Sports Illustrated Keeps Up With the Times

Trying to Meet Your Expectations
I know my readers expect certain things from my blog and I do my best to deliver. For those of you who haven't figured it out yet, I try to include three separate items in each blog post. 

• Marketing/PR and affiliated IT tips/topics
• Interesting "puppet" news or items about ventriloquists
• A miscellaneous category that I just call "funny to me"

According to the most recent internet communication statistics, email newsletters and blogs lose readers for three primary reasons:

• Content doesn't match what the recipient signed up to receive.
• The timing of the emails or posts is too frequent or too infrequent.
• The recipient loses interest.

With those three things in mind, I will keep my posts to twice a week, the articles will continue to be brief and they will focus on the three subjects listed above. To date, only two people have unsubscribed to the blog, (so we can talk about them now) while I gain new subscribers every week. Apparently I'm staying ahead of the curve and the blog is growing in popularity. Thanks to all of you for reading and I hope you enjoy today's articles and states of undress. 

Increase Effectiveness of Company Communications
For generations people have been saying that laughter is good medicine. And now scientists say that great-grandma was right. We now know that laughter releases helpful goodies in our bodies which boost our immune systems. In fact, the therapeutic benefits of laughter are being harnessed by academia and the business community into laughter workshops and other formalized chuckle sessions. Get the workers laughing and you raise productivity.  (If that's the case, Dale must be the most productive person in the world because he hasn't stopped laughing since reading my request for a raise.)

So how can you harness humor and make it work for you? Here's a simple rule which - although not a universal panacea - can help you use humor without risk. "Use humor about situations, not people." People will usually identify with a situation. And when your audience identifies with what you write, you'll attract their attention and they'll take the time to read about it.

Of course the best thing to do is to call Brown & Martin, Inc. We use humor everyday. We have to. It's the only way we can work in this hellhole place.

Avenue Q

I'm going to see some of my puppet friends in Avenue Q at the Milwaukee Performing Arts Center in a couple of days. I first saw the Tony winning production on Broadway. What can I say about Avenue Q? It uses cute little puppets to address sex, drinking, surfing the net for porn and other adult subjects. And they accomplish this in hysterically funny ways. Warning ... there is full puppet nudity ... and more.  

  Although the program emphatically insists that no character in the musical is based on any character from Sesame Street, it's pretty easy to see through that bit of legal-side-stepping. You can change the names, the colors, the sexual orientation and the voices ... but it's still pretty easy to pick out take-offs of Bert, Ernie, Cookie Monster and others. If you haven't seen Avenue Q, you should. It's more than "funny." It's "memorably funny".  More details at http://www.avenueq.com/ 

Keeping Up With the Times
Thanks to our friend Gene Mueller at WTMJ Radio for pointing out to us that some people are raising the question: "Is the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition needed any more, now that we have the Internet?" (Warning: If you were offended by the naked puppet photo above, you probably shouldn't read any further.) Supposedly the web is rife with naked people doing unspeakable acts (at least, that's what I've been told). So do American men still wait breathlessly at their mailboxes every February waiting for the S-I swimsuit issue? Would anyone complain if Sports Illustrated did away with the tradition?

I, for one, have no problem with female swimsuits, the models in them, or S-I putting them in my mailbox. It's true that times change. But S-I seems to be changing right with them.

Marisa Miller who‘s been in the swimsuit issue for 7 consecutive years, finally made it onto the cover.  And what is her 2008 swimsuit made of? Paint! (I bet you're looking more closely at the photo now aren't you?) Marisa appeared on The Late Show with David Letterman last week, the day after she learned that her photo would be on the cover of S-I.  I think Dave was barely listening as he flipped through the pages of S-I asking Marisa what it was like to be shaved and painted. The interview isn't as funny as Dave's "Ventriloquist Week," but it's amusing ... even to a puppet. Click here to see it. http://www.cbs.com/latenight/lateshow/video_player/index/php/945838.phtml