … allowing a constantly changing free exchange of thoughts and information … there’s always a dark side.

For a funny but insightful look at this dark side I strongly encourage you to read Ed Docx’s article Twittering Fools, in the Utne Reader, reprinted from Prospect.

Tired of the mindless commentary from ordinary people who have less knowledge and expertise about subjects than my three-year-old grandson, he writes:

I don’t care what Andy from Cheadle thinks about the Gaza Strip, the ice caps, Manchester City, or even Cheadle. Nobody cares. Nobody except Andy, and presumably he already knows. When I turn on the radio or the television, or when I open a book or a newspaper, what I want is an expert. I want insightful commentary. I want stylistic elegance. I want eloquence. I want uninterrupted expertise.

And that’s the dark side of all the social media wackiness out there.  I’d just as soon my life not be a Joycean stream of consciousness.  Given everything going on out there I’m getting more and more attracted to things being a bit slower, a bit more methodical.

“Streams”.  Stream this.  Stream that.

But you’ve got to ask … streams of what?

I work in a field that is awash with experts.  Indeed, seems there are more experts in what I do,  than people.

I’m talking about social media but I probably could be talking about anything.

Roderick Low posted a good summary of the dilemma (along with some good prescriptions) in which he cites the blog Broadstuff that noted given current growth projections …

“by 2012, we would have as many as 30 million ’social media experts’ plying their trade globally.”

Wow.  30 million experts.  That is a lot of experts.  I wonder who they will be working for.

In fact, based on what I see a good percentage of today’s experts don’t have clients.  What are we going to do with all these experts?

Which brings me the second area of job title explosion:  commentators.

With all the new media out there we’ve got more than you can shake a stick at.  Actually a lot of them you’d just as soon hit with a stick not just shake it at them.  But given the explosion of everyday commentators you’d only end up playing “whack-a-mole” (how is that for tortured stream of conscious imagery?)

Just one thing about those commentators.  A lot of them never really have had any direct experience in what they are commenting on.  This is particularly true in politics.  Have Rush Limbaugh or Keith Oberman ever run for office?  Ever worked in government?  Ever practiced constitutional law?  No but they sure can comment on it all.

Experts with no clients … commentators with no experience.

Here’s a suggestion.  We follow our brethren in sports.  Watch a football show.  Maybe one or two laymen but they are always teamed up with former coaches and players — that is, people who have actually had experience in doing what they are commenting on.

Experts who actually do work.  Commentators who actually know from experience what they are talking about.

What a concept.

There’s a nightmare in Haiti.  But it is not really a nightmare.  Because when you wake up it is still there.  And it gets worse.  It will be there tomorrow and the next day and the next.  Many people are trying to help.  But what happened quickly won’t be undone quickly.

That is the rub of life.  Disaster often strikes quickly.  Recovery always takes time.

Today amidst all the tragedy we celebrate the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr.

Why?

Because while he lived in the nightmare of segregation and prejudice, he also worked towards the dream of a world without it.

Because having the dream was only half the battle.  Keeping it.  Holding fast to it.  Making it part of who you are.  Incorporating it into your waking up and going to sleep.  Never letting go.  Never letting up.  Always standing firm even when people spurn and ridicule.

And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream.

It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.  I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of “interposition” and “nullification” — one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.  I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; “and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.”

Thank you Reverend King.

Now.

What’s your dream?

As folks who drink at the JuiceBar know, I write a lot about travel.

So here’s a travel story with a simple lesson.

It is amazing what happens when you are nice to people.  It is even more amazing when you go the extra mile and do something surprisingly pleasant.

The day started with a 4:30 am alarm from my BlackBerry.  I love my BlackBerry.  I hate my alarm.

I lay there thinking.  Can I stay in my bed?  Please?  God, it is early!  In my mind I sound like a 10-year-old.

By 5:15 I’m heading down the Dulles Toll Road ready to attack a day trip to Boston.  Leave at 6:30 am.  Grab a cab.  Make a 9 am meeting.  Break.  2 pm fly-by.  Head home on the 4:30 pm.  Able to make a meeting back in Northern Virginia at 7:30 pm.

The above is the reason I have not watched the movie Up in the Air.  The movie is way too close.

Slug through security.  People mover.  Gate B66.  And here is where things get interesting.

Flight delay.  Mechanical problems.

It is 6:15 and the agent is actually cheery.  Upbeat.  Moreover she’s open, honest and most of all accessible.  Next update at 7 pm.  Bing.  At 7 am she’s talking to me.  Next update at 7:30 am.  7:30 am comes and bing, she’s talking to me again.  Answering anybody’s questions.  More agents begin to cluster around the gate readying to move.  Decision made.  Next update will be at 8:30 and there’s a 9 am flight so let’s get everyone on to the 9 am flight.  Agents fan out.  There’s running through travelers like a California wildfire through Hollywood.  I timidly note to one agent that my meeting in Boston starts at 9 am.  So I don’t know if this whole flight is worth it.

He says to me, “Let me know what you decided and we’ll take care of you.”

Thirty minutes later, after a handful of emails and a couple of calls with my CEO, we pull the plug on the day trip.

I go back to a DIFFERENT agent and tell him my decision.  I’m so used to being abused, charged, and refused that I don’t even ask for a refund.

Turns out I didn’t have to.

“Oh, yes, Mr. Johnson.  My colleague mentioned that he talked to you.  Totally understand.  He already told me that we’re going to issue you a refund.  Should just take a minute.”

I love JetBlue – for today — because …

• They were nice.
• They were accessible.
• They did something that they didn’t have to do.
• In fact, they did something that others NEVER do.

I say that I love JetBlue today because I’m just as human (and fickle) as anyone else.  But if JetBlue continues to do this, they may be taking a lot of travel away from United.  At least from one traveler I know.

[ENDNOTE for anyone from JetBlue reading this.  It was the agents at Gate 66, flight 1250.  They were ALL great.  Please do something nice for them.]

Anyone reading this who knows me knows this:  I’m no prude.

I like to have a good time.  I’ve had more than my share of long lunches the The Palm.  I’ve had my late nights out.  I did my time at some of the most fast-paced and well-known agencies in Washington DC.    I’m a liberal Democrat for God’s sake.

So I’m no prude.

This all by explanation of my first experience with the show MadMen.

I’ve been in the communications business for 30 years.  MadMen was the show EVERYONE said I should watch.  They said it was a story that I’d relate to.  It was the archetypal lifestyle of people in our fast-paced business of creativity in a political, cunning, personal and some times tawdry business.  It was a “behind the scenes” portrayal.

As someone who has been around the block or two it was with particular interest that I watched the first two shows of the first season with my wife and daughter Saturday night.

I’m supposed to like this?  This is what people think is cool?  Fun?

It was pretty depressing to me.

There are NO redeemable characters.  All the men are misogynists.  All the women are whores.  All the clients are either idiots, sluts, or calculating sleezebags.

The protagonist — the creative “genius” — is a dour guy that spends a lot of time either drinking, smoking or shirtless in a lifeless, mechanical, and utterly amoral and loveless tryst.  Oh, and the shallowness of his relationship to his lover mirrors that of his relationship to his wife.

The “creative team” make college frat boys look like Mensa candidates.  They are sophmoric, stupid, brutish, and seemingly incapable of intelligent or ethical thought.

The female lead in the first two shows is a mousy secretary that, immediately after taking the job beds the drunken account executive (who is the chief rival to her boss ) the night after his bachelor party.  In show #2 she wonders openly to her other whore-like secretary friend why men think they have license to take liberties with women.  Even her savvyness is sleazy:  the first thing after getting the job it to get contraception, presumably so she can bed folks in the office.

And in between it all people smoke.  Men smoke in elevators.  Women smoke while pregnant.  Physicians smoke while performing an gynecological exam.  They smoke with children, in kitchens, in bedrooms, in offices, in bathrooms.

This is just in the first two shows.

I’m supposed to like this?

This is supposed to characterize the world I’ve spend half my life in?

This is me?

This is not intriguing.  This is not compelling.  This is not even entertaining.

It is embarrassing and depressing.

Maybe that is the point.

Happy New Year 2010 from the JuiceBar.

The close of the year is a season that defines the phrase … “well it is that time of year again!”  There’s the travel.  The dinners.  The family.  The gifts.  The visits.  The cards.  The calls.

But most of all, the changing of the calendars is one of resolutions and predictions.

Resolutions and predictions.  They define the word Sisyphean.

How many people have actually kept one or more New Year’s resolutions?

What?  You say you have?  Well God bless you.  You are the needle in the haystack, the exception that proves the rule, the lightening that struck twice.

Do us all a favor, won’t you?  How about commenting on this blog and providing some guidance on how that is actually done.  It will give you a chance to help someone.  And it will give all of us resolution weaklings a person to loath besides ourselves.

But enough about resolutions.  How about those predictions?

I’m always amazed at people’s predictions.  We laugh at Madame Soleil but invariably engage in the exact same kind of mindless speculation as the late astrologist and psychic.

And how many predictions have actually come true?  Based on my experience not many.  I confess to having succumbed to the Sirens of prediction in the past.  I spent mindless hours predicting all sorts of stuff.  Predicting is very seductive.  Who wouldn’t be attracted by the pull of being the secular prophet warning the huddled masses of the great works that God has in store for them?

How strong is the prediction impulse?  Well whenever I want to figure out the answer to questions like that I do what millions of other people do.    I “Google” it.

Google “predictions 2010″ and among the 8 million entries is the British newspaper The Telegraph predicting the rise of 3D television.  That doesn’t bode well for our house which still lacks a flat panel display, a DVR and Blue Ray.  There’s a ton of predictions by the media about the media.  Newsweek predicts that someone will die on a reality TV program.  I thought that actually had already happened but clearly I’m not current.  Then there were the predictions of Folio’s experts which included one from Paul Armstrong that “overall, the media will still continue to die, shrivel, morph, whatever—it no longer matters.”  I look closer and see that Armstrong’s Twitter handle is @themediaisdying.  Always good to predict something that you’ve already declared is happening.  The ReadWriteWeb predicts “the death of the login”.  I hope that includes the death of usernames and passwords.  Mark Drapeau predicts in O’Reilly Radar of something he calls “ubiquitous crude video content.”  I thought we already had that.  It is called “porn.”  And there were predictions about the economy.  According to the National Inflation Association a “huge crash in the U.S. dollar could occur at any time”.

I feel better now.

The Wall Street Journal’s predictions bordered on the religious when, in its tenth prediction (why are there always ten?) it boldly declares “the world will not end.”  Speaking of , even the Catholic Church got in the 2010 prediction business.  You’d think that they’d have enough on their hands in managing the book of Revelation.

Predictions.  Predictions.  Predictions.

So much time thinking about so many things that we have very little control over.

Here is my anticdote from year-end predictionitis.

We should spend as much time trying to figure out where WE are NOW as we spend on where OTHER people WILL BE in the future.  As Shakespear wrote (I think) “the only thing harder than diamonds is to know thyself.”  If we spent more time taking an honest inventory of where we are we’d be alot more equipped to know what things we need to do to get us where we want to be.

Reminds me of the great line …

Know how to make God laugh?

Tell him your plans.

Or tell him your predictions.

You know it is Christmas at the home of Jerry’s Juice Bar when …

Every chair is occupied and every space on the leather couch is taken.  And somewhere amidst the chairs and couches someone has dozed off … usually on the leather couch.

There is a constant boiling of water for coffee, hum of the dishwasher readying for the next meal, and the sound of someone, somewhere taking a shower, and the picking up of someone’s “stuff”.

Friendly but foreign animals roam from person to person searching for a handout or just a hand that will pet a forehead or scratch an ear.

There’s a mountain of paper waste, boxes, wrappings, turkey carcasses, tins and coffee grounds overflowing the sole garbage can in the back yard.

At any given time someone is sitting and reading, someone is on the computer, someone is watching television, someone is either going or preparing to go, and someone is coming back.

And me?

I get quiet.  I reflect.  I smile.  I wish for things that could be.  And am happy for things that are.

Merry Christmas to all.

I spend a lot of time in airports.  Not as much as George Clooney in “Up in the Air.”  I don’t like traveling as much as this fellow seems to and I find negotiating airports more of a pain-in-the ass than comforting.   But in a recent trip I toured through three major U.S. airports and two major European ones and was reminded of a curious difference between the two.

European airports list departures by time.  When are you leaving?  Look up on the board and scroll down for the time.  There it is.  Got a 9:45 am flight out of Berlin?  Just need to find those flights listed between 9:40 and 9:50 am.  It will be there somewhere in betwixt the flights to Cracaw and Geneva.

U.S. airports list departures by destination.  Where are you going?  Washington DC?  That’s easy.  Go to the end of the listings in the WXYZ space and find where you’re going and then work backwards for the time and gate.

The U.S. system makes a helluvalot more sense to me.  First, I ALWAYS know WHERE I’m going.  But there’s a lot of times I don’t quite remember when.  I can get confused about whether the flight is at 2:30 pm or 3:30 pm but I NEVER get confused about whether I’m going to Newark or Los Angeles.  Then there’s the issue of delayed flights.  You check in and they tell you that your flight is going to be an hour late.  Do you look for the ‘correct’ time or do you look for the revised time?

Very confusing.

I can only think that the European airports carried over the vestiges of the old train station arrival and departure boards.  You know.  Those huge mechanical panels that every minute do the “click-click-click” thing in which plates unfold from the middle to amazingly display a curious combination of yellow and white type on black that gives the latest listings of trains, cities, and gates.

Now it is a series of luminescent flat screen panels dangling from the roof … but the listing by time remains.

And I still can’t remember when that flight is supposed to leave.

Some time ago, psychologists discovered that “grump old men” are smarter than other old men.

Specifically, a report released several years ago suggested “that a disagreeable nature goes hand in hand with advanced vocabulary and general knowledge in old age,” the researchers write.

The older you get, the better you are if you are grumpy.

Welcome to my world.

that is why I’m fascinated with a new book by Barbara Ehrenreich entitled:  “Bright-Sided:  How the relentless promotion of positive thinking has undermined America.”

According to a review in the NYTimes, Ehrenriech claims that positive thinking is “just another way for the conservative, corporate culture to wring the most out of its workers.”

According to Robert Gathman in the Austin-American Statesman, “journalist Barbara Ehrenreich mounts a spirited attack on the American culture of positive thinking, arguing that the mass manufacture of feel-good palliatives, by encouraging sloppy reasoning, shortsighted habits and a curiously uncritical identification with the powers that be, is doing more harm than good.”

Feel-good stuff is sloppy.  No pain, no gain my friend!

The problem with happiness — we were guaranteed the right to pursue it in our constitution — is that it is a pretty shallow pool to swim in.

Whatever happened to pursuing truth, justice, peace?  Now there’s something worth living for.

I would have finished the above with “the American way” but that would lead us back to the happiness thing.

Be smart.  Be grumpy.

And have a happy day.