Dearest Allison,

You are one fresh and original provider of marketing solutions. I’m excited and relieved that you have joined the twitter revolution and that you have a new tool with which to exercise your freshness/originality (freshinality?) and to provide valuable transparency about your marketing expertise. I’m honoured that you’ve followed me and I simply can’t wait to click through to your website and—oh, wait a sec… Hey, no harm, no foul Allison! I’m still interested in following you (admittedly because I can see cleavage in your profile photo). I’ll just read some of your recent tweets so that I can get a real sense of who you, and your fresh and original team, are—oh, wait a minute… You know what Allison, forget the silly foreplay. All good marketers know that there are perfectly good bots to do all of this personal feel good marketing stuff anyway. And that’s what I like about you; you know efficiency when you see it. In fact, I bet you’re too busy providing fresh and original marketing solutions to use these fresh and original marketing tools anyhow. Let’s just draft up a large contract and get started. At least you spelled Twitter right—oh, hold on a minute…

Truly yours from your new client,

Jay

Twexism :: The act of using twitter to make slurs against the opposite sex.

If I was Photoshop, I’d use the clone stamp tool to get rid of the odd zit.

Just launched a fun little project we did at Giant Ant Media to promote environmental activist Christopher Swain and the Timberland Earthkeepers program. Derek, the newest member of team ant made a great little microsite - DirtyForSwain.com - to compliment the video… or the other way around.

Recently a book which is pretty much all about me - How to Make Money with YouTube - took news stands by storm.

Really, all you need to know is on pages 25, 60, 90, 93, 111, 123, and 168 which is when I’m imparting deep wisdom about things like YouTube, and making money on it. As you can see from the glossary, I’m 7 times more important than Al Gore, Greenpeace and Google. And (not shown in the image) I can’t fail to mention that my company, Giant Ant Media is also twice as important as Google (a little company that you may have heard of which owns YouTube). In fact, right now we’re planning to buy Youtube outright from Google. I’m also thinking about running for President. I figure I’m about 7 times more likely to be elected than that Gore guy… if this is any indication.

If you pick up the book, you’ll learn secrets about how I was able to quit my job and sit back as the phat cheques roll in every few months. The snapshot below was taken right before I ran to the bank and bought like six cars or something. I don’t know, I lost track.

On a serious note, I’m flattered that Brad and Deb Schepp interviewed us for the book. They talked about us very graciously as an example of people that were able to start a business (Giant Ant Media) after a video (How to Shower: Men vs Women) did well on YouTube.

I wish them great success!

Two and a half years ago, on Labour day weekend, my roomate’s friend James came to visit. Just a year before James had beaten cancer which, just a year or two earlier, had taken his father. We had a great weekend - went to a Wolf Parade show at a little Kalamazoo, MI bar, threw a guitar off the roof one night… repeatedly, and made the long drive up into Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to go camping on Lake Superior.

On the way up we stopped for ice cream at a used car lot, drank Jack Daniels and ate fatty American treats to refresh our thirst.

I fell asleep some time after crossing the Mackinac Bridge - the one that was on my drivers license that traverses the straight between Lakes Michigan and Huron - and woke up as we drove through an immense cemetery full of a perfect grid of white headstones. I rubbed my eyes and, as they focused, I saw that it was just a clear cut full of sun-bleached stumps. There was something sad about the similarity. It was as though they had been planted in that perfect grid just so that they would look orderly when dead. They had perfectly scribed epitaphs on their sawed tops - decades of rings that told a story about each and every year that protected their core until it didn’t matter anymore. If we’d stopped the car we could have read about years of flood, years of drought, years of disease.

It got me thinking about James. We didn’t talk about, or even mention, cancer for the entire four days. I wondered if, on the inside, James had layers of rings in there somewhere that told the story.

In the end, it didn’t matter. We didn’t talk about his growth rings. Instead, we drank around the fire until it was a good idea to jump over it naked while others spat JD on the flame, and then slept and repeated. But I still wondered about his rings.

When Jess’ sister, Leila, decided to shave her head for cancer awareness recently, it automatically made me think of that weekend with James and the tree grave yard. And, because of that, it seemed like a cool thing to try to help her with.

Leila is shaving her head with Balding For Dollars on May 9th in order to raise money for families dealing with childhood Cancer… as a way of easing the severity of the growth rings that they will inevitably add.

Jess put a website together for her, and I made some videos to help her tell her story. If you feel compelled, please engage.