GoNOMAD's An Exciting Place To Be Now!

It sometimes boggles my mind how much happens in this little office, everything is happening in marvelous waves. We've been in touch with another larger travel website about a new partnership, developing a whole new suite of pages with quality content. It's going to be a great new way to share information with our readers.

Also just this week we're launching an expanded and more colorful GoNOMAD tour directory, with exciting tours around the world that will be mixed in with our articles. So if you're reading a story about Carcassone, France, you'll be able to price out trips there, and how much flights cost.

We're pretty excited about the quality of the offerings, and we join the likes of Expedia, Lonely Planet and Frommers in partnering with these folks. Down the road are new plans to sell passport services, currency exchange and a large selection of vacation rentals on the site.

Though these additions are key to our growth, the site still surprises me with the quality of our stories. We just posted a new list in February's newsletter, have a look at them here.

Tomorrow we say hello to Manjula, who will start as a GoNOMAD web designer next week. She will be customizing all of the stories to add the flight and tour links to help travelers GO!

The Subway Sub Soared, But Quiznos Was Too Heavy to Kick

Ad agencies are coming up with rich sources of quality content and ideas...and Quizno Subs is getting sued by Subway over their agency's latest idea...allow users to submit videos attacking their competitor's sandwiches. I laughed out loud when I read the topics of some of the 115 videos sent in trying to claim the $10,000 prize. The New York Times had the story.

"One of the videos shows a wife arriving home with a Quiznos sub for her husband, and a Subway sandwich for the dog. . One showed two submarine fashioned as sandwiches, with the one representing Subway being obliterated because it did not have enough meat. In a third two men punt sandwiches across a parking lot, the Subway one soars high, the Quiznos one is so heavy that the man falls over when he kicks it.

When the suit was first brought up to Quiznos and their agency, they claimed the same exemption from legal action that YouTube, that user generated content is protected because of the Communications Decency Act, which immunizers 'providers of interactive computer services from responsibility for user postings on their sites...the same way AOL says they're not liable for the scurrilious things people say about eachother in its chat rooms.

At the root of Subway's beef is that their competitor egged contestants on to slam them in their homemade ads. If Subway wins, there will be new rules on the wild frontier of home-styled product attack ads.

At Hope and Olive, a Fine Schmooze It Was

The cafe sponsored a get together for Chamber of Commerce members up at Hope and Olive, a very hip and cool new restaurant that is putting Greenfield on the culinary map. One of their owners, Tim Zaccaro, showed me his selection...more than 30 bottles of wine available by the glass. I enjoyed a crisp Vouvray and waded into the crowd to schmooze.

I met a woman who is a doctor, practicing at Franklin Medical Center. I asked her if being a doctor meant that you got all sorts of soliciations from investment firms, and junk mail by the ton. I also asked her if she worked a lot of hours. She said, yes, she does get approached by these investment sellers, who think she has more money than she does. And she manages to work just forty hours a week, so she's not burning the candle at both ends as one might think.

Then I met a woman I have met before who runs a lumber company. She said that we should sell these capsules full of coffee because everyone loves these new kind of coffeemakers and that we'd get rich if we sold the little plastic devices. But, they don't come filled with the coffee we sell, I said. Still she insisted that I should find these and stock my cafe with them, and that many people will come in and buy them.

I moved on to visit with a woman whom I hadn't seen in years. The memory was hazy---it was a high tech broadband outfit in South Deerfield. Yes, it all came back. We sold her hundreds of denim shirts, and before that she used to work for my friend Denis who died trying to land his high-performance Mooney plane on a foggy South Carolina runway. One of the nicest things about living in the same area for so many decades are these connections, that come about often, and connect you with your past.

Kim now works for her brother's telecommunications business, and like me, is doing well as we enter 2008. It was a festive and fun gathering, glad to have my good friend Jack there and our cafe manager Liz, who deserved a fun night out watching the old master schmooze.

Please, Please Stop Leaving that Free Paper Here

It's a glorious Sunday at the cafe, many people coming and going. I had a chance to read the Republican and found a story close to my heart. It was about free newspapers, and quoted readers in Baltimore MD as having to fight to stop a free daily from landing on the edge of their driveway every day, whether they ask for it or not.

I had a similar battle at my post office when I asked if they wouldn't mind NOT putting the Recorder's junk mail into my box. "We have to put it there," said the clerk. "You can't refuse to get it." In New Zealand, one thing I noticed that nearly every mailbox has a little hand lettered sign saying 'no advertising mail,' or 'no circulars.' They can opt out, and that's good.

In Sweden, it's hard to avoid having men and women wearing special vests that say SE hand you copies of their free daily. I remember a dinner in Copenhagen with a woman who edits an old line newspaper's free daily. They publish the thing at a $300K per day loss, just because there are two other free dailies that keep coming out and competing for ad dollars. In Europe, free dailies have sprouted up in every major city, and now at least three are published nearly everywhere. Many are published by an Icelandic billionaire named Thor Bjorgolfsson.

In Baltimore, lawmakers are trying to pass a law to make newspapers bend to the wishes of customers who don't want their free papers. The law also would force publishers to include a toll-free number to call and stop the deluge. But its prospects aren't good, as lawmakers are being lobbied by publishers, and wave their famous free speech flag. The publisher in Baltimore claims that "keeping that annoyance to a minimum is among my highest priorities." Yet he's fighting the law that gives these unwilling readers a chance to stop receiving them.

Dennis Brennan's Soft Jazz and Poignant Rock

I'm just back from a virtoustic show at the Iron Horse by Dennis Brennan. He's a clear singer, poignant writer, and tender ennuciator of lovely songs that he played tonight at the Northampton theater stage. It was a celebration of the guitar, a championing of the instrument, so many fantastically talented guitarists, playing in harmony, so many different ways.
It was jazz, it was rock, it was softer drifting almost into classical...no, jazz, really engaging. The Horse's famous acoustics did him proud, with the softest tinest most delicate notes being strummed by Kevin Barry.

The band would slowly, quietly, back into a song.. then they would step down onto a lower level and booooomm! They'd let loose with a streaming, rollicking funky celebration of the guitar!
He sings a song about Charlestown hoods, taunting them to get in touch with him. It reminded me of looking for Whitey Bulger. "But that was in Southie," Bill leaned over and told me. "Not Charlestown."

This band blended the talents of many into a streaming, pulsing, intoxicating mix that is made better by the smart and poignant lyrics. Joe made an excellent choice by putting me in touch with this band. WOW! What a night out!

This Hilltown Squire Was a Man to Remember

Yesterday at the cafe, I picked up the Recorder and found a lovely tribute written by Gary Sanderson to a 'hilltown squire' whom he had the pleasure of spending some time with on a ride over country roads in his pick-up earlier in January. Sanderson thought it was an abandoned house, but low and behold, there was "a gray-haired, coverall-clad man loading cordwood into the bucket in front of his tractor." They stopped to set a spell, and he writes about how refreshing it was to meet an honest to goodness, hilltown agronomist, who was so real and genuine.

The two talked about family, and the land, and the rolling hills and beautiful back country that drew them here. And they talked about deer, both agreeing that there are no longer the large bucks and plentiful does that once roamed these hills. Then they talked about cordwood, since it was evident that the old gent was in the business. Once, he said, cords went for $15, now he said he has a friend who can't make a living even selling $200 cords. He thought he could. When he began adding up the cords, concluding that 100 would net him $20,000 and wouldn't he be set?

The flatlander, Sanderson, threw out that he knew people who were barely making it on the huge sum of $100,000 a year. That shocked the old guy, 'maybe those people don't know how to add water to their oatmeal,' came his ripost. Sanderson admired his salt of the earth demeanor and values, and wrote about how sad it will be when all of these types are gone. I agree.

Deerfield Attractions Website Makes its Debut

I woke up this morning and got a nice surprise. Old Joe my webmaster can still delight and amaze, while at the same time managing to make me almost pull out the few hairs left on the top of my head. Last night I spoke before the Deerfield Selectboard, talking about our plan to put up four signs directing people to the center of the village. Bernie Kubiak gave them the lay of the land, I was there to emphasize the point....that even though the town was paying, most travelers are looking for food, lodging, coffee, and maybe WiFi, not where they can pay their property taxes. So I made up a bunch of sample signs, sort of haiku, different ways in which we might point out our fairly concentrated, yet hidden burg here in the center off of Route 5.

The board was very hospitable, and once we come up with those key 40 characters, they said they'be happy to pay for the signs. I told them about our new promotional group, that was featured in last week's paper. "The one thing the reporter didn't mention," I told them, looking around to the new guy here, Jeremy Dirac of the Recorder, "is that our action plan called for the creation of a new website to promote ourselves. It's now on line, and it's called Deerfield Attractions.com. So I had hoped that the paper would pick up on this and include our new website address in a story.

Joe finished off the basic look of the site while I fell asleep last night. This morning, voila! There it is, looking great, and soon this will be a major way we'll promote our town's attractions.

Fighting for the Right Signs, From My Sickbed

I remember so well that Saturday afternoon when our town offered flu shots for the public. I even put up the notice on the cafe bulletin board, vowing to get the shot myself to avoid getting sick this winter. Then I looked up at the clock that day and saw that it ended at 1 pm, and I missed my chance at a shot.

For the past three days I've been down with the flu. It's a rarity for me to be sick, and I keep thinking about that flu shot that I didn't get. Rats! Last night I awoke to a dark and quiet house and thought it was the middle of the night...but it was only 10:45 pm. Fitful weird dreams, covers being thrown about, and through it all Mama cat by my side, the serenely calm bedside partner who keeps her distance down on the bottom of the bed.

Despite my illness, that is now receding, I've got some battles to fight this week, so I have to muster my strength. One involves signs on the two roads that pass South Deerfield's downtown. I've rallied my fellow business people to propose that the state erect signs that point to the downtown business district, and worked out the proposal with the town manager.

Then I hear that he wants the signs to point to "Municipal Offices, Police Station, Library" instead of "Restaurants, Shops, Downtown South Deerfield." Something about how if the town is paying that's what they should say. So I am going to show up at the selectman's meeting, (hopefully I can recruit some fellow business owners), and lobby for a more mercantile wording.

I mean, who drives by Yankee Candle wondering where they can find the town hall?

Nobody Asks for Press Cards Anymore, Do They?

I remember a spirited debate with Shoul once when I suggested that press IDs, which were once issued to reporters and photographers, were no longer neccessary. I told him that I thought people used business cards now, and that the press card thing was a throw-back, an old and gone tradition.

Today I read in a NH newspaper that the state there will no longer issue these press IDs. That's because the man in charge, Jim Van Dongen of the Dept of Safety, says there are too many new online and specialty news outlets and he doesn't want to have to be the decider about who gets one. It's a sign of the times of our blurry distrinction between the many different kinds of journalists.

Van Dongen said that in NH, between 150 and 200 people ask for the passes a year, but the truth is, they don't get many chances to use them.

Talking About Stockholm with Kevin and Sue

Today while all of New England is gathered to watch our beloved Patriots try and make it 17-0, I will be taken away from the game for a phone call. It will be Kevin and Sue McCarthy on the line, calling from their Travel Planners Show in St. Louis. The topic for today will be Stockholm, where Kent and I traveled in December.

These Midwesterners are always cheerful and fun, and the show is a breeze. They don't throw tough questions at you, and I usually can remember enough details to provide their listeners with the kinds of details that travelers are interested in. The interview will be about 10 minutes, after that I can breath a sigh of relief and watch our Pats crush the Chargers on their way to their next Superbowl.

Bashing Cars and Slipping on Ice

Yesterday's post was about Sayulita, Mexico, where it's balmy, dusty, hot and there is no snow. This week made me realize that despite my fantasies about spending some time in that beach town, for now I'm definitely in New England and it's January.

First, I walloped a stop sign while making a turn onto my road during Monday's snowstorm. I think driving a four-wheel drive with big tires makes you forget that you still have to stop...and as that slow motion accident occurred, me sliding, slowly, right into that stop sign, I realized the folly of my short-lived security. Jumping out, I see that I've merely ripped the auxiliary fender off my black work truck, plastic accessories that look cool but don't do that much. So I shrug and decide not to worry about it.

Then this morning, I load up for a dump run , complete with the Christmas tree piled high in the back of the truck. Jumping in, I zoom backwards .... crunch! I've hit my son in law's Honda, parked in the driveway behind me. No, we're not in Mexico, and it's not warm, it's freakin' freezing. I meet a friend who I haven't seen for a while outside the cafe...he says that on Christmas night he fell on ice in his driveway and broke three ribs, been laid up ever since.

Outside as I type this, I watch people navigate our icy sidewalk, and thank god I took some time this morning to go out there with salt and a big metal ice scraper. The good news is that in our town there is an auto body shop run by a farmer who does good work cheap. Because the last thing I need now is to get the insurance people involved and pay surcharges for the next three years all because I backed up too quickly.

Living La Vida Pura in Sayulita Mexico

Kent passed along a book to me last month that I've been thoroughly enjoying. He reads so many books and it's a pleasure to get a crack at them when he's finished. Today was a sick day, so I had time to enjoy Gringos in Paradise, a new book by Barry Golson.

The book follows in well written detail the lives of a Connecticut couple, Thia and Barry, as they build a house in Sayulita Mexico, chasing a dream that was hatched when Barry wrote an article about Americans moving to Mexico for AARP magazine. With this taste in his mouth and dwindling finances (the difficult life of the freelance writer), the pair decides to take the plunge, despite the naysayers they meet at Connecticut dinner parties.

What I love about Golson's style is that he is so honest and direct. I even recognized the name of one of GoNOMAD's advertisers when he talks about his strategy for figuring out how to get his house designed and built. The beach town of Sayulita is a mix of dogs, dust, gringos and friendly locals, with children running through the streets and a relaxing, shorts and sandals feel. There are so many Americans they make fast friends, yet they have no desire to live anything but Mexican lives during their retirement.

Thia and Barry need to get a frame made for a painting they had commissioned, and find a man named Armando, who works out of a rickety woodshop in nearby La Penita. Like so many of the people the meet in Mexico, Armando takes the time to get to know them, and he tells them about an ancient Huichol site with rock carvings and a pool with a carved throne. It's a special place and Armando delights in sharing the history. Later he finds a family that sells fresh shucked oysters, and they set up a table in the driveway and slurp the freshly caught mollusks washed down with Pacifico beers.

This is why we came to Mexico, says Thia. I cannot remember an afternoon like this. It is a gift.

"Esto es la vida pura, no?" Armando asks. "Is this not pure life?"

In China, Keeping Mentally Ill in Cages is Common

I remember when I was a kid growing up in New Jersey, there was a family that had a little cage that their sons played in. It was a cage, not for them to live in, but to play in, but nonetheless, many neighbors talked about this with horror.

I recalled this yesterday when I read about how this is common in China...keeping mentally ill children and adults in cages to keep them from hurting family and neighbors. It's a sad story because it goes back to economics. Few peasants in China can afford to pay to institutionalize their sick kids, so some put them in cages. The WSJ's Nicholas Zamiska wrote about one family named Wang, whose son killed a woman in their village with a knife. With help from their neighbors, the Wangs built a 6' x 7' x 3' wide cage and since 2003, they never let their son Guocheng out. After the murder, he was supposed to spend five years in prison, but a few months later the authorities let him live in his home cage instead.

"One day last March, Guocheng managed to break one of the bars loose from the top of his cage, crawled through the hole, and killed his mother, beating her to death with the bar. He later returned to the cage on his own. "

It's pretty clear that his dad Wang Yanxu will never let him out again. But after the publicity and photos were published showing the murderer in his home cage, he was admitted to a Mental Disease recovery hospital, and the state decided to pay the $1600 per year expense.

Not So Bafflingly, Mossberg Pans a New Phone

Walter S. Mossberg can kill or redeem any electronics product just by a bad or good mention in his personal technology column in the WSJ. I cracked up when I read his review of the new Voyager phone from Verizon, which he wasn't impressed with.

"In fact the Voyager, bafflingly, has several different user interfaces--two on the outer touch screen and an entirely different one on the inner screen above the keyboard that doesn't work by touch at all. Some functions work only with the inner screen. Scrolling through lists is a halting, frustrating process compared with the smooth, slick scrolling on the iPhone."

He continues, comparing how the two phones go into airplane mode, when you have to turn your ringer off. It takes two steps on the iphone but five steps on the Voyager. The phone doesn't use ubiquitous WiFi, instead, relies on Verizon's own 3G networks, and 'the user interface is clumsy and confusing." Ouch!

I would think that a company as smart at LG would be able to do a better job copying Apple's software, or steal away someone who could better replicate what the iPhone does. But the heart of the problem is that the iPhone put a real Pc-grade operating system in their units, and the LG people had to bend to Verizon's own less developed 3G.

He Made $3 or $4 Billion in 2007--Is He Happy?

If you know anyone who is rich, they can't hold a candle to John Paulson. This hedge fund operator made an estimated $3 to $4 billion for himself in 2007. He did it by betting against the sub-prime loan market, and he hit the jackpot. In today's WSJ, Gregory Zuckerman writes that Paulson has a pal. A protege, an admirer, who has made about $500 million so far by copying Paulson. His name is Jeffery Greene, and he was married to a glamorous Chinese woman at his estate, called Palazzo di Amore, in a lavish ceremony.

What about this bothers me? Why is this a little bit like when you hear the contract that was extended to Lebron James or Michael Jordan? Jaws drop then too. The paragraph above though, proves that to make the super-duper, insanity money, you have to work with money, and manipulate values, and exist on a whole other plane than most people.

There has to be a steep learning curve to become a hedgefund billionaire, doesn't there? I find myself asking, 'is there a special skill, or a deserved attribute that allows men to make these kinds of fortunes? Are they happier than us because of their outrageous financial success?

Coskata Makes Fuel from Corn Husks and Gets GM Boost

Sometimes people comment to me on how much I like reading. I read the entire Wall St. Journal, much to my daughter's surprise."You're always reading, Dad," she told me, as I finished up the last section. Sometimes my family gets mad at me and says I'm ignoring them (the NJ ones anyway) but I'm not...I just need to read, all of the time.

How else would I find out about such fascinating topics as GM buying into a cellulosic-ethanol company?

I first heard of this firm, Coskata Inc, while riding a bus to NYC last year. It's founded by a former VC named Vinod Khosla, who in the Wired article was preaching about how someday we will make fuel from things like corn husks, weeds and sawdust.

At the time I read this, California was on the verge of passing a law that would have taxed oil companies on their leases and would have generated billions for research in cellulose-derived energy. Unfortunately, the bill failed so none of this money was passed on for research.

GM's investment in Coskata means that the technology will make great strides, and since the raw materials for this fuel is virtually anything with cellulose in it, the supply is unlimited and free. More than a dozen companies are rushing to develop this far-ranging concept, since there isn't enough room to grow all the corn we need and the price for corn-based ethanol is sinking fast.

Getting to Know Pirates in the Straits of Malacca

Yesterday as I was helping Cindy move her office I had time to peruse a copy of National Geographic. There I found a story about a favorite topic: Pirates. In the long story, Peter Gwin meets up with an Indonesian pirate who is held in a Malaysian jail, after a failed hijacking attempt on a tanker in the Straits of Malacca. I remember seeing the ships out there, where more than 250 have been victims of pirates, when I visited the city of the same name on Malaysia's coast in 2005.

Gwin quizzes the pirate, called a 'Lanun' in Malay, who can't figure out why anyone would want to talk to him. He agrees after the writer promises a gift of toothpaste and a brush. The piracy incident that landed this slender man named Arrafin in jail went terribly wrong for the bad guys. After they scaled the ship and tied up 16 of the crewman, they began torturing the ship captain, and blasting his cries for help over the ship's loudspeakers. But there was a 17th crewman, (who Gwin also interviews), who snuck away and hid...then clambered over the side and sped off in the pirate's own speedboat, leaving the bad guys on a ship headed out to sea. The hero quickly contacted police who caught up with the ship a few hours later.

Then the intrepid writer joins a couple of seedy characters and they go to a karaoke bar in Batam, a place that was once touted as the next Singapore but that has fallen into a harder time so that now it is full of strip clubs and drug dens. He gets to know a few other pirates who show him how they carve long pole out of bamboo to scale up the backs of the ships, and told him that after a big 'shopping trip' (their term for a successful piracy heist) they repair back here to these seedy bars for marathon meth sessions or orgies with multiple hookers who work the bars.

Gwin spends enough time with these bad guys to get inside their heads, and the result is a profile of men with nothing to lose, very little fear, and who pirate partly for the excitement, and of course, the riches. At the article's end, Gwin gets a text message from one of the pirates, two months after he's back in the states. "I got a job as a master of a tanker," said the text, and Gwin wonders how long this guy will possibly work at a regular job, and not in the shadowy world of the pirates.

It's Our Super Deluxe Booth for the Javits

Here is our newest acquisition...a cool tradeshow booth that fits into the little stand shown in front, that we'll use at the Javits Center for the NY Times Travel Show.

No more borrowing booths, no more fussing over hard to assemble old outdated equipment. It took my friend Dave and I all of fifteen minutes to assemble this 10 x 9 booth, and it was a snap!

Now we'll create a huge vinyl sign to hang in front that will look just like the GoNOMAD front page. And on the sides we'll have large lettering so even if you're 100 feet away, you'll see us!

Advantum Displays are the people who make this product and I must give them serious props for doing a great job and making it all so easy to assemble.

The Trouble Began With a Rodent Limb

I read today as I sat in the cafe looking at the rain about a very sad restauranteur. Sad because business at her Chinese restaurant is down more than 70%. The photo in today's Daily Hampshire Gazette showed Rachel Wang setting a table for lunch in a forelorn and empty Hunan Gourmet.

The trouble began last month, when a patron discovered a tiny rodent limb in their order of vegetable moo shu. Ouch! Since then the restaurant has laid off employees and changed the suppliers of the bamboo shoots and wood ear mushrooms, that might have been the source of the dastardly deed.

The family returned the take-out order and got their $51 back, but photographed the rodent part as it sat in its bath of moo shu. Laboratory analysts say it appears to be "the front foot and partial leg of an unknown variety of rodent." Wang suspects it came from China, in one of the cans of the now-banned supplier's mushrooms or bamboo shoots.

Even though the board of health has given Hunan an approval, another restauranteur recalls just how hard it is to rebound after one of these incidents. "I felt her pain when they were going through it," said Peter St. Martin, owner of Sylvesters, who 20 years ago had a similar scare.

Getting Ready for the Big Show

Now the big PR blitz begins...I mailed out press releases to local newspapers here trumpeting our first appearance as exhibitors at the New York Times Travel Show. Hopefully this will be newsworthy to our local papers and we'll see some coverage. In the release I detail my plans to present a seminar on search engine optimizing in Boston and our Travel Writing Class that we'll hold at the Javits during the event. Kent and I will teach the basics and bring in some ringers we know in the city to add to the fun.

Yesterday Matt called me from the cafe. "Max, come over, there's a big, big package here for you." I hurried over and in the kitchen sat a massive box, with handles showing through the carton. It was our new trade show booth, a massive ten-foot by seven foot wall that fits in the booth we'll have at the Javits Center. For four years we've gotten by by borrowing a booth from our friends at Bolduc's Apparel, now finally, we've got our own and that feels like we've arrived.

Dave Chouinard, the proprietor of Graphics Pro, will come up over the weekend when we assemble this baby in the garage. Then we can measure it all out and make a huge vinyl banner that will mock the look of the GoNOMAD website. Dave has been so valuable to our businesses, coming up with layouts for the show hand-outs, business cards, and designing cool looking websites for our client. It's a great fit and we're happy to be working with reliable, solid, talented and dependable Dave.

The Office is Hoppin' Late Tonight

I got a task done today that has been on my mind for weeks. Boy it was good to hit send, and give Jeremy all of the info he needs about my Search Engine Optimizing workshop at the Boston Globe Travel Show on February 22.

I'll have to get an early start, and motor in to a 10:30 speaking engagement. I will present common sense advice to make your website come up higher in organic Google searches. I love this topic and spend much of my day reading up, tweaking and playing with the algorithm in my head and listing and re-listing the principals that make some sites come up high, and others low.

I was pleased to hear from Tom Vannah that he was publishing my story about Vero Beach in the Valley Advocate this week. This is the first issue that will be printed on the Gazette's shiny new Italian press.

We've also added a new feature on GoNOMAD that provides a sound gallery of radio shows archived by topic from the Around the World Radio Show. Now you can listen to interviews about the topics of the articles.

Tony Wheeler Zooms the Dunes of Libya

I've had Tony Wheeler's new book "Bad Lands," by my bedside table, I read the section on his trip to Libya. In the book the author visits as many vilified places as he can, including North Korea, Albania, Iraq and Iran among others.

A few stories Wheeler relates that he learned from his tour guides gave insight into what the Libya is like today. Wheeler, the founder of Lonely Planet, is an articulate writer who uses funny phrases but manages to convey the essence of the place. He recounts a story told to him by a friend who worked in Libya's oil business in the 1970s.

There were two flights that left Tripoli for Rome....one empty and one completely full. The first was flown by Libyan Arab Airlines, and the latter by Alitalia. Everyone on the Alitalia flight would be clamoring for a drink and the moment the door was shut the flight attendants would be racing down the aisle handing out drinks before the plane reached the runway.

Wheeler goes out into the desert, his Toureg guides zoom their Land Rover up the steep sand dunes and park at the highest peak, offering views of the deep blue lakes visible in the horizon. 'A dragon's backbone of dunes, regular as a sine wave, ripples away to the southeast."

One sad thing Wheeler relates about Libya is that everywhere he goes there is litter and garbage by the side of the roads. In fact approaching towns in the desert are marked by the build-up of debris on the roadside. When a guide notices a piece of the Leptis Magna, the country's best Roman ruins, has been stolen, he sinks into a funk. Dozens of similar pieces now reside at the chateau of Versailles and other French landmarks--stolen back in the 17th century.

Beckie, from 1968

I came across a collection of Polaroids from the '60s of women who were applying for jobs at strip clubs. They are charming and evocative of how women looked back then. Fascinating!

Huck: "Aren't I Great for Not Playing this Ad?"

Dana Milbank writes about New Year's Eve on the campaign trail in Iowa in the Washington Post. Here he zeroes in on the GOP front runner.

"Huckabee was the lone candidate to defy his image; the GOP populist who rails against the country-club set scheduled his early-evening party at, uh, a members-only country club. His supporters were greeted by a "Huckabee 2008" ice sculpture, polished serving trays, and a bar stocked with Absolut, Stolichnaya and Tanqueray.

If the image wasn't quite right for the populist, it was not Huckabee's worst event of the day. That distinction went to his lunchtime news conference, at which he drew disbelieving laughter when he simultaneously displayed and disavowed his new attack ad. "You're not going to get a copy of it, so this is your change to see it, then after that, uh, you'll never see it again," Huckabee teased.

"Why are there still five easels up with the attacks?" challenged the Politico's Jonathan Martin. ABC News's Jake Tapper asked whether it might be "too late" to take the high road after Huckabee had compared Romney to "Seinfeld's" George Costanza.

Reporters began to ask each other whether this was Huckabee's "Howard Dean moment." And things didn't improve when he invited them to watch him get a haircut. Three dozen journalists, among them The Post's Libby Copeland, squeezed in to witness the shave, facial massage and haircut, performed by a barber wearing a microphone.

Amid the grooming, Huckabee continued to field questions about the attack ad. "You should've seen the ad I wanted him to run," the barber interjected.

By the time the well-shaved but roughed-up Huckabee arrived at his New Year's Eve party, he had become a man of modest goals. "Tonight, when I put my head on the pillow in 2007," he joked, "I plan not to wake up until 2008." The way things are going out here, even that wasn't guaranteed."

It's Almost Noon--Time to Fire up the Videos

Lunchtime is prime time for web viewing, according to a story in today's NY Times. Cube dwellers browse videos on websites all of the time but they ramp up viewing at this golden hour of noon.

Marketers have found that people who watch products videos at noon are 30% more likely to buy than if they had been viewed at any other time of day. clearly, people like the regular routine, said Mike Hudack, chief executive of blip.TV, a video sharing site. “Continuity and consistency is incredibly important,” Mr. Hudack said.

“If you want to attract a loyal audience, you have to give them what they expect when they expect it.”

"Walk around your office” at lunchtime, said Alan Wurtzel, head of research for NBC. “Out of 20 people, I’m going to guarantee that 5 are going to be on some sort of site that is not work-related.”

The midday spike in Web traffic is not a new phenomenon, but media companies have started responding in a meaningful way over the last year. They are creating new shows, timing the posts to coincide with hunger pangs. And they are rejiggering the way they sell advertising online, recognizing that noontime programs can command a premium.

Now newspapers are creating a special menu of videos that roll at noon. Hey, might as well fish where the fish are.

Early January at the GoNOMAD Cafe

Saturday at the cafe: A man meets a woman from a dating service. It looked like they enjoyed their coffee, but, no match. Then old pal Bill comes in, a regular. We sat for a coffee and then it was time to update the website we maintain for him. We posted some striking photos of nude marquetry on gigantic bureaus he designed with Silas Kopf.

Then time for errands; to the hardware store, drat, lights still don't work...then time to find a venue for the GoNOMAD Travel Ad Network party, in February during the New York Times Travel Show. Gotta find the right setting for tourism folks, ad people and clients to come schmooze at a cocktail reception. It's gotta be cool, centrally located, and not cost a mint.

Now, for tonight....I love the challenge of a Saturday afternoon, 'what do i want to do' session. I am thinking about this new Italian restaurant that just opened at Hatfield's Old Mill. I worked there briefly when the Valley Advocate had their offices there, now it's a BYOB restaurant. Maybe a date for tonight?

Thinking of Orchid Island When It's 4 Degrees

Last night with a sigh of relief I published my article about Vero Beach FL. I have tried to stick to a rule of publishing articles within a 30-day window after I return from a trip. I got back from Vero in late November, so this one was just about due. And since I just reported on the radio about our trip to Sweden, the clock was ticking.

I enjoyed my time there more than I thought I would. Often when we are asked what GoNOMAD is all about, an easy answer is that we don't cover Disneyworld, or the Bahamas, or most of Florida. That is, the typical tourist scene that most Americans think of as a vacation.

But in Vero Beach, not only did I get to indulge in fresh seafood like local pompano, grouper and stone crab, I got to paddle the Indian River with an expert paddler named Kristen Beck, and bicycle all around Orchid Island on a very cool 'forward pedal bike' that made it easier to pedal.

I got to pop into a few art galleries with my lovely host Lori Burns, the tourism head in Indian River County. She once toured the country with her band-leader husband, and then hosted her own TV show in Florida. She's been heading up tourism for decades and it was nice to be out on the town with her, since she knew so many people.

Brotherly Slide

It may be cold outside, but for Carlo and Nathan Cosme, it's time for sledding on Beacon Field in Greenfield. This photo appeared in the Republican Newspaper yesterday!

Melting Salt to Create Electricity Just Makes Cents

I got a chance to read the WSJ last night and found another example of how industry is charging ahead with fantastic new ways to generate power using the sun and wind. It's happening right near here at Hamilton Sundstrand, a division of United Technologies located in Connecticut. This company has developed a new partnership with US Renewables Group to develop power plants that use molten salt to generate electricity.

It's an elegant scheme, beginning with a 1200-acre field of mirrors, that all point up to a tower 600 feet in the sky. Inside, salt is heated to 1050 degrees, and then the heated salt is pumped through a steam generator where turbines create electricity. The systems can run continuously at 50 megawatts--enough juice to power 50,000 homes.

"We think there's a huge market out there," said David Hess, the company president, saying he expects to do about $1 billion in solar sales over the next 15 years.

Of course, Sundstrand has no shortage of work. Their components make up $2.5 million per airplane for Boeing's new 787 Dreamliner. And with 790 firm orders for this new jet on the books, that's a full pipeline of business for more than a few decades.

What If You Hosted a Party and it Snowed?

We woke up on this first day of 2008 to a dribbling of snow, which has now turned into a torrent. Bummer, because today is our Open House at One Green Lane, and we've invited 30 people over to sip wine and nibble a spiral ham. Ugh! As I sit here I watch those small little flakes that mean it's a serious storm...not the puffy white ones that disappear, no these babies are going to add up to a bunch of inches.

So now we contemplate what to do...how many people will come? How many roasted potatoes shall we make, should we freeze half of this honkin' ham for another day? It is a classic dilemma faced by party hosts.

Last night we were asleep before anyone blew a noisemaker. We enjoyed a Steve Buscemi movie called Interview before we retired, it was a fascinating study in two people who change as a result of a long night of drinking.

Resolutions for 2008? I will get to those soon enough!