Fortunately, they got the tone right, too:

Go ahead and bellyache about blogs. But you cannot afford to close your eyes to them, because they’re simply the most explosive outbreak in the information world since the Internet itself. And they’re going to shake up just about every business — including yours. It doesn’t matter whether you’re shipping paper clips, pork bellies, or videos of Britney in a bikini, blogs are a phenomenon that you cannot ignore, postpone, or delegate. Given the changes barreling down upon us, blogs are not a business elective. They’re a prerequisite.

Note the first person.

A related (although much more in depth) read is Tom Coates’ essay on the mass amateurization of everything:

…flexibility of publishing creates a fluid and living form of self-representation, the ‘homepage (as a place)’ has become the ‘weblog (as a person)’ that can articulate a voice. And when there are a multiplicity of voices in space, then the possibility arises of conversations. And where there is conversation there is the sharing of information. And conversation about what? Well everything from music and movies and animation and medical information. Weblogs are becoming the bridge between the individual and the community in cyberspace …

For PR, that means a serious shift in voice is coming, because PR should be the bridge between the business and the community. And the community is starting to filter out messages that don’t sound how people talk:

Translation From PR-Speak to English of Selected Portions of Adobe’s ‘FAQ’ Regarding Their Acquisition of Macromedia

[QUESTION] Do you anticipate a reduction in force as a result of this transaction?

[ADOBE] When two successful growing companies join together, the result is a combined organization that creates new and exciting opportunities. The combination will lead to powerful new areas of innovation, new products and solutions, and an acceleration of our respective growth agendas. At the same time, there will be some duplication of employee functions between the two companies, and upon the close of the transaction, we anticipate some level of reduction in force. While we anticipate the integration team will identify opportunities for cost savings, the primary motivation for this acquisition is to continue to expand and grow our businesses into new markets.

[TRANSLATION] Yes.

via John Gruber at Daring Fireball

Obviously, a large merger presents some challenges for the PR professional, especially when it comes to talking about job losses. But what if you have an audience that doesn’t want to hear you obfuscate? And what if they react somewhat sarcastically (like John did, or worse) when you do?

It places a much higher burden on the communicator – you have to speak clearly, personally, and honestly or risk offending an audience that has the power to make itself heard (look at who’s linking to John’s PR send-up.)

In lieu of a light, meaningless story about some trivial aspect of my life, I’d thought I’d treat you to something more substantial. I don’t claim to be knowledgable about anything, but I am quick to use new technology to help do the things I want to do, so here’s some of what I know:

• There are tools out there that will help you and tools that won’t.
  • Example; you wish to know about the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, a small district in far eastern Russia founded in 1928 as a place for the Soviet Union’s Jews. A Google search will turn up plenty of good information. You are looking for information about a specific, concrete topic, and search engines will be happy to oblige. Here you go, says Google. 414 results.
  • But what if you are looking for information about an abstract topic, something like “health care costs”? A Google search on that gives you 2,820,000 hits. Some will be useful, some won’t, and it looks like you’re in for some major sifting. Blleaggh!!, says Google, spewing vomit all over.
• Now, you can probably refine that Google search (here’s a good guide to getting better results out of the vomit pool), but that doesn’t solve the basic problem; you’re looking for a different kind of information than Google provides. You don’t want to know facts and figures and statistics about “health care costs” (the way you did about the Jewish Oblast). You want to find someone who knows a lot about health care and ask them, “Hey, why are health care costs so high?” This is a very different kind of search.
  • You want human information on an abstract topic. This doesn’t come from web pages, it comes from people. So you need to find someone who knows what you want to know, and ask them (or at least listen to what they’re saying).
  • Fortunately, it’s very easy these days for people to say things on the internet. So the chances are pretty good that there’s a health care expert out there producing content about the health care industry (and probably about health care costs, too). Hey, look, there’s one now!
• Sometimes you’re not searching for facts, you’re searching for sources.
  • You can’t go to Google and say, “Find me someone who I can trust and is smart about health care issues.” But, with a little digging, you can go through RSS feeds, evaluate the competence and authority of the sources, and over time, develop a list of people you trust to inform you about that subject.
  • Bloglines is a good tool (here’s the part about using technology to help you). Sign up for an account (it’s free), and start subscribing to RSS feeds. Keep these in folders by category (like bookmarks) and check them daily (or hourly). When you want to research a new subject (like health care), set up a new folder for RSS feeds about health care. Then subscribe to as many health care feeds as you can find (here’s a start), so you can begin monitoring the subject and filtering out the feeds that you don’t trust or don’t find useful.
  • Use Blogline’s Clips and Blog features to save your research as you go. Every time you find a good post about the subject, clip it or blog it; then you’ll have a running record of your findings that you can easily share with people (like the person who’s paying you to find them).
  • Get a good browser: Firefox is my choice. Why? A good browser can increase your productivity online, especially when you’re doing information searches. Searching, by its nature, involves going off on tangents. There are many ways to get to what you’re looking for, and you never know which link will take you. In Internet Explorer, link open in the same window or in new windows. This means either you do a lot of ‘back’ clicking, or you have 27 windows open in your taskbar, with no idea what’s in each one.

    Tabbed browsing is a feature common to many decent brosers (i.e. not IE) which allows you to open links in tabs. That way, you can save the Google search you started from in one tab, and go off on tangents in new tabs within the same window.

    Firefox also has a ton of other features (like note-taking plugins and bookmarklets) that will make your time online more efficient.

  • Find the right search engine. It might not be Google. A9.com, Amazon’s new search site, takes web results from Google and combines them with statistics from Alexa, Search Inside the Book results from Amazon, and reference results from Guru Net.

The point isn’t that there’s just one, best way to find what you need, but that there is technology out there that can vastly improve your results and productivity. And that if you don’t experiment with all the different options, you may be missing something really useful.

When I started something called “New Media Journalism” was the buzzword, and it was always something that intrigued me. So when people asked me what I wanted to do, I’d say some combination of the Internet and journalism. But I distinctly remember having no clear idea what that meant.

Three years ago, New Media meant a newspaper with a Web site. It meant attempting to do something with streaming video. And it meant giving newspaper reporters digital video cameras and recorders. In essence, I thought New Media Journalism would mean figuring out ways for the traditional media to adopt all the new technologies that were becoming more and more commonplace.

That, it turns out, was only part of the equation, and the lesser part, at that.

The change in journalism has been much more profound than a simple adoption of new technologies. Instead, we have seen (and will continue to see) a major shift in the locus of mass communication. New technologies like cheap recording cameras and the Internet haven’t just made it easier for traditional media to reach their audience, they’ve made it possible for the audience to take control of the message.

The old idea of “feedback” was that a newspaper or TV new show would have a number where people could call and leave messages. Or an address people could write to. So, if you had something to say about what big media was doing, or if you just had something to say, you’d meekly send a message off to an ombudsman or public editor and wait and hope they’d print it. In the New Media age, journalist (and journalism students) properly imagined that feedback would be enhanced; that was a good thing. The Internet would allow us to get more opinions and responses from our readers and viewers.

So, how to do that? Well, an e-mail address! Interactive polls! Discussion boards! Look at all that great feedback coming…back.

But letting more people contact their newspaper’s ombudsman is not one of the great triumphant promises of the Internet. Happily, it had more in store for us than that.

After a while, people got sick of waiting and hoping. And they decided they didn’t want their “feedback” posted on a letters page of a newspaper, they wanted an even bigger audience. So they did something that, because of new technology, had become ridiculously easy; they started a Web site.

And that, I believe, has started a real transformation in what the word “journalism” means. Putting aside the question of which are more trustworthy, blogs or old news, there’s no question that blogs are producing at least as much (if not more) content as old news. That’s a staggering shift. On one hand you have hundreds of huge organizations with payrolls and facilities and trained professionals. On the other hand you have millions of individuals and small groups; most unpaid and untrained. And yet blogs can compete with traditional news media outlets in terms of the amount of information they are distributing.

How long before this change reaches the rest of the information market? How long before home-movies distributed compete with Hollywood for the eyes and ears of valuable consumers? How long before academic journals have to compete with academic blogs for control of that niche? What will be the first major discovery to be announced in a blog? Or has is already been announced?

No one was surprised by the information age; we knew it was coming. But what we didn’t realize was control of the world’s new most valuable resource would be distributed from the ground up.

Most of the people I work with are familiar with blogs to varying degrees. A few people regularly read at least one (Kos, Drudge, The Virtual Chase, etc.), but I don’t think anyone (besides me) has one. And beyond that, I don’t think there’s a good understanding or discussion of how our department (which does internal and external communications) is going to respond to the unavoidable rise to prominence blogs have recently enjoyed. I don’t have the answer to that, nor do I think does anybody in the PR/communications/advertising/journalism world. But blogs have revolutionized the way people communicate, and that change is something that can’t be denied or ignored.

So, to begin with, let me contradict myself. Blogs are not what has revolutionized the way we communicate. That revolution began long ago, and it’s origins can be traced back as far as you car to look (TV, radio, telegraph, etc.). But, essentially, it’s the Internet that has revolutionized communication. Everybody has always known this, and always known it would (even back when I owned my first modem for the Mac it was called “Global Village” an allusion to Marshall McLuhan’s theories of modern, global communication).

It’s popular right now to say that blogs are something new and different. Bloggers, in particular, like to set rules about what is and is not a blog. Some say it’s only a blog if it’s updated frequently; others say if there’s any editorial oversight, it’s not a blog. I disagree.

A blog is just a Web site with a catchier name that doesn’t require weird capitalization. That’s it. Just a Web site. Those blog critics who complain about blogs being no better than the mid 90s AOL personal home pages with pictures of people’s cats and flashing GIFs are right. The early Internet was flooded with boring, ill-executed, pointless pages about people’s pets, their kids, their guitars, and even more dorky topics. But in my view, all those pages were blogs.

The only difference between the blogs we read today and the ones we didn’t read in 1995 is that today’s blogs are much, much easier to create. In 1995 creating a Web page (which I use interchangeably with ‘blog’) was a complicated ordeal. You had to know HTML (and most likely you actually had to hand code it, rather than using a WYSIWYG editor)). You had to some Web space, which was remarkably confusing and difficult to get a hold of, unless you were a) a student at a university or b) a geek (and I say geek in the most loving way).

Most people, alas, were either not students or not sufficiently geeks to be able to put together a Web page. So the few personal pages that did exist weren’t very good, or didn’t appeal to an audience, or both.

Today, everything about creating a Web page has changed. Sure, knowing a little HTML still helps, but so does knowing how to speak English in Miami. But the fact is, you can get by just fine without it. Web space, which used to be not only expensive but also confusing (the DNS server’s connected to the … domain name!) is now free and easy. Blogger or a host of other, um, hosting services, will just give it to you. In fact, they’re practically begging to give away Web space. If you want fancier duds (like your own domain name and no ads) you’ll have to shell out a few bucks, but I literally mean a few bucks (my hosting service, Bloghosts, provides excellent support, a great administrative interface, a bunch of email addresses, and 100 megabytes of space for about $3 a month).

So now, setting up a Web site where you can post pictures of your cat, stories about your cat, and even audio clips of your cat is FREE, and it takes just minutes. So, of course, there are a million blogs/websites about people’s cats, and nobody reads them, and nobody updates them, and they are a waste of space and time and even the words I using to write about them.

BUT! But, ever since publishing content on the Internet became easy and free and fast, the cat sites have been joined by hundreds of thousands of sites published by people with real, expert knowledge and honest opinions about what they are writing. Lawyers, doctors, politicians, writers, PR people, small business owners, airplane enthusiasts, cartography geeks. They’re all out there creating good, useful content on a regular basis. People who ten years ago were holed up in their basement designing dot-matrix printers out of Lego’s are now posting their design specs online. You can debate the usefulness of a dot-matrix printer made of Lego’s that uses chocolate for ink, but you can’t argue that it isn’t interesting. And I firmly believe it’s better to have that knowledge out in the open where it can be shared and revised and improved upon, than to have it trapped in some brilliant geek chocolate-lover’s mind.

It turned out that the Internet was not about technology or computers; it was about publishing. It was the next logical step in a series of refinements to human mass communication that has been in the works since Guttenberg pressed the first “In the beginning” into his first bible. Reaching a mass audience (or, in my case, a small but devoted (I hope) audience) is no longer a capacity reserved for those with power or money or very, very loud voices. Creating a Web site is no longer the exclusive domain of geeks and nerds and computer geeks (wait, did I say geeks already?). Anyone can do create one, we just call them blogs instead of Web sites.

Combine that with the power of RSS (which is just a way of standardizing the content on these blogs/websites so that they can be more easily read, searched and republished) and you’ve got an ever expanding, incredibly diverse, and widely accessible representation of humanity’s collective knowledge. If you learn to search it, filter out the good stuff from the bad, and monitor it for changing trends and currents, and your own consciousness becomes vastly enriched and augmented.

The next step, then, is not only to feed from the great pool of human knowledge which is accumulating on the Internet, but to contribute to it. It’s your way of getting your message out there, of communicating it to people who very likely not only are interested in hearing it, but also probably searched to find something exactly like it. I keep telling my uncle, who knows a lot about wine, that he should start a blog/website about that frosty beverage. He could help inform people that wine is not meant to be frosty when consumed, and that most likely those who call wine a frosty beverage are confusing it with beer, which is a malt alcohol and has not at all the same flavor or appearance as wine. Idiot.

My dad (although I don’t like to admit it) is something of an expert in the field of medicine and medical education. I’m sure there are hundreds of people out there who would love to read what he has to say about health insurance, teaching hospitals, residency programs and the like.

I could go on and on, but the point is, everybody’s an expert on something. And even those who aren’t (like me) are still qualified to write about whatever interests them. Because after all, if it’s interesting to you, it’s certain to be interesting to someone else, too.

Unless it’s about your cat. There’s just no audience for sites about cats anymore. None.

This week was Felicia Rashad, the actress played by New York attorney Claire Huxtable. She likes the botanical gardens in Manhattan; it’s her way of getting in touch with nature, which she says is her greatest inspiration. Sounds good to me, except that communing with nature in the middle of Manhattan is like looking for classical music at Wal-Mart. Plus, she’s got money, Cliff’s a doctor, they can afford a vacation. Oh, right, I forgot, can’t leave Rudy at home with LeoTheo, he’ll probably have an out-of-control party. Pbbbth, beeep, bap!

So, NPR’s been doing this for weeks now. Another creative space was a barn, filled with odd knick-knacks and eccentricities. A coffee shop, a library, a McDonald’s. All perfectly interesting, stimulating choices. Of course, you kind of get the feeling that a truly, brilliantly creative person wouldn’t be particular about where they create. In a way, having a special place for being creative seems childish. Like having a special hat you use to think about difficult things.

But, childish or not, ask anybody who writes, makes music, paints or does anything else that requires both concentration and imagination, and you’ll probably find that there’s a certain place where they like to do it best.

Here’s one of mine:

There is a hairline crack, fine as floss, running down the center of this room. From the ceiling, through the darkness, all the way to my computer. At the end of the tiny yellow string is what appears to be an albino spider. He’s making a move towards my computer, which sits on my lap, because it is a laptop computer. Makes sense.

This is the front porch, the place I go when a) I want to commune with nature, Felicia Rashad-style, or b) my roommates are communing with the PlayStation 2. There’s a bench-swing covered in cheap floor mats I got at Home Depot for $2 a piece. There’s a cold glass of water on the windowsill to my left where it is accompanied, sometimes, by a cookie. Mint Milano, chocolate chip, etc.

Today the water came stag. The cookies are inside on the dining room table urging me to hurry up.

Besides the spider, who, truth be told, I’ve never seen around here before, there is an ivy vine which has for some time been growing in through a crack in the window. It thinks it’s people. I’m already doing all I can to grow plants inside, so I don’t mind it, although I wish it’d use the door. But that’s ivy for ya’.

The view from here is residential. Three streetlights and their smooth, night-colored street. Across it there is a big elm tree which I call Sideshow Bob because of its uncanny resemblance (in both appearance and personality) to the Simpsons’ number two villain. On my side of the street is a huge oak which I call The Oak That Nearly Smashed My House. Or just Smashy.

And as if all these things were not inspiration enough, for the past two nights there has been a disgusting slug/beetle perched at the top of the concrete steps, sunning itself in the yellow electrical glow. I wanted to smash him yesterday but I thought better of it and today I’m glad I didn’t; he hasn’t moved an inch. He appears to be hibernating in plain sight in the middle of a busy thoroughfare (our sidewalk), which makes him the stupidest little monstrosity I’ve ever encountered. But he’s real charming about it, so I like him.

I don’t know how long he will stay there. But neither he nor I can stay out here that much longer (lows in the 40s forecast later this week). August is draining away, down a funnel of drama, and soon coming out to the porch to write will be like going to the Arctic Ocean to swim.

But for now it’s the best room in the house. Crickets chirp their love songs. The trees breathe in great heaving sighs. A silly beetle sleeps in danger’s path. Now and then a car goes by.

Yep. That’s right. Hear those loud booms? Those are the pillars of humanity crumbling. Well, I hope insurance covers it, because come this Friday, July 30, I’m done.

FOR ONE WEEK! Hahahahahahahhahahahahhahah!

Ahahahahahahaha!

Ha!

Sigh. Whew.

Next week I’m on vacation. Up north, as we say here in Minnesota (although to most people the whole state is ‘up north’). We’ll be staying just 10 minutes south of the Canadian border in a cabin right on Lake Superior. At night you can hear the big lake’s little waves lapping at the smooth-rocked shore. That, and the sound of Canadians, lots and lots of Canadians, just minutes away.

Amazing how their voices carry.

Have you ever thought how weird it is that I, a Jew of eastern European descent, son of Argentines, now feel totally at home vacationing in the northern Minnesota hinterland? Sure you have. Can you imagine seeing a born-and-bred northern Minnesotan talking it up with the locals in Rio, wearing one of those scant thong-bottom swimming suits? If you can, I salute your healthy imagination.

But come on, have you been to Minnesota? Thongs?

Anyway, I anticipate a relaxing week, lots of painfully cold, wonderful swimming in the biggest lake in oh-I-don’t-remember-the-statistic-but-it’s-pretty-huge. Should be real pretty up ‘dere, you ‘betcha. As long as the bugs aren’t too bad (they can be a problem, you know).

My big dilemma has been whether I should bring my computer with (if only all the world had such dilemmas). On one hand, I just want to relax and forget about any obligations. On the other hand, I’m terrified that if I stop posting for a week, I’ll never be able to start again.

You see, writing is like riding a bike; you never forget how. But coming up with ideas of what to write about is very different. The less you write, the harder it is to think of something to write about (at least for me). And already the hardest part of my week is coming up with things to write about every day (the second hardest part is getting to bathroom in the morning, but I’ve already covered that).

If I don’t keep writing while I’m on vacation, it’s going to be hell getting back into it when I get back. So I’m pretty sure I’m going to bring my laptop along.

Of course, by that reasoning, I’ll never be able to stop writing, which is a scary thought. I mean, what if I wanted to stop? Maybe there’s some kind of rehab therapy for writers who want to quit…

… sure there is, it’s called TV. Preferably cable TV.

Of which there is none where I’m going. The cabin has a TV, but it only picks up one channel, and it picks it up like floss with a chopstick. If I ever quit writing, it’s not going to be next week.

So, if you only read the first and last paragraphs of this, here’s what you got:
1) I am an arrogant egotist and I’m going to quit writing.
2) I’m not going to quit writing and I don’t know how to floss. Or use chopsticks.

All in all, a pretty accurate description of what’s going on in my life. The other, shorter way of saying all that goes like this: On vacation next week. Up north. No posting.

Writing is like that for me. I can\’t write if there are people around, and I especially can\’t write if they\’re making noise. I know that sounds prissy. Eww, what will I do? All this commotion!

I know a real writer, one of those newspaper guys with the \”Press\” hats, would scoff at my fastidiousness. Those people write their stories on napkins with one hand and fend off attackers with the other. By \”fend off\” I mean \”swordfight.\”

I\’m sorry. I\’ll never be a real journalist. Or swashbuckler.

But I suspect those writers who say they can write anywhere aren\’t being fully honest. Every writer has some trigger, some condition that loosens up the keys. Some people like to write in the morning, others (like me) at night. Some people like music, others like alcohol.

Wait, did I say alcohol? Sorry, I meant LOTS of alcohol.

What? You never heard of Ernest Hemingway? Read \”The Sun Also Rises\”; the plot is just there to fill space between the drinking. And if the characters are drinking, you know damned well what the author was doing. Eh? Ehhh?

Writing, that\’s what! Ernest Hemingway was writing when he wrote \”The Sun Also Rises\”! Heh heh. OK, all you libel attorneys go away now.

Lately it occurs to me that almost everything I write on this site is fodder for the cannons of jurisprudence, and before long I\’m going to be bankrupt and in prison, writing funny anecdotes on the shower walls with soap. So, in light of that, I\’m going to include a legal disclaimer that says if you\’re reading this you\’ve waived the right to sue me for any reason. There. That was the disclaimer. Funny how you can\’t even read the disclaimer without waiving your rights. Laws are funny.

You know what else is funny? Accidentally giving everyone who ever reads this post the impression that I\’m a lonely, paranoid drunk. Not that I\’m not a lonely, paranoid drunk. I just don\’t want to give that impression.

Speaking of lonely paranoid writers (there I go with the libel again), Lileks had a good piece yesterday fisking Michael Moore\’s LA Times Op-Ed.

My point in linking to this stuff (or in pointing out why I thought the 42% vacation figure was misleading) is not to suggest everything Michael Moore says is invalid. And I don\’t expect anyone who loves Moore or Fahrenheit 911 to be convinced by Lileks\’ comments or anyone else\’s.

Many people will go on agreeing with the opinions Moore expresses in F-911 regardless of any factual or logical flaws in the argument. And that\’s fine. But, as Lileks argues, that seems like a matter of faith:

Believing in Bush’s perfidy gives some people the same comfort and emotional nourishment others get from believing in Jesus. It validates them, cements their view of the world…

Pivotal word: some. Others recognize Moore\’s arguments for what they are – propagandist and often incoherent – but continue believing in Bush\’s perfidy. And they justify their belief not by faith, as Moore would have them do, but by reason.

I keep mentioning Moore\’s failings because I\’d like to see more of the second kind of Bush critics, and less of the first.

Except that I wasn\’t awake. So the best I could have done was turn on my computer in my sleep, and write the post in my dream. Which I knew, even then, was a waste of time, since it would be gone when I woke up.

No matter how great this idea was in the dream, it wouldn\’t have looked like much in the morning. I bet it was something along the lines of: \”Ooooh, I know, I\’ll write a post about monkeys! And how they\’re funny and stuff!?\”

I\’m not terribly depressed that I lost it. Still, I get the feeling that writing a boring post about monkeys is better than writing a boring post about dreaming about writing about monkeys.

Speaking of monkeys (now there\’s an underused transition): I was going to write a thrilling comic essay about bananas today. But then I thought, \”You know what, the country is mourning the death of my childhood president; people don\’t want to read about bananas.\” So, even though it\’s written and ready to post, I\’m holding it till next week. Out of respect.

OK, fine. I stayed up late watching the Pistons embarrass the Lakers. Out of respect?

My brother graduated from elementary school Wednesday. It makes me remember my own elementary-school graduation, and how middle school seemed like a giant step toward adulthood. So much so that I refused to refer to it as anything but \”Junior High\”.

In the end, the only real difference between junior high and what came before it was the noticeable lack of recess. They take it away in 7th grade, and they never give it back. And for that I am still bitter.

Anyway, I\’m glad he\’s done with it. Now it\’s on to stiff-legged slow-dancing and one-shoulder-strap backpack-wearing.

My advice? Sling it low, brother. Sling it low.

This week was crap*, both in terms of word count and quality. This is the beginning of my fifth month of daily blogging (although it\’s not really blogging, since I usually just publish one long post a day). There are now 126 posts in the database, and if you figure each one is about 250 words, I\’ve got over 30,000 words on this thing already.

Now, I don\’t mention this just to toot my own horn, but to point out how hard it is to come up with things to write about when your idea tank is about 30,000 words short of full.

No excuse, obviously, since what I\’m supposed to be is some kind of writer. I should be writing 30,000 words a week, like Stephen King. But I don\’t have his geeky glasses or freakish imagination.

Every so often, there will be a week like this one, where it\’s clear that just getting two sentences posted a day was a struggle equal in scope and unpleasantness as getting the guy who plays Barney out of his costume after a promotional appearance at the zoo.

Next week, I\’m told, will be better, with funnier, longer, more interesting posts. This is not a promise, but a mysterious prediction. You can help make it come true by sending me interesting links, questions, requests, and comments to write about.

And I promise to quit copping out on endings by using glib, meaningless internal references.

* Sorry about the language, but that\’s really the only word that describes it. Kiddies, avert your eyes. Wait, if you\’re reading this it\’s too late for that. Crap.