The Enlightened Redneck

Posted on 02.06.12 by Danny Glover @ 5:51 pm

This snapshot, posted to Instagram by Douglas W. Ray of the digital marketing firm Three Ships Media, has been plastered all over my Facebook news feed for the past two days. I got a kick out of it, so I thought I’d share it here:

Social media isn’t really all about donuts (or other foods) and the people who eat them. But like everyone else, I’ve posted my share of updates, tweets and photos about my dining experiences. If you can’t laugh at yourself, then who can you laugh at?

Wray’s list of “Social Media Explained” has inspired others to expand it.

UPDATE: Three Ships Media told the story behind how its inside joke about social media and donuts went viral. Apparently Punxsutawney Phil deserves the credit:

The groundhog drawing [on our whiteboard], itself just seasonal filler, was a fleeting replacement of something else, an easy way to eliminate some white space and live up to our reputation as quirky creative types.

So we decided to make a little chart explaining social media through donuts. We put our minds together and then our creative director, Nuno Gomes, scribbled it out. Doug Ray, a multimedia producer here, snapped a photo with Instagram and posted it on Facebook and Twitter. We had a beer, a good laugh and went home for the weekend.

Since then, more than 60,000 people have ‘liked’ it on Facebook, and thousands of people have tweeted about it. We weren’t trying to make anything cute or funny.

Death By Texting

Posted on 02.02.12 by Danny Glover @ 8:31 pm

We have a 12-year-old son, so we know this look:

But euthanasia isn’t the answer. Divine parental intervention works just fine.

For those who may not be familiar with The Onion, it’s a satire publication. No actual children were harmed in the making of this fake news report.

Many of the stories at The Onion are laced with vulgarity, so I won’t link to it. But I do enjoy some of their videos and stories. This satire poking fun at The Huffington Post today has less mainstream appeal than the video about a young girl’s texting-induced coma, but media junkies like me got a kick out of it:

NEW YORK — Shocked and saddened witnesses at The Huffington Post’s news-aggregation facility have confirmed that employee Henry Evers, 25, died Wednesday after being sucked into the website’s powerful news-repurposing turbine, where his body was immediately torn to pieces.

The 200-ton content-compiling device, developed by Greek multimillionaire and site co-founder Arianna Huffington, sucks up original articles from around the web with its massive rotor assembly, re-brands them with the Huffington Post name, and then spits them back out on the company’s home page. …

Since The Huffington Post was founded in 2005, its headquarters has consisted of two rooms: Arianna Huffington’s spacious, lavishly appointed office overlooking New York City, and the windowless 10,000-square-foot subterranean warehouse that houses the turbine. More than 700 low-wage workers, known as writers, clock in every day, and, dressed in their Huffington Post hard hats and coveralls, work in dark, unsafe conditions to ensure the machine runs smoothly and constantly churns out content.

That’s an exaggerated portrait of how many “news” organizations work these days.

Filed under: Business and Culture and Entertainment and Just For Laughs and Media and Technology and Video
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Another ‘Shcool’ Lesson

Posted on 01.25.12 by Danny Glover @ 11:30 am

We’ve been down this road before on this blog — twice, in fact. Apparently road-painting crews (and our “home-shcooled” son) have trouble spelling the word “school correctly.

The latest example, as reported by Fox News:

An embarrassing misspelling of “school” is gone from the street outside a New York City school building.

Utility workers used heavy machinery to ground up the wrongly placed “H” and “C” in the “SHCOOL X-NG” sign on Tuesday. The correction was made a day after the New York Post reported the spelling error.

Filed under: Government and Grammar and Human Interest and Just For Laughs and Photography
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The Puppet’s Court In Cleveland

Posted on 01.19.12 by Danny Glover @ 9:20 pm

A Cleveland television station has taken the concept of a “kangaroo court” onto the airwaves and online in a satirical publicity stunt that re-enacts the proceedings of a corruption trial using puppets. The CBS affiliate WOIO started the series last week, airing the lighthearted clips at the end of its newscast, and this morning posted the fifth video report from “The Puppet’s Court.”

The enlightened redneck and social media strategist within me love the station’s creative way of adding entertainment and humor to an important story. But the news curmudgeon within me is saying what one of the station’s anchors did amid her laughter at the report: “I’m horrified.”

Watch the other puppet reports on the station’s YouTube channel.

Hopefully this lampooning of the legal system will help convince courts to let cameras in trials so TV stations don’t have to create video coverage.

Filed under: Government and Just For Laughs and Media and Social Media and Video
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Jay Leno Was Wrong About W.Va. — Again

Posted on 01.16.12 by Danny Glover @ 2:19 pm

I’ve had my work published in some of America’s top publications, including The New York Times, but there’s something special about seeing my byline for the first time in the local newspaper I delivered as a child — and in defense of my fellow West Virginians and Mountaineers.

After writing a blog post about Jay Leno’s West Virginia jokes, I asked the executive editor of The Intelligencer/Wheeling News-Register if he would be interested in publishing a column on the issue. He agreed. It ran in print yesterday and went online today.

Here are excerpts from the column (with one background link added by me):

For one magnificent moment after the Orange Bowl on Jan. 4, West Virginia University and the entire state of West Virginia were the talk of America. Sports fans were in awe of the Mountaineers, who set record after record in one of the greatest football games in college history.

We West Virginians should have known the hillbilly bashers wouldn’t let us bask in the glory for long, and sure enough, the predictable slam came less than 24 hours after the final whistle.

“And West Virginia beat Clemson in the Orange Bowl last night by a score of 70-33,” Jay Leno said in his “Tonight Show” monologue the day after the game. “West Virginia scored 70 points? Huh, West Virginia? They don’t score that high on their SATs.”

Leno apparently holds to the comedic philosophy that when all else fails — and the “Tonight Show” has been one big fail after another for the past two years — just tell a West Virginia joke. …

Leno hasn’t yet sunk as low as Vice President Dick Cheney, who scored a cheap laugh in 2008 by characterizing West Virginia as a state full of inbreeding rednecks. But he’s sliding toward that gutter. His latest jab alienated the West Virginians who still watch Leno and further infuriated those who long ago tuned out the “Tonight Show.” …

But that’s OK. We West Virginians don’t need the affirmation of entertainers or politicians or anyone else who finds joy in insulting us. Most Americans voted against West Virginia before the Orange Bowl, and as our Mountaineers boasted at the end of the game, most Americans were wrong.

They always are when it comes to Almost Heaven.

Read the whole column at the newspaper’s website.

Filed under: Hatin' On Rednecks and Media and People and Rednecks and Sports and West Virginia
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The Newspaper Life

Posted on 01.04.12 by Danny Glover @ 5:35 pm

When I decided to become a journalist, I imagined I’d be working in an atmosphere much closer to this one than the one I’ve known for the past 20 years:

The tools for producing and distributing journalism in the information age are much better than those of yesteryear, but I do long for the days of the “rewrite man” and copy editors. They were the protectors of the art of great writing — a mostly lost art in today’s era of blogs, tweets and text messages, where too many journalists think good grammar and consistent style are antiquated.

Filed under: Grammar and History and Media and Social Media and Video
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Pinterest For Rednecks

Posted on 12.23.11 by Danny Glover @ 3:14 pm

Pinterest is the latest social media craze, and as someone who makes his living in the digital marketing world, I’ve been meaning to try it for awhile. I requested an invite to join Pinterest a few days ago and received it this morning. That’s when the inspiration hit me to create a “Redneck Humor” board.

But first a bit about Pinterest: As the name implies, the site is a place where you “pin” pictures of the people, places and things that “interest” you. But this virtual pinboard also has a social aspect to it. After you pin photos to your topical boards, other people can “like” them, “repin” them to their own Pinterest boards or comment on the photos.

The network is especially popular with women, who use it to create collections of recipes, clothes and other items. But as I poked around the site today, I realized that it’s a great forum for creating photo essays and themed albums on topics that interest me, too — sports, politics, West Virginia and, of course, rednecks.

I decided to make my trial run on Pinterest a fun one by pinning photos from past “Redneck Humor” entries on this blog. (One potential benefit is new readers.) I also scoured the Internet for other photographic displays of redneck humor and pinned several of them to my board.

This photo album is a win-win for both you and for me. It makes it easier for rednecks who love to laugh at and with their kinfolk (in spirit, if not reality) to find “snapshots of happily uncultured American life” in one place. And It’s much easier and quicker for me to pin multiple photos to Pinterest than to blog about each photo individually.

When it comes to redneck humor, pictures tell the story far better than my words anyway.

So if you have not done so yet, click on over to my new Pinterest board and get your fill of redneck laughs. And if you’re so inclined, request your own invite to Pinterest and repin or like the photos that make you laugh the most.

Filed under: Blogging and Human Interest and Just For Laughs and Photography and Redneck Humor and Social Media
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Ned Stevens Gutter Talk

Posted on 12.21.11 by Danny Glover @ 8:01 am

A few weeks ago at my company’s blog, I sang the praises of social media as the best communications tool for getting satisfaction after bad consumer experiences.

Lodging complaints via Facebook and Twitter is far more effective than using the telephone, I said. “Why endure that grief, which often yields no satisfaction, when I can spur a major corporation into action by tweeting 140 characters or by posting an embarrassing photo to Facebook?”

Days later, I unintentionally proved my own point during an infuriating phone encounter with Ned Stevens Gutter Cleaning. Both my wife and I had to endure an obnoxious lecture from an employee more determined to “educate” us about the realities of gutter cleaning than to abide by the guarantee that our gutters actually were clean.

We’ve been customers of Ned Stevens Gutter Cleaning for several years, ever since we moved into a three-story home whose gutters are beyond my limited ladder reach. We’ve been pleased with the company’s service most of the time, but we have had occasional problems, including our neighbor once witnessing Ned Stevens Gutter employees failing to clean all of the gutters on our house. When we reported that incident, the company sent a crew back to the house to finish the job.

Ned Stevens Gutter often sends workers to our home when we are not here to witness the cleaning, so it takes a certain measure of trust to believe its teams do the work effectively. We hadn’t had any major problems except for the one episode, though, so Ned Stevens Gutter Cleaning had earned our trust. The company lost that trust in a big way two weeks ago.
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Filed under: Advertising and Business and Family and Social Media
Comments: 1 Comment

Twitter Hall Of Fame (And Shame)

Posted on 12.05.11 by Danny Glover @ 7:42 am

Twitter has released its picks for the top 10 tweets of 2011. Some of them will make it into my new Tumblr-blog-in-progress, the Twitter Hall of Fame.

I’m covering the flip side of Twitter on a second Tumblr, the Twitter Hall of Shame. The “fame” blog recognizes previously unknown people who found their proverbial 15 minutes of fame through Twitter, and the “shame” blog is a memorial to famous folks — celebrities, politicians, athletes and more — who tweet before they think.

Feel free to recommend stories past, present and future for both blogs. Email your nominations to danny@enlightenedredneck.com.

Filed under: Blogging and Business and Social Media and Video
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Rep. Paul Ryan, Deer Slayer

Posted on 11.23.11 by Danny Glover @ 6:35 pm

During the legislative season, Paul Ryan is a budget geek in Congress. But when hunting season comes, he’s a whitetail wonk and a sharpshooter in the wilds of Wisconsin.

The proof is in this picture that Ryan, R-Wis., posted to his Facebook page today:

“I butcher my own deer, grind the meat, stuff it in casings and then smoke it,” Ryan told Politico. “Not much to it.”

That, my friends, is an enlightened redneck.

Filed under: An Enlightened Redneck ... and Government and Hunting & Guns and People and Photography and Rednecks and Wildlife
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Megyn Kelly’s Life Of Crime

Posted on 11.02.11 by Danny Glover @ 9:45 pm

Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly confessed her life of crime to a national television audience today. Well, it wasn’t so much a life of crime as a one-time shoplifting incident for Halloween when she was 12, but the admission still made some entertaining TV:

“That’s it,” a sheepish Kelly said to close the segment. “Now I won’t be able to run for president or be a Supreme Court justice because I confessed my crime on national television.”

Filed under: Media and News & Politics and People and Video
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Puking On The Pitt Pumpkin

Posted on 10.31.11 by Danny Glover @ 10:27 pm

Sometimes we West Virginia University fans have a twisted sense of humor. Our “Backyard Brawl” rivalry with the Pitt Panthers brings out the best of the worst within us.

The Mountaineers win the “Front-Porch Pumpkin Brawl”!

Filed under: Just For Laughs and Photography and Redneck Humor and Sports and West Virginia
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Old Advice For A New Age

Posted on 10.29.11 by Danny Glover @ 10:15 pm

Back in the late 1990s, I briefly joined the National Conference of Editorial Writers while I was working at an e-zine called IntellectualCapital.com, which we liked to think of as the op-ed page on the Web. At the time, many NCEW members held the freewheeling Internet masses in contempt. I was among the few who didn’t and had some rather pointed debates over the issue with my skeptical colleagues.

I had forgotten that I wrote an article about the issue for the NCEW magazine, The Masthead, back in 1999. I just rediscovered that article online. It’s as relevant in today’s era of blogging and social media, where the power of editorial gatekeepers is greatly diminished, as it was more than a decade ago, so I’m going to reprint the article. Here it is:

Old Advice For A New Age
The Masthead
March 22, 1999

By K. Daniel Glover

A half-century ago, at the first convention of the National Conference of Editorial Writers, renowned newspaperman Henry Louis Mencken admonished our founders with these words: “No editorial writer,” he said, “ought to be permitted to sit in an editorial room for month after month and year after year, contemplating his umbilicus. He ought to go out and meet people.”

Simple words (with the exception of umbilicus!), simple message: Get out of your ivory editorial tower and listen to the people lest you make a mockery of your profession.

Mencken’s message retains its relevancy today, which explains its presence within the corner of cyberspace we know as NCEW Online, and it is a message every online (and perhaps offline) commentator ignores at his or her own risk. Why? The one-word answer: interactivity.

You see, there are no ivory towers on the Internet. “The people” have rejected both the editorial elitism of the past and the hit-and-run punditry of the present. They have demanded a voice in the national discourse, and the World Wide Web has given them that voice — one that often is unfiltered and unlimited.
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Filed under: Blogging and Media and Social Media and Technology
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Bad News, Good News (In Pictures)

Posted on 10.27.11 by Danny Glover @ 9:18 am

One of the most common complaints about the media is that they emphasize bad news almost to the exclusion of good news. The truth of that critique was never more obvious than in yesterday’s “Pictures of the Day” on Lens, a New York Times blog about photography.

Readers were treated to a series of photo stories full of bad news, including:

Flooding in Bangkok;
Fiery protests by Yemeni women against their government;
Earthquake devastation in Turkey;
War in Afghanistan and Libya;
Physical fighting in Italy’s parliament;
The police crackdown on “Occupy” protesters in Atlanta;
And Palestinians rooting through the “garbage” of Jewish settlers on the West Bank.

The Times apparently prefers to front load its journalism with bad news and end on a happier note, though. The 12th picture of 13 featured a colorful image of a prayerful religious festival in Sri Lanka and then this gorgeous snapshot of a double rainbow over London.

Filed under: Human Interest and News & Politics and Photography and Weather
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‘Must Be Able To Work Indecently’

Posted on 10.19.11 by Danny Glover @ 1:14 pm

I know the economy is bad, but is it so bad that people would be willing to consider a job where one of the skills required is this:

Must be able to work indecently, with minimal direct supervision.

I can see why someone who is willing to work indecently wouldn’t want much direct supervision. The job also requires “overnight travel” and a willingness to “embrace diversity.”

One laughable error in word choice makes the ad sound like something from an adult publication, but it’s actually a listing for … a food-safety specialist in Northern Virginia/Maryland. No pole-dancing required.

My guess is that the ad meant to say the employee “must be able to work independently.” Instead, we see what happens when all of the copy editors are downsized.

Filed under: 1980s and Adoption and Books and Business and Grammar and Just For Laughs and Media
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