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Why I’m Starting The #BergChat

The Heidelberg
Dear University of Missouri J-Schooler,

I remember when I was but a wee undergrad. The year was 2009. A young man named Barack Obama had taken stewardship of our country. The economy was in the crapper. I drove around in a Chevy TrailBlazer with vanity plates.

Much has changed since then. (The Blazer no longer has vanity plates.) But one thing hasn’t:

At our alma mater, the University of Missouri, there exist two distinct sectors of our esteemed School of Journalism: the school itself, and the Reynolds Journalism Institute.[1. I should note here: Counsel has advised me to cease and desist referring to them as my personal Daddy Warbucks.] The J-school is doing some awesome stuff. So is RJI.

Problem is, we’re not always doing great stuff together.

Even though these clusters exist within the same damn building, there’s still a gap between the two. Young J-schoolers dare not venture into RJI. Us RJIers would rather not wander off into the J-school.[2. Except on occasions when there’s free food over in Walter Williams.]

Here’s the point: there’s some pretty incredible Journalism Stuff™[3. Trademark of Oshinsky, Inc., 2011.] going on in Columbia, MO, and there need not be a gap between RJI and the J-school.

So I’m launching a new thing this year: The #BergChat. It’s a weekly session in which I’ll invite anyone from the J-school community to sit down with me for 30 minutes to talk about… well, whatever you want. An idea you’ve got. A question you’ve been afraid to ask. A resume you’d like an extra pair of eyes on.

And while we’re chatting, I’ll buy you a beer.[4. For free. Free, as in: no purchase necessary. Cash value of said beer must be less than or equal to $5. The #BergChat will end immediately if the #BergChat-ee attempts to buy a Natural Light with his/her free beer. These are my terms.]

Now, the fine print:

1. Every #BergChat must take place at the World Famous Heidelberg Restaurant. It’s tricky to find, so here are the Google Maps directions from the J-school for those who’ve never been:


View Larger Map

2. The #BergChat will last 30 minutes.

3. During said #BergChat, I will buy you a beer, or, if you’re not inclined/able, a drink of your choice.

4. To schedule a #BergChat, follow me on Twitter at @danoshinsky. Each week, I’ll be tweeting out times when I’ll be holding a #BergChat. I’ll open up a handful of half-hour slots. The first (pre-specified number) of folks to respond will be given a timeslot. All you have to do is show up and chat.

5. Each J-schooler gets exactly one #BergChat with me. After that, you’ll just have to stop by my office if you’d like to continue the conversation. Or agree to buy me lunch.[5. Hint: I’m a Noodles and Co. fan.]

6. The #BergChat can just be one-on-one, or it can be a group of students chatting. But I won’t take on a group that doesn’t fit in a Heidelberg booth. So essentially, it’s got to be a group of three or less.

Point is: I’m reaching out to you, the J-school population. It’s up to you to make the next step and get involved with what we’re doing at RJI.

See you at the Berg.

-Dan

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The $1,000 Father-Son Belly Challenge.

This is the kind of thing that I shouldn’t go doing. It’s not nice of me to take an old man’s money.

And yet, that’s just what I intend to do.

The old man in question just happens to be my old man, Bill Oshinsky (he’s the little fella you see in the photo below). And he’s got it fixed into that bald skull of his that he can get into better shape than me.

Day 1.

So we’ve made this bet: We’re going to spend a year getting into shape. And on Aug. 1, 2012, we’ll rendezvous to decide who’s got the better belly. Winner gets $1,000. Loser pays.

I’m not going to waste valuable kilowhatevers here on danoshinsky.com with this sort of nonsense, so we’ve set up one of them Tumblrs for you to follow along. Check out bellychallenge.com for more.

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A Question From Me, The Professional Question Asker.


I went to see NBC News’ David Gregory speak tonight in a little auditorium on Nantucket Island. He spoke for an hour, mostly about the failures of our political system and our economy and our media, and then he closed by reminding everyone that we were on a little island 30 miles off the coast of Cape Cod, and that everything probably isn’t as bad as it seems.

When that was over, Gregory opened up the floor to questions.

This is the part of the lecture I hate.

Not the idea of Q&A. That I love. We need more Q&A in our lives, and not just at big fancy lectures involving salt-and-pepper-haired reporters in nice blazers. We need lots of thoughtful questions and lots of thoughtful answers in our day-to-day lives. And we need everyone to be asking and thinking and listening in order to be part of this nice little experiment in domestic living that we’ve got going on here in America.

Participation is a very, very good thing, and I encourage it highly.

What I dislike is that I ever since I got my degree from the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism, something’s changed for me. I’ll be at a lecture like I was tonight. I’ll be there with someone else. Let’s call this man, for the sake of accuracy, my father. The moderator will open up the floor to questions. And I will sit back in my chair and listen to questions being asked.

Dad does not like this.

See, my father does not see me as a reporter. Or a journalist. Or a writer. He sees me as a Professional Question Asker. That’s what he believes I earned a degree in out in ol’ Columbia, Mo. And when an opportunity to use my Professional Question Asking skills passes without me asking a question… well, he sees it as an invalidation of my college degree.

And I find this funny. Because I am most definitely not a Professional Question Asker. If there’s anything my Mizzou degree certifies, it’s that I’m a Professional Listener. My job is, if at all possible, to shut up and listen. And then report what I’ve learned. That’s why I’m usually in the back of the room scribbling notes on the lecture program.

At these Q&As, I do this quite well.

Dad does not like this.

Sorry, pops.

But here’s what I’m thinking: Pilots don’t get asked to fly planes on their day off. Bobby Flay doesn’t get thrown behind the grill every time he goes out to eat. Librarians don’t just show up at random libraries and start implementing the Dewey Decimal System.

So I suppose it’s with several years of Professional Question Asking behind me that I ask this: Why do I keep getting picked on?

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Why I Do Not Have a Smartphone.

I am finding that lately, I have had to defend my choice of telephone. I find this strange, as my telephone does exactly what I want it to do: It places and receives phone calls anywhere in America.

The fact that it does this, and that I pay about $35 per month for such services, seems like a good deal to me.

And here’s what I really like. My telephone does more than just handle phone calls. It can also send and receive text messages, which are growing on me as a legitimate tool for communication. It features voicemail, which is quite a bit more affordable than hiring a secretary to handle similar message-taking duties, and it has a few spiffy additional features, such as a tip calculator and alarm clock. The calendar function is especially useful, and can be used for such purposes as finding out what day it is.

Again, I thought this was a lot for a cell phone to offer.

The good folks at CNET had this to say about my phone:

“In any case, the SGH-A137 isn’t too much to get excited about. The simple flip phone is so basic that it doesn’t even offer an external display.”

Oh.

What I am discovering is that my colleagues agree with the editors at CNET. They tell me that more than my clothes, or my choice of automobile, or my chosen profession, my phone indicates what kind of human I am.

I thought my phone indicated that I was both sensible and uncomplicated.

Not even close.

Not even in a million, billion years. Just NO, Dan.

What my phone apparently signals to others is that I am, at best, uncool, and at worst, a lost cause. There is only one remedy for someone like me:

A smartphone.

A smartphone like the iPhone, or the Blackberry, or something that runs on Android. A phone capable of listening to a song on the radio, determining what song I’m listening to and then automatically downloading said song to the phone’s very hard drive. A phone capable of taking a photo and then rendering it in sepia. A phone capable of booking reservations at a nearby restaurant, testing my food for any toxins, chewing my food, paying my bill, getting me a taxi home, tucking me into bed and telling me a bedtime story.

A phone like that, or something.

I do not like that sound of that. Not at all.

See, I have a very simple mind. I actually like dividing up my devices into specific silos. I like reading on my Kindle. I like typing on my laptop. I like rocking out on my iPod. I like calling on my phone. This system works nicely for me.

And I suppose that, yes, I could get a singular device that could allow me to do all of those things. But I type slowly on a phone. I don’t like reading something on a three-inch screen. I like going for a jog and not having my music device start vibrating from an incoming text.

More than anything, I love disappearing. When I am at my computer, I respond to email. I write. I’m busy.

But away from that screen? I shut down. Work ends. I go out, and I enjoy life in this rather nice world of ours. If you need me, call me. I’ll pick up. But that email of yours will have to wait.

Give me a smartphone and I’d be in a state of perpetual Google. I’d be walking down the street and see a Curly W hat and ask myself, Who was it who hit 3rd for the Nationals in 2006?, and then I’d lose myself in the lifetime statistics of Jose Vidro, and then I’d pour over numbers on Baseball Reference, and then I’d find myself wondering what just happened to the previous 35 minutes. I know, because this is what happens at work. I take a thought, and connect it to another, and another, and then the time just disappears. I am good at wasting time, and on a smartphone, I would waste an awful lot of it.

My current phone? I don’t get lost in it. I make my call. I send my text. I move on. I leave myself time to stop and stare.

It is a phone that allows me to focus completely on what I am doing.

Of course, now that I’ve said all that: I’m going to get lost on the way downtown tonight. I’m going to need directions. A song will come on the radio, and I’ll want to download it. I’ll forget to make reservations at the place I’m headed. I’ll see something that demands to be sepia-ized. I’ll have an urgent email to send out.

And I’ll understand why everyone else has that thing in their pocket.

But me? No. Not yet. Not ever, I hope.

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From the Dept. of Things I Want: The Kid’s Menu of Wine Lists.

I went out to dinner last night with this girl. She was about my age. From upstate New York. We met via kickball, and I asked her out. Nothing too formal. Kickball romances typically aren’t, I’m told.

But we were on this patio, and it was a nice night, and she had gone through the post-work motions of getting all dressed up, and I suggested we get a bottle of wine. The waiter brought us the wine list.

It was, front to back, no fewer than 15 pages. It must’ve featured 200 wines. Maybe more.

We were lost.

Both of us like wine. Both of us wanted a red wine. And neither of us could figure out if any of the hundred-something red wines available were right for us.

We asked the waiter for help. He spent a full 60 seconds looking through the list before getting flustered and calling in some backup. To find a red wine that wouldn’t max out my credit card, we needed the assistance of the restaurant’s sommelier.

Shouldn’t there have been an easier way?

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What we really needed were fewer choices. We needed a list tailored to the needs of the wine-drinking 24-year-old on a semi-fixed income.

Here’s what a young wine drinker wants:

1. Red or white
2. For under $40

That’s the entire list of characteristics[1. And no screw off tops — it makes us feel like we’re buying a $5 bottle.].

So that eliminates half the wines from last night’s menu. But don’t stop there. I don’t need six malbecs on the menu. I don’t need three pages of cabernet sauvignons.

I want the Kid’s Menu of Wine Lists.

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Wine Pairings

Here’s what I’m offering you, sommeliers of America: the chance to make a customer for life.

Because I don’t understand wine. I don’t appreciate its subtleties. I like wine, and I’ll happily pay $25 or $30 at a restaurant for nice bottle to share with a date. But when I’m at the liquor store, I buy wine based on how colorful the bottle is. I don’t remember names or tastes or blends.

I remember that I tried the wine with the penguin on the bottle.

But there’s an opportunity here. Because there are lots of young people like me who simply do not know how to order wine. We don’t drink it that often. But we like to seem cultured, and, ideally, there will come a time when I’m on a date and I’d like to be able to point to the menu and say, “Oh, yes! This one! I had this a few months back at _______! This is the one we want.” And she’ll be impressed, and I’ll be happy, and we’ll both end up drunk, and that’s all I can really ask for from a bottle of wine.

So give me limited choices. Offer two wine menus: the Full Menu, and the Limited Selection[2. Please don’t insult us and call it the Young Drinker’s Selection, or the Kid’s Wine List. We do like being treated like semi-competent humans.]. Make it 10 wines. Make every bottle on the menu the same price — $30, $35, whatever. Otherwise, we’ll always choose the cheapest one. Eliminate that distraction.

Make the menu one page, and only one. Give us a full description of each wine. Offer tastings, if we’d like.

And at the end of the night, on the receipt, ask us if we’d like to leave our email addresses, so that you can shoot us details about what we’ve just enjoyed and where we can find it in our neighborhood. A coupon wouldn’t hurt, either.

Point is: Limit our options and make us fans of something new. We 20somethings are loyal. If we like something, we’ll stick with it. And we’ll come back to your restaurant and tell our friends about you, because we’ll have found a place that invited us to experience something new. We like feeling welcome, and we love it when people treat us seriously[3. This isn’t necessarily breaking news, but you’d be surprised at how many adults treat 24-year-olds like we’re 12.].

All we’re asking is for you to help us. We won’t be insulted by a limited wine menu. Hell, we’d probably order more wine if you presented it to us that way. The full menu can be intimidating.

Because I saw the 15-page-long wine menu last night. And on the back jacket cover, I saw the beer selection. There were four beers on it. I knew all their names.

That seemed like something that I could handle.

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You know what ended up happening last night? The sommelier came. He spent 45 seconds deliberating about his selection of red wines. He pointed to a wine on the menu. We ordered it.

It was, to be fair, delicious.

But today, I was relaying this story to my mother. And she asked me a simple question:

“So what wine did you end up getting?”

And I realized: I had absolutely no idea.

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Twitter’s Truth Squad.

Here is what happens when I hear about news indirectly — basically, when breaking news gets to me secondhand:

1. I run to a computer.

2. I open up the nearest Twitter client.

3. I search for the news that I’ve just heard and try to find confirmation that it is either true or false.

In short, Twitter is my first source for news verification. It usually has details on an event long before traditional news outlets can get a full story up online.

But consider what happened to me Saturday night. I see this Facebook update from a friend, a Springsteen fan. It says, “RIP Big Man.”

And I immediately log onto Twitter to search for news about Clarence Clemons.

Except — that’s exactly the wrong place to go for something like this. Twitter is where death hoaxes go to really get rolling. On Twitter, someone impersonating @CNN has announced Morgan Freeman’s death. On Twitter, we’ve seen Adam Sandler and Charlie Sheen and even Mick Jagger die, only to find out hours later that they’re actually still alive.

Death hoaxes aren’t even the worst of it. Sometimes, we’ve got news hoaxes going around. Like the one from real Washington Post columnist Mike Wise. Or a new hoax from a guy who claimed to be a college basketball recruiting expert with inside information. Turned out he wasn’t. Didn’t stop his fake news from getting real attention, though.

What I know is this: we need a way to verify these news-related tweets. Twitter took a big step forward when it introduced verified accounts. But it needs to go a leap beyond that, I believe.

So here’s an open call to the Twitter team: Want to make your corner of the Internet one that actually prides itself on accuracy? Want to make your product the thing that people actually trust?

Start verifying tweets.

Not Twitterers (or tweeple, or tweeps). Go verify individual tweets.

And you’re not going to like how I think we should do it:

With humans.

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Hear me out. I’m talking about Twitter, one of the biggest and most powerful news reporting tools on the planet, employing a team of real, actual humans. Humans who make phone calls. Humans who verify information independently, and don’t just Google something to find out if it could be true.

In the past, we called such humans “reporters.” I’d be okay with using that phrasing again.

It’d work like this. Twitter would bring its own team of reporters in house. They’d monitor activity on Twitter. They’d see what’s trending and what’s bubbling just below the surface. And when something big breaks — say, an #RIPBobSaget hashtag — the reporting team would break into action. They’d make calls. They’d independently verify Mr. Saget’s status. If it turns out Mr. Saget was, in fact, not killed in an awful wakeboarding incident in the Swiss Alps, the Twitter team would move to quell the rumor by:

A. Posting a breaking news update at the top of the Twitter page devoted to the hashtag.

B. Creating a push notification specifically targeted to those using the hashtag — or discussing Bob Saget — to inform them of the truth.

That’s the starting place.

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But what if Twitter went further? What if Twitter created a specific channel for breaking news, where it could publish breaking news tweets in real time? Think the Google News homepage mixed with the instant refresh technology of TweetDeck, with all news curated by the Twitter reporters. Wouldn’t that be a must-bookmark?

Think of it this way: Why wouldn’t Twitter HQ want to better utilize Twitter as the breaking news service it already is? Give us headlines. Give us the news ticker, Twitter style. Give us a verified account with trusted, we-actually-made-a-call-and-know-this-to-be-true news. Call it @TruthSquad. Call it @VerifiedNews.[1. Just don’t try to combine Truth + Twitter, because you’ll end up with something like @truthitter. Not a flattering name.]

And don’t say it wouldn’t pay for itself. When an earthquake hits Los Angeles, and Twitter’s in-real-time news page is posting links and Twitpics, you don’t think the New York Post would pay $10,000 to get their quake story posted at the top of the Twitter breaking news page? You don’t think they’d like the extra million hits they’d get just from Twitter referrals?[2. Speaking of which: Celebrities would also be a great source of income for Twitter. When you crash your car, your insurance company pays to fix the damage. If someone starts a Bob Saget is Dead rumor, why can’t Saget get social media insurance to recoup the damages to his brand name? Pay Twitter a little, and Twitter insures that when false information gets out there, they’ll get the real information into the hands of users who care about celeb news.]

Now, do note: there is no way to verify off-the-record or on-deep-background information passed along from some reporters. If @ESPN says, “Sources tell @ESPN that Michael Jordan will be coming out retirement to play for the Miami Heat,” the Twitter team isn’t going to be able to confirm that. They don’t have ESPN’s sources. But they can confirm certain news.

An official Twitter team of reporters can stop hoaxes. They can get truthful information out to consumers.

They can make Twitter the place for trusted, breaking news.

Traditional media can’t necessarily serve this role as the gatekeeper for real-time truth. Tell me again why can’t Twitter do it itself?

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My Sister, the Graduate.

My little sister graduated from college this week. We went down to celebrate graduation with her. We filed into the school’s basketball arena on Thursday. We sat and watch the processional. An orchestra played. A Dean spoke. Hands clapped, and parents ‘Woo-Hoo!’-ed, and mostly, we just sat, unbelievably proud of my little sister.

Now, she didn’t think much of her graduation. We’re Jewish kids from the suburbs who get to go on week-long ski trips — we’re not exactly the kind of college graduates who’ve had to overcome long odds. I said it when I graduated, and my sister said the same thing after hers.

But I remember a conversation we had three years ago. My sister called me, in tears. She was having a tough semester. She’d felt resistance — from her classes, from her peers. She felt isolated and lost, and she called asking for help.

I remember feeling a tremendous responsibility. I’d been called upon for brotherly support, and I remember reaching back to a place I didn’t know I could go to give her the only advice I think I’ve ever really believed:

Go out and find the things you love and the people you love, and be with them as much as you can.

Fast forward to the close of the graduation ceremony on Thursday. I was holding the camera, and my sister started dragging me through the crowd. She wanted a photo with this friend, and that friend, and this family. Hugs and kisses. Some English, and some Spanish, and even a bit of Swahili. Enough moments to put a Kodak executive’s family through college.

My mother looked at me — my mother, the lady who knows everyone, the lady who can, has and will start conversations with complete strangers in the bathroom — and said, “Your sister knows everyone.”

I was about as proud as a brother could be. We started hearing stories about how my sister had met all these people. Turns out my sister had thrown herself into everything — clubs and sports and classes, and she’d made some incredible friends.

She’d figured out college.

Because there’s a little secret about undergraduate life. They don’t tell you this when you’re reaching for the Ivies, or when you’re cramming for SATs, or when you’re being schooled in the differences between early action and early decision.

College isn’t about the classes. If you’re lucky, for four years, it’s a place to try. College is four years to try things that you won’t have time to try once you’re old, four years to experiment, four years to grow. Four years to find the stuff you love and the people you love.

You’re right, El. We don’t have the Hollywood story. You’re right: we expected you to graduate from college.

But you found something else at college, El. And for finding it, we couldn’t be prouder.

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The Very Exciting Thing That Is About To Happen To Me (or: M-I-Z).

This post was originally published over on Stry. It’s actually a speech that I intended to give in Columbia, Mo., last week. I didn’t know I was supposed to give a speech, and then I decided to read the itinerary of events I’d been sent, and saw very clearly the words “Dan Oshinsky” and “five-minute speech” linked together, and suddenly, hastily, began writing. Turned out that they decided to not have me speak — wise move on their part, I should say — but I’ve regurgitated the vague outline of my would-be speech here:

Motion is kind of an amazing thing.

I feel like I should know. I went skydiving last week.

I’m not exactly the skydiving type. I’d never been skydiving before, or bungee jumping, or heliskiing, or anything that involved a significant amount of free fall. I’m also not a fan of heights. So you can guess how strange it must have been for me to be sitting on the floor of a four-seat Cessna, 10,000 feet above Warrenton, Va., strapped to a guy named Dave — white hair, white eyebrows, used-to-be-a-roadie-in-Joplin, Mo., Dave — when the door to the plane opened, and I looked down.

And I surrendered.

Surrendered to the overwhelming, crippling fear, for one. But also to Dave, because he was literally harnessed to my back, and he was going to throw me out of the plane whether I was ready or not, and he was also the guy who controlled the parachute, which meant that he would be deciding whether or not we landed.[1. Well, safely, at least.]

I surrendered. We jumped.

I was thinking about that last week. I think there are two types of media organizations out there: Those willing to surrender to the current media climate and move forward, and those that aren’t.

It is not enough to merely acknowledge that things have changed for newsrooms and news organizations. Some fight what’s happening, some fear it.

Some surrender.

That’s the smart choice.

One type of new media organization gets me especially excited these days: The startup. These are organizations that sense opportunity, chance, uncertainty — and are putting themselves in motion to chase their ambitions. I find that to be a remarkable thing.

So this year, I’m going to get a bit closer to them.

The University of Missouri’s Reynolds Journalism Institute (RJI) has invited me out to Columbia, Mo., in the fall to serve as a fellow.[3. The list of former fellows is long and distinguished, and I am not entirely sure how I now find myself among their ranks.] For a year, I’ll be studying news-centric startups, trying to catalog the choices, successes and failures made during their early stages. I’ll be applying those lessons to Stry, the startup I founded last fall in Biloxi, Miss.

Despite all the success I had in Biloxi, Stry has been idling since the fall. RJI is giving me the chance to kick-start Stry once again. During the course of my fellowship, I’m going to try to take Stry from concept to realization. The goal is to build out an organization that can begin reporting and syndicating stories starting in the spring of 2012.

Better yet is that I’m going to try to bring transparency to the process. I’m going to put Stry inside the fishbowl for others to watch and participate in the startup process. My successes, my failures — they’ll all be public.

My hope is that by opening up the process, we can give other could-be founders the chance to see how challenging the startup process can be. If we do it right, we’ll give them the chance to start their company at a place greater than zero.

Do that, and we give them the chance to put their company into motion faster.

And motion — motion is kind of an amazing thing.

photo at top by Dak Dillon

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A Note Regarding the Nature of Stories About Myself and My Mother That Appear Here on This Blog.

By now, you’ve probably read about Greg Mortenson, author of the best-selling book “Three Cups of Tea.” Mortenson, according to a “60 Minutes” report, embellished, fabricated and radically altered key details in his book.

Which is a roundabout way of saying: Greg Mortenson is a liar.

I can’t prove to you whether or not Mortenson has lied  — I’ve never read “Three Cups of Tea,” and I wasn’t with him in Afghanistan or Pakistan to confirm or deny any details presented in that book — but I know he’s not alone among the accused. The list of writers alleged or proven to have told stories that were more fiction than non-fiction is growing. James Frey famously altered details for his memoir. David Sedaris has come under scrutiny for his words. All fall into a particular category of liars:

They are writers.

Writers — particularly writers who specialize in the re-creation of events that they themselves experienced — don’t always portray real-life events in the most accurate light. I’m not talking about outright lying — wholly inventing events and then claiming them as nonfiction isn’t excusable.

I’m thinking more of the nature of personal recollection. The best personal stories get told and retold, and often, they change. They become bigger than their parts. They operate in a vacuum independent of space and time.

They are, often, part-true and part-bullshit.

Everyone has a fish story — some have an entire memoir’s worth — and I’m okay with that. No one’s confusing David Sedaris for David Halberstam.

Consider this thought, recently published in the Baltimore Sun:

“Some of the allegations regarding Mortenson seem to fall into the category of poetic license — collapsing time to tell a better story. That was an issue that I discussed Saturday with James Patterson and Charles “Chic” Dambach on a CityLit Festival panel on memoirs. They both acknowledged taking some license in their books, and I really don’t mind that — but an author should acknowledge the practice in a preface or elsewhere in the book.”

I couldn’t agree more. But it shouldn’t stop at books. I think this very blog needs some sort of explainer as to the way I tell stories. I’ve seen what “60 Minutes” did to Mortenson. I don’t want to get the Steve Kroft treatment.

Here goes:

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Dear danoshinsky.com readers,

The stories you will read about my mother on this blog are true. On the whole, at least. My mother really did ride a fire truck dressed as Mrs. Claus. She did hold up the ‘Hola, Dan, mi puta grande’ sign. She did once abandon me in a stroller to go chasing after a limo that was not actually driving Kevin Costner through downtown Washington. All of these things are true.

What cannot be verified as entirely, scientifically accurate are each of the conversations within the respective stories that appear on this blog. Those conversations appear here in the most complete version that memory will allow, and where my recollections differ from those of the other involved parties, such has been noted within the context of the story.

I cannot fully guarantee that every word here is exact. Some memories have worn beyond the point of recognition. There are times when I will tell one version of a story, and then, months later, I will tell an entirely different version of the exact same story. In nearly every case, the latter is a more embarrassing, degrading or absurd version of the story, and my readers have repeatedly requested stories that feature any or all of those qualifications.

I can guarantee this: these stories, in no way, have been embellished to enhance the credibility of the author (or his mother). They have not been edited to portray the characters within as overly competent or even decent.

These are my stories, and I am just doing my best to tell them. They are not meant to inspire you. They are not meant to portray life as anything other than absurd. They are here because I have lots of embarrassing stories, and other people like hearing them.

That part, I can guarantee, is true.

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How Bon Jovi’s Subversive Smiley Face Would Go Viral in 2011.

I got a Bon Jovi song stuck in my head the other day. The song was “Have a Nice Day,” the title track from the band’s 2005 album. It’s got all the Bon Jovi hallmarks: those familiar power chords, Richie Sambora playing a double-necked guitar and multiple lyrics about “living my life.” All it’s missing is that signature “wah-wah” guitar riff.

But the music video for the song got me thinking about how viral campaigns work. The video starts off with Jon Bon Jovi outside of one of his concerts. A fan hands him a copy of the CD, and the singer grabs a Sharpie and draws this little doodle.

Then the fan pulls out his cell phone, takes a photo of the doodle and sends it to someone. And from there, the subversive smiley face goes viral. It’s plastered on mailboxes and billboards, tattooed onto arms and lower backs, and even cut into a corn field.

But step back a second. Let’s see where this all starts in the video.

It starts with that. With a picture taken on an old-fashioned, non-flip, Sprint cell phone. Not a Blackberry. Not an iPhone. A phone that retails today for less than $20.

Let’s put this Bon Jovi video campaign in perspective. The song came out in August 2005. The iPhone wouldn’t be released until June 2007. Twitter wouldn’t launch for another year, and wouldn’t gain popularity for another three years. Facebook was still limited to college students only, and those with accounts could only post one photo — their profile photo.

So this within-a-video viral campaign — one from a song that’s only six years old — is almost comically antiquated.

How would Bon Jovi’s smiley face go viral today? Probably like this.

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Bon Jovi draws the image on a fan’s CD. The fan whips out his iPhone and Twitpics it. Then, even though it’s a doodle, he Instagrams the image, because everything looks better in sepia.

The Twitpic gets a little bit of traction at first — a retweet here, a retweet there. Someone mass @-replies the message to celebrities. @kimkardashian makes the image her profile pic.

Soon, the smiley has its own Facebook page — Can this smiley face get more fans than the Jonas Brothers?

Then it gets its own Twitter account — @SubversiveSmiley, along with dozens of impostor accounts. (@FakeSubversiveSmiley, @SubversiveFrowny, @SubversiveSmileyGlobalPR, among others.)

(The Twitter account is later republished in book form, and makes the New York Times best-seller list. The CBS sitcom based on the tweets — “Have a Nice Day” starring John Stamos as a stuck-in-the-80s Jersey dad trying to make good — gets cancelled after the third episode.)

4Chan launches a meme — #icanhazsmiley — and then the Cheezburger Network launches a site devoted to sneaking the smiley face into famous photos “Where’s Waldo” style.

HuffPo publishes a photo gallery of 21 famous smiley faces, and although mostly inane, it draws 11 million page views.

@KanyeWest retweets the initial image with the hashtag #SWAG, and announces his next album will be called “Show Me How to Smiley.”

The image jumps the shark.

Two weeks later, Bon Jovi’s album, “Have a Nice Day,” finally hits iTunes. Fans are confused as to why Bon Jovi’s album is featuring an image that’s so last week.

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