:-:-:-:-: Oops! This link appears broken. :-:-:-:-: [el-blog-de-clay-mcdaniel]

via BBC News Radio tonight, more than 100 Afghan women have SET THEMSELVES ON FIRE this year. In many cases, it is a fake kitchen fire or other domestic display of suicide by self-immolation as a way out of a particularly abusive relationship.

Holy crap, that is absolutely awful.

Are you ready, Paris Las Vegas senior management team? If you’re listening out there, I’m about to help add at least a half-million dollars to your annual bottom line, maybe more. It’s easy: all that it requires is one change to your Room Management Policy and a training session with your housekeeping staff.

Stop leaving the lights on in your unoccupied guest room bathrooms all day long.

Your “Conserve” cards in the rooms indicate that you want your guests’ help in saving water, energy, etc. But you’re cooking off electricity in every single room, in a few thousand rooms, every single day, most of the day, just so that a new guest has two seconds of extra light in the room hall upon entry.

Ridiculous, unnecessary policy – the Cost/Benefit Ratio on this policy is way way off.

[Your hallways are well-lit, people will be able to see their way into their rooms just fine. I assure you, no one cares, no one will notice, and if they do you'll hear about it at the front desk and you can change the gameplan for that guest in that room only for their stay.]

I don’t know what your electricity costs out here in Las Vegas, but for easy math let’s assume it’s a half dollar per day for 12 hours or so of electricity to power all those bathroom lightbulbs for no one:

$0.50 per day x 2900 rooms x 365 days = $529,000

You’re welcome. If you’d like to comp me a Suite for the opening of March Madness weekend in 2010, I’d be more than happy to take it. Cheers.

I’m up late in Las Vegas, as often happens here, but instead of hitting the tables I’m winding down after a long day of presentations and an enlightening team dinner.  Sportscenter coverage of the last day of World Cup Qualifying is helping out. Usually I reserve my personal blog for random, non-business-related musings on the recent successes and occasional failures of the soccer teams I support or less frequent posts on contemporary art, where to get a tasty microbrew in Seattle, or why I am frequently in awe of my young daughters.

When it comes to observations on the state of the social media marketing industry, my current profession, I typically rely on the talented team at my company and the ‘crowdsourced’ approach to opening our company blog, Twitter account, and Facebook Page to their thoughts as well as my own + our clients and partners. But tonight I feel like a brief post on how far our own agency, and the larger social media marketing industry, has come in the past three and half years since we started Spring Creek Group.

In a word, it’s just been amazing.

It will be an honor to present along with a valued and key client of ours tomorrow here at the WOMMA Summit, and I’m sure that tomorrow I’ll be just as amazed as I was today at how large, varied, and mature this field has become in just a few short years.  By learning together, we’re all demonstrating an openness to the change and dynamism that is the hallmark of the social media field.  In seeing contemporaries like Ant’s Eye View grow equally impressively and rapidly, I find encouragement that  the demand is still growing for talented strategists and efficient execution teams to bring brands and businesses of all types ever closer to their most valued assets: their own customers. And in talking to marketing innovators and leaders here like Rod Brooks at PEMCO, a Seattle company with local roots and national leadership in customer engagement and connection, I get a feel for the shared sense of opportunity out there to bring customers of all stripes more deeply into the growth, improvement, and narratives of organizations that are trying hard to continually do better for their customers as well as their stakeholders, employees, and shareholders.

It’s really a privilege and an honor to be a part of this revolution, and especially to be meeting with more of my colleagues and presenting with a key client stakeholder tomorrow. I can’t wait.

And with that, it’s time for me to do something most of Las Vegas is designed to keep me from doing: get some rest.

Cheers.

Pitchfork is offering, for one week only, the ability to view all 94 minutes of the recent documentary of Everyone’s Favorite Icelandic Orchestral Post-Rock Band (c)(TM) playing all over Europe and elsewhere.If you can’t get enough of slight, sun-starved men playing guitars with cello bows and so forth, enjoy the linky-mcjump-jump over to Pitchfork’s video here.

[...Or you can always just hang out on this post, imagining that you're watching the whole thing (thereby dramatically boosting this blog's average visitor time-0n-site up from the current figure of, well, let's just call it something that rounds to zero).]

On a par with a recently-noticed odd juxtaposition at my local Tully’s, this morning I overheard the following summary of today’s KUOW ‘Weekday’ show hosted by Steve Scher: “Today we will be talking about Honor Killings, which still occur around the world and even here in the U.S…   Also: Gardening!”

Want to know where the middle of nowhere is? The Tristan de Cunha Island group! There’s less than 300 people who live there, sporting a grand total of 7 unique surnames. Whoa.

Funfact: If you hit the “+” button on Bing Maps, you start drilling in to the island little by little and then eventually *poof*, the island disappears and suddenly you’re back in the ocean… kind of like what it must feel like to live on Tristan de Cunha, sometimes.

… and that this will be my driving commute each day when I have to get in my car (as opposed to the bike, which I vastly prefer and hope to be able to use as much as possible):

Eek.

Peter Boal, if you are listening out there, you are to be commended. Since arriving at the Pacific Northwest Ballet you have done what is vital in these times: you have made the ballet relevant, enjoyable, challenging, and exciting to a whole new (younger) generation of audience members.

I attended tonight’s performance of Romeo and Juliet, and although it was by no means my first ballet performance in Seattle (I’ve been a subscriber and single-ticket-buyer on and off for the last 8 years), I was struck by a few things tonight in particular:

1) The crowd is the most diverse and youngest – on average – of any of the “high performing arts” (opera, first-run theater, symphony, ballet… am i leaving any out?) in Seattle. Plenty of hipsters, yuppies, high-schoolers, art-school-types, and still the usual retinue of parents and older ballet enthusiasts. And people are dressed well. Not formal, just looking good – like they made an effort. This, in and of itself, is kind of an achievement in this town.

2) A couple behind me in line for a drink before the performance (BTW, full bar plus wine plus microbrews plus SEVERAL champagnes by the glass = genius) remarked, sotto voce, “Look around, these are MY people!” By that they meant, I think, “the ballet is managing to attract Ballard and Cap Hill and Beacon Hill and Seward Park and…”

3) The experience is perfect for working people and night owls alike: Plenty of warnings to get to your seat, a forgiving wait until 5 or 10 minutes past showtime to allow the younger lollygaggers and cheap-parking-seekers time to get in the door and get up to their less expensive high seats.

4) The stage design, sets, choreography, and dance is current. Boal is taking some chances and incorporating challenging, modern, even racy and at times humorous dance into a traditional art form… without losing the commitment to rigor, athleticism, and beauty that people who are drawn to ballet want to see. Some of the interactions between dancers tonight was pretty racy – hands on bodies in places they wouldn’t have been 20 years ago. But chaste doesn’t bring in the 25 year olds – taking chances with the interactions between lovers, rivals, and the rest of the corps that surround the soloists does.

5) Stanley Stewart Kershaw*, the conductor of the pit, is consistently turning out top-notch symphonic music. The performance of Prokofiev’s score tonight was nearly perfect, the strings were notably strong, and the timing was spot-on. It’s obvious that he cares and that the music is there to drive the dance, rather than being merely an accompaniment or a soundtrack. And the audience gets it – the applause was among the loudest for Kershaw when he took the stage, amidst appreciative applause for the dancers themselves.

(*ed. note: I updated this post a few days after originally writing it with Mr. Kershaw’s proper given name. Sorry, Stewart, I forgot to fact check before posting the original post late at night :-).)

6) The lighting was modern and striking, as well as occasionally odd – but in a good way, in ways that drew attention to the dance AND the set design and choreography. The films and scrims on the spots from above in particular was noteworthy and cool.

7) The corps LOOKS LIKE the population of the Pacific Northwest – some younger, some older, we get to see dancers of Asian, European, African-American, Latin, and other backgrounds at the top of their game. What a pleasure to feel like we are seeing a distinctly Pacific Northwest ballet, in addition to a generally high-quality corps. This takes long-term investment in the apprenticeship and junior programs as well as the ability to attract top talent from elsewhere makes for a diverse corps. (and the retention is not to be discounted for continuity – the tenures of some of the Principal and Soloist dancers is impressive, and a testament to what must be the high regard the corps overall feels for Boal since coming on board).

8) Little things like marking in the program which dancers were recently promoted to more elevated roles in the corps, and which dancers came up through the ranks of the Pacific Northwest junior program, go a long way for people like me who actually read the program before and during the intermissions – it shows that the Ballet here wants to acknowledge and reward the commitment of their dancers and retain them. When we get to see pieces like Mopey as well as the classic Balanchine gems like Jewels danced by the same dancers over multiple seasons, sometimes years apart, it’s just great. I for one can’t wait to see Mopey again in November because I expect it will be danced by the same guy who killed it two years ago (or more) when it debuted here.

9) Your marketing department is doing all the right things to connect with new audiences through the new channels – especially online. A full commitment to social media is evident as soon as you dig into the website. Check out what the PNB is doing in all the key locations:

All in all, and in sum, the corps and the production teams are delivering great value. And the composition of the audience shows how well Boal is doing at keeping the ballet relevant to new and interested supporters here in Seattle.

Keep it up, and thanks for doing all the little things well.

A lot of “L”’s this weekend, not a lot other than the beautiful fall weather for a Seattle sports fan to enjoy:

- Seahawks L

- Sounders L

- Mariners L, L

- UW Football L

- WSU Football L

[However, as one guy in the office pointed out, Bellevue HS Football won. The future is on the shoulders of the youth of the PacNW.]

with a central role in tonight’s Entourage episode.

Bonus: Dean Cain cameo. (we share an alma mater, we’re real close…)