$%!@ MY Dad Says

One of my favorite things about my dad is how funny he is (usually, albeit unintentionally).

Unlike some funny dads on the Internet these days (see: Justin’s dad), my dad is a man of far fewer words.

One particular phrase that often comes out of his mouth is among my favorite Dennis-isms. That phrase would be “more (object/subject/offending party) than you can shake a stick at.” I’ve been hearing this phrase for as long as I can remember. I’ve often puzzled over it’s meaning. Who is going around shaking sticks at objects in large quantities, I’ve often pondered.

Image courtesy of Using English

Apparently, my dad is.

The last time I was visiting my parents, my dad was standing in the kitchen looking out the window, outside of which many chipmunks were beginning to assemble their winter provisions. He was holding the golf club that he occasionally walks around the house carrying. “There are more [expletive deleted] little [expletive deleted] out there than you can shake a stick at,” my dad mused, shaking his head. Dad doesn’t like the chipmunks, who tear up the yard he painstakingly cares for. Nor does he like their architectural endeavors, which usually end with structural damage to his landscaping.

Noted.

Image courtesy of Sulekha.com

Whilst watching my dad curse over his yard’s furry little denizens, it dawned on me that in saying his trademark phrase, he was in fact holding a stick. And he was shaking it.

Mystery solved?

Not so fast.

• She [my cat, Coalette] gets more food on her face and the floor when she eats than you can shake a stick at.
• The village spent more money on that new town hall than you can shake a stick at.
• There were more people at Costco this morning than you can shake a stick at.
• Costco didn’t have any watermelons today, but they had more zucchini than you can shake a stick at.

And the list goes on. But something doesn’t add up. While the chipmunk incident did indeed necessitate the shaking of a stick, no stick was involved in any of the aforementioned instances.

The detective in me needed to get to the bottom of this idiom. A quick Google search turned up…. Not much. The only thing it really turned up was that “more than you can shake a stick at” has been in use for much longer than the 55 years my dad has been on this planet. World Wide Words, while not completely cracking the case, did shed some light on the conundrum.

According to World Wide Words, it seems as if there really is no explanation for where this curious locution came from, only theories. Its first use was documented in 1818. The most logical of theories, to me, is that it came from tallying farm animals, shaking sticks at them as they passed through, to facilitate counting.

Given that my dad grew up in the Oregon farmlands, his fondness of the phrase makes sense.

Maybe the metaphorical idea behind the idiom is as deep as it goes.

Or this is just a shining example of the fact that I don’t need to dissect every amusing phrase I hear to see what’s inside, intentionally taking it literally in order to do so.

But in my defense, the tendency to do this runs in the family.

Years ago, after overhearing my dad say to someone on the phone “[Co-worker whom shall remain unnamed] has his ass in a sling,” my mother and I spent the next few hours researching to find out if you could, in fact, break your ass (and not just your tailbone).

(Verdict: Yes. You can. Technically, you’d be breaking your ischial tuberosities.)

Image courtesy of FitSugar

These may just be funny little phrases most people hear and automatically go to the intended, metaphorical meaning without delving deeper. For me, I hear or see them and smile at the thought of my dad and the funny idioms that, because of him, have become dear to me.

Hearing them invokes more delight for me than you can shake a stick at.

Clam Chouder and Other Adventures in Badspellingland

I recognize that I do an inordinate amount of griping about the lack of spelling and grammar skills I come across in my various daily ventures. I let it get to me way too much.

It became very difficult for me to walk along Broadway St. in Chicago (unfortunately a direct path from school to my apartment) for a weeks-long span this summer. Why? Someone had ingeniously repeatedly tagged buildings, signs and newspaper boxes “Clam Chouder” along a one and a half mile stretch.

Image courtesy of BlogNetNews Illinois

Why someone felt like deviating from more traditional topics in written vandalism to tag “clam chowder” on countless structures is beyond me, but the spelling blunder was the bigger mystery in my eyes. It drove me so insane that I took to going out of my way in my quest to get home to avoid having to look at it.

Image courtesy of lovely/creepy Google Maps

Who knows how many people saw this graffiti and walked by shaking their heads, appalled by the tagger’s inability to spell a well-known word. Maybe a lot; maybe none.

Are misspellings really that big a deal? Can they affect your life that much?

Why don’t we ask the ten people walking around wearing permanent reminders on their person that they (or their tattoo artist; possibly both) cannot spell, exhibited at Oddee.com (and your local concert venue)?

Image courtesy of Oddee.com

Laser tattoo removal is extremely expensive; consulting a dictionary is not.

Misspellings can impact your wallet even if you are not inclined toward injecting colorful permanent inks into your skin… Not to mention your credibility.

I’ve been doing the eBay thing for close to eight years now, both on the buying and selling fronts. A few years ago I learned the Great Secret to finding great things on eBay for (almost criminally) less than they are worth: Change the spelling of the auction when searching. By deliberately searching for items using misspelled keywords, I have gotten some insanely good deals on expensive items. All because the seller spelled something in the auction title wrong, causing it to not show up during normal searches.

Image screenshots courtesy of eBay

Just recently, I managed to pick up a gorgeous ring on the popular online auction site for literally hundreds less than it would go for retail, all because the seller had misspelled the name of a common gemstone. Had the word been spelled correctly, the price would have likely gone way beyond what I ended up paying for it. This was far from the first time I’ve gotten a great deal courtesy of a simple misspelling.

In e-commerce, spelling can also be important to credibility. Not long ago I was contemplating purchasing some rather expensive shoes from a heavily-advertised last-chance online discount shoe store specializing in top designer brands. Skeptical that the price seemed too good to be true, I was looking for some clue as to the company’s reputation. Everything seemed to check out, and I had my highly coveted shoes in the online shopping cart, ready to check out. Then, I clicked on the FAQ link at the bottom of the page and was redirected to this:

Screenshot image taken by me. I am not linking to source site, to protect the potentially embarrassed merchant.

I decided that the inability to spell “privacy,” or at least do basic proofreading, was enough to make me suspect a scam.

Sale lost.

Proper spelling wins once again.

Kids these days…

There’s no doubt that language evolves through time, with each generation adding their own twists to the vocabulary and challenging the various conventions.

But Generation Y seems to take the cake with what we’ve done to the language of the 21^st century. And that’s not necessarily a good thing.

In a way, we’ve gone beyond making our contributions to the language and have created our own language to replace good ol’ English. Need proof? Does your dad know what kthxbai means? Side note: if he does, it’s probably because he’s been spending entirely too much time on Lolcats, and you might want to consider an intervention. If you write your grandma a short email message saying “c u @ xmas luv u, ttyl,” is she going to sit there and scratch her head for ten minutes trying to figure out what you’re saying? Or worse, will she call you up and ask you if you’re on drugs or something?

Image courtesy of ICanHasCheezburger.com

The extent to which young persons these days have deviated from proper English is not just a phenomenon put into place to confuse older people.

I’m only 24 and I don’t understand even half of “text-speak,” and I’ve been texting since texting became mainstream. Why am I, at ten years older but very tech-savvy, so out of the loop of the language that 14-year-olds are firing back and forth at each other with amazing ease?

Maybe it’s because my mother did such a good job of making me appreciate the virtues of proper spelling and grammar that text-speak annoys the hell out of me.

Maybe it’s because I don’t fraternize with a whole lot of 14-year-olds.

I don’t know. But my point is, this new “language” we’ve created or helped create has become a form of elitist language aimed at the young or super tech-savvy. It’s like being 7 years old again and thinking that if you say something to your sister in Pig Latin, your parents won’t have a clue what you said (by the way— they understood every word).

I’m probably in a small minority of people who simply can’t stand this elitist new language. What is so hard about typing the word “you” in its entirety? I do sympathize with those who rely on the bare-bones text messages because they lack a QWERTY keyboard on their cellular device. That’s technology’s lag. But when these little idioms make their way into real life (or “IRL”, as I recently caught on to), that’s just unacceptable.

Example: Not long ago I was standing in line to see an R-rated movie when I heard the young lady behind me say to another young lady, “OMG. Did you see who he brought? LOL.”

Should we be concerned when our nation’s youth begin mistaking acronyms such as “OMG” and “LOL” for legitimate words?

I for one am hoping this is just a passing fad.

Cookie Monster image courtesy of open.salon.com. Words added by me.

Why has our writing gone to hell?

Something was brought to my attention recently by a member of Generation X, one whom I might add is in a position to know what she’s talking about.

It seems as though my generation’s writing skills have gone to hell.

Not that this is really a shock to me. Members of Generation Y may do a lot more writing than any generation before, especially out of high school, but we’re also hopelessly addicted to our technology, and our various gadgets facilitate more and more of our written communications. We also increasingly let our electronic gadgets proofread what we’ve written, instead of taking a second to do it ourselves. And this is doing us no favors.

As a generation, the trend is toward writing messages to one another rather than actually speaking, and because of this we write far more than any other generation before us. But we are undeniably more concerned with quantity over quality. A great number of us dash off hundreds of text messages a day, but we’ve whittled the messages down to the bare minimum necessary to which the person on the receiving end can understand the basic idea, and often with little to no punctuation.  And (at least in my case) much of it gets lost in translation. I find myself constantly getting such messages and replying simply, “Huh?”

While texting, IMing and whatnot, it’s clear that we’re not too concerned with our spelling and punctuation, which is fine when we’re just talking to our buddies. It’s when those tendencies seep into everyday life that the problem arises. Spelling is one thing. Spellchecker is a good tool, even if it is far from foolproof and should by no means be relied upon. Spellchecker knows how to spell. It doesn’t know when you’re misusing words (or it just doesn’t care). My sixth grade teacher had this great little poem hanging in front of the classroom computer. I can’t speak for my whole sixth grade class, but I’ve never forgotten its message.

Punctuation is equally important. According to dictionary.com, punctuation is “the practice or system of using certain conventional marks or characters in writing or printing in order to separate elements and make the meaning clear, as in ending a sentence or separating clauses.” Our language has put two conventions into place to break up writing to make it easier to understand, and punctuation is one of them. The other is by capitalizing the first letter of every sentence. But my generation doesn’t do much of that in casual written form, either, myself included (but it’s not because I am lazy… I just find lowercase to be much more aesthetically pleasing).

Furthermore, punctuation is so important that we as a nation have dedicated an entire day to it. That’s right; September 24 is National Punctuation Day. Mark your calendar, and mark it right.

Since I like backing my arguments up, here’s an example of a more public form of rampant bad writing. Head over to craigslist and do a little browsing through any category (but if you’re up for a good laugh, head over to the missed connections section). It’ll probably take you all of two minutes to find a post titled “I seen you at…” or “You was with…” Those two grammatical blunders just scratch the surface of the spelling, grammar and punctuation offenses, and inabilities to form complete, coherent sentences on craigslist alone.

Getting back on topic, in addition to our poor grammar and spelling, we’re also inefficient writers. A lot of this blame seems to be on the various papers we’re expected to write in high school and college. While I am not condemning the writing of papers, as it appears students these days need all the help they can get in learning to write coherently, these papers have doomed my generation as far as efficiency goes; for the bulk of writing we are expected to do comes with those dreaded length requirements.

I cannot count on both hands the number of times during my 3.5 years in high school and 5.5 years in college that I have finished writing a paper and found that it hasn’t been long enough, which instantly would have resulted in a lowered grade. Many times this has forced me to consult my trusty Thesaurus to replace short, concise words with big words that much of the general population would probably have to look up in a dictionary. It’s forced me to otherwise fluff the work up, constructing winding sentences twice the length of what I started with.

I received stellar grades on these papers. But little did I know, my “gift” of being able to fluff a piece would end up a curse when I eventually settled on the career path of public relations early last year.

Years of being forced to fluff papers to their death just to meet length requirements may have honed my creative writing skills and expanded my vocabulary, but it has done me no favors in this field.

I don’t know about my public relations peers, but I am finding myself having to unlearn nearly everything I ever knew about “good” writing. It is not a virtue in this field to be able to construct beautifully written, winding sentences showcasing your impressive vocabulary. A good public relations writer can convey messages in few words using language that the average person can understand. Clear and concise wins the game in this profession.

It leaves me wondering why kids are being taught that quantity is more important than quality. Why should a paper drone on for five pages if the point could have been made, and made well, with necessary support materials, in one page?

This is fine for the kids who leave high school after graduation and never have to construct another paragraph again. But for those of us whose careers will hinge on our ability to communicate through the written word, it’s death.

And this post is a clear example of that. A word count up to now tells me I’ve taken 1,004 words to say what I want to say. That’s not concise.

In the spirit of my above rant (and to avoid looking like a total hypocrite), I am condensing the contents of this post from 1,004 words to one long sentence:

Generation Y can’t write well or effectively because technology has made us value quantity over quality, and we’ve long been rewarded for meeting length requirements with good grades, even if we could have said it just as well in half the space.

Then again, maybe the dismal state of Gen Y’s writing skills isn’t our biggest problem.

After all, they don’t call us Generation Y for nothin’:

Image courtesy of PostKiwi, originally published in Journal de Quebec.

… but that’s a whole other story.

Could you disappear?

On August 15, 2009, Wired writer Evan Ratliff deliberately went missing.

As part of a contest run by Wired, Ratliff vowed to remain missing for 30 days. Anyone who managed to find him, in person, would be awarded $5,000. The catch: He wouldn’t be hiding out. He’d be in plain sight, where someone with some brains and the time to do a little bit of Internet sleuthing could find him.

Images courtesy of Wired.com

And five years ago, there’s a good chance that no one would have been able to find him within the 30-day time constraint. Five years ago, Twitter didn’t exist. The clue that led to the end of Ratliff’s evasion ended up being the simple fact that Ratliff, using a pseudonym, began to “follow” New Orleans vegan pizza parlor, Naked Pizza, on Twitter. A few phone calls to the pizza joint, and Ratliff was captured on September 8, 2009. Being caught at a pizza place was an interesting twist, considering that the dossier on Ratliff released by Wired states he is afflicted with celiac disease…

Image courtesy of womenscolony.squarespace.com

Ratliff went to some pretty impressive lengths to avoid being tracked down, including selling his car and shaving his head. And managing to stay on the lam for three weeks while staying connected is an impressive feat, especially considering the efforts in place to find him. Wired magazine has an estimated 700,000-reader subscription base, and website content similar to that of the magazine. Word-of-mouth spread news about the contest (I myself told four geeky friends), and a Facebook group, The Search for Evan Ratliff, had more than 900 members at one point. That’s a lot of potential amateur investigators (and of course, possibly some real investigators).

And, judging by the forum on the Facebook group alone, these were smart people playing the high-tech game of hide and go seek. Eventually the search effort evolved into a group endeavor, with sleuths sharing clues and bouncing ideas off one another.

But the person who ended up tracking Ratliff down was NewsCloud founder Jeff Reifman, with the help of Naked Pizza employees. After a lot of prior investigation and acting on a tip that Ratliff may be patronizing the joint one evening, Reifman placed several phone calls to employees, who physically captured Ratliff when he came in, head completely shorn.

Ratliff lasted 25 days on the lam, assuming mostly normal online activities. But what if the many initial clues provided by Wired hadn’t given sleuths a leg up on their investigations? Could Ratliff have lasted the full 30 days?

In theory, one could disappear if they chose to. Just check out this other Wired article, Gone Forever: What Does It Take to Really Disappear? But we all know how hard it is to remain anonymous in the age of the Internet. With sites like Intelius offering a disturbing amount of information about you to anyone with a credit card, it’s no wonder full internet anonymity is pretty much unattainable.

But again, in theory, it could be done. One would essentially have to impose witness protection program-strength guidelines upon themselves. The first step would be changing your IP address (surprisingly easy to do). Next would be to abandon all of your previous online accounts, and use nothing that was attached to your name, instead using a new alias. You wouldn’t be able to contact people you‘d known before, as they could be used to find you. And, of course, no online banking. No using your credit card to make online purchases. Those can be traced.

In theory, abandoning your previous online presence and forgoing modern conveniences is one way to “disappear” from the Internet age world, while still mostly being present in it.

Now the big question: If that’s what full anonymity took, would you be willing to make the necessary sacrifices? We all love our internet commerce, Facebook, blogging, and iPhone applications. Would we be willing to step back into an age without these things to attain the levels of privacy we previously enjoyed?

This is the choice we have to make.

Wired has promised a full article about the Evan Ratliff disappearing act, including an interview with Jeff Reifman (and perhaps a few Naked Pizza employees) in its December issue.

Something to chew on…

Two things are, in the course of being trained for a career in public relations, pounded into our collective heads early and often, with regards to what we let out into the world: communications should be concise, but they must be relevant. At least as far as my institution of higher learning is concerned, that last one isn’t an option. Interestingly though, those simple guidelines apparently are not widely followed throughout the profession.

That this was the case never occurred to me until I was doing some research and stumbled upon Forrester Research’s Groundswell blog. In the course of my trolling, a post written by Forrester analyst Josh Bernoff titled: Three Quarters of the PR email I receive is irrelevant. Why? caught my eye.

The gist is that Bernoff tracked every public relations-oriented email that hit his inbox for a two-week span, a total of 114 messages. The lovely pie chart embedded in his blog is a real eye-opener to public relations professionals and students everywhere. A whopping four public relations emails Bernoff received were what he would classify as relevant to his interests; just 27 had even a slim chance at being considered relevant.

The unwanted contents of Bernoff’s inbox is probably far from an uncommon occurance.

But it begs the question: is this a mere annoyance to the recipient of such messages, or could it have a serious and lasting impact on your ability to communicate with that audience in the future? Cutting to the chase, I mean that if you piss them off, you run the risk of burning an important bridge or two.

This may seem like a pretty extreme consequence of blindly or accidently sending a public relations message to the wrong (read: uninterested) audience. You may be thinking to yourself, Come on… One email to an inappropriate party isn’t going to keep me from reaching them as an audience in the future.

Yeah? Think again.

As the Editor-in-Chief of Wired magazine (shameless promotion: Wired is awesome. Get Wired), Chris Anderson is a pretty important audience. As is Mark Frauenfelder of blog group boingboing. And what would you know? Both of these gentlemen have been blacklisting what they refer to as “PR Flacks” from their inboxes. Anderson has even gone as far as to post his list of offenders! But, in the case of Frauenfelder, specific email address of the sender isn’t just blacklisted —  the whole domain name is. So if one person in your company or organization sends out an offending email, the whole company suffers. Ouch!

Both Anderson and Frauenfelder assure that once you are on this list, you aren’t getting off it.

It doesn’t matter how big and important your company or organization is either. If you take a minute to scan through the list, you’ll see blacklisted emails from some huge, well-respected firms, and various other well-known media entities and public relations firms.

So yes, it seems as if the seemingly simple error of sending public relations material to the wrong party can have pretty harsh and lasting consequences.

This further drives the point that what we as public relations professionals or eventual-professionals send out into the world really, really needs to be relevant to the audience that receives it… Lest you be blacklisted.

Our President, Our Publicist?

Disclaimer: This is a post involving politicians but is not (meant) to be about politics! If I write something here that sounds horrifyingly ignorant of politics, it’s because, hey, I kind of am (but I plan on making an effort to remedy this after I graduate). If you want a politically correct rant, get my poly-sci major sister on the phone. I’d run my posts by her first, but she’s very busy.

Every four years, the American public is put to task in electing a new commander in chief; someone who, from a public relations perspective, will serve as our spokesperson, our communicator, but really, The Publicist of the United States of America.

Aside from the obviously important tasks of running the place, creating legislation, and chasing lobbyists around, that’s what the President is, right? The person chiefly responsible for how our nation is viewed? Just look at how we as a nation were viewed during Dubya’s administration (and I choose to not comment further on that).

Isn’t that why, in the 2008 election, it seems like every other country on earth weighed in on who they wanted our next president to be? After all, the world turns based upon countries’ relationships with one another, and a lot of that is based on communication, verbal or otherwise.

Image courtesy of Sensitivity to Things

For what is public relations? Public relations is a means of building relationships with your audience; getting them to trust you and or/your organization, and then motivating you to act. It is a two-way channel. You give information, but you also get feedback.

Now, what is a Presidential Campaign? The candidate goes around the country making speeches and conveying messages to their audience (the people of the United States, and really, the whole world). The candidate also eagerly welcomes feedback. This feedback will come early on in the campaign, as the candidate learns what messages work with which audiences, and which ones don’t. Feedback will manifest itself the strongest when that day comes when everyone lines up to cast their ballot.

Now on to where I was REALLY going with this: Something that has spurred ethics debates across the board since it happened, but most notably among reporters, journalists, and social media users.

I’m talking about what I will affectionately refer to as “Jackassgate.”

As we probably all know by now, during an interview with ABC News, President Obama called Kanye West a jackass for his MTV VMAs outburst (Yes, I loved the comment, which is why I’m writing about it again).

As it turns out, this was on off the record remark, which was brought to the public’s attention when ABC News Nightline co-anchor Terry Moran put it on his Twitter account. Moran has over one million Twitter followers, so it’s safe to say that people saw it. A lot of people.

Tweet image courtesy of BumpShack

And the backlash ensues.

What is really interesting is that almost no one made mention of the fact that our President used an “objectionable” term. (Was this admissible? That’s another debate.)

The ethics debate centered almost entirely upon the fact that the comment was made off-record to a CNBC reporter and was overheard by ABC employees listening in on CNBC’s wire (it turns out the two share a wire, so this was actually legit), and later made very public by Moran via his Twitter account. Ethically speaking, does it matter that the employees didn’t realize the comment was off-record? As US law dictates, Obama is a public figure and legally is not afforded the same privacy rights as the rest of us. As President, most of what Obama says, on the record or off, can and probably will be put on the Internet or made public in some other way.

Politicians being caught saying things they don’t want the public to hear is nothing new. Remember when Bush thought his microphone was off at a 2000 campaign debate and proceeded to point to a reporter in the crowd and use another “objectionable” term to describe said man to Cheney?

Probably not. Because that was the Era Before Twitter.

It took all of one hour before the tweet was removed from Twitter by Moran. ABC News issued apologies to both the White House and CNBC. But of course, it didn’t matter… Silly ABC News — don’t you know that once on the Internet, always on the Internet? An ABC News spokesperson explained to Politico.com what had occured, as restated by Politico columnist Michael Calderone:

In the process of reporting on remarks by President Obama that were made during a CNBC interview, ABC News employees prematurely tweeted a portion of those remarks that turned out to be from an off-the-record portion of the interview. This was done before our editorial process had been completed. That was wrong. We apologize to the White House and CNBC and are taking steps to ensure that it will not happen again (excerpt courtesy of Politico).

Have ethical standards really changed that much since the skyrocketing popularity of the Internet, or even since the advent of Twitter? No one can deny that we live in a different world now that Twitter (and let’s not forget Google Cache!) exist.

Mr. West: Foot, meet mouth.

One of the most exciting things about a prospective career in public relations is getting to work with clients. In the course of our careers, we will undoubtedly come across a myriad of different clients, most of which I can only assume will be an absolute joy to work with.

But isn’t it the stuff of public relations-practitioner nightmares to have a client that, despite your best efforts, is seemingly bent on destroying their own image?

Exhibit A: Mr. Kanye West.

I’m not going to sit here and say that I watched the events of Sunday’s MTV Video Music Awards transpire. I have never even seen the VMAs. With that said, I couldn’t help but become curious when, hours after the VMA broadcast, the internet was abuzz with news and commentary surrounding yet another outburst by Mr. West. It seems as though (perhaps under the influence of nearly an entire bottle of Hennessy) West jumped on stage as artist Taylor Swift was accepting her Moonman, hijacking the microphone and proceeding to rant about how he thought Beyonce got robbed (remember that tirade?).

As it turns out, this was hardly a one-time, blame-it-on-the-alcohol incident. In fact, West has had so many prior outbursts, some for which he has had to publicly apologize, that UK newspaper The Guardian has dedicated an entire article to a timeline of notable Kanye Outbursts! Looking through the timeline, spanning from 2004 to present, one must wonder: Where are West’s handlers?

 

 

Interestingly, an entire 20 minutes of Internet research (the absolute maximum I’m willing to dedicate to this subject) was unable to unearth the identity of West’s publicist or the firm representing him. And perhaps for good reason: As an article on the website of Los Angeles Public Relations suggests, “The challenge for West’s rep is to get him to behave in a civilized manner long enough to keep himself out of the news.”

What a challenge, indeed! In this day and age, especially since the advent of Twitter and with the increasing popularity of celeblogs, the jobs of publicists and firms have just gotten a whole lot harder. How is a publicist to control their client’s image when that client insists on repeated public outbursts, and frequently takes to his blog or Twitter account (the latter which West allegedly does not have) to vent? What if the client has no interest in keeping himself out of the news?

It appears that sometimes damage control is the only answer. In the case of West’s most recent outburst, he immediately took to his blog to apologize, in his typical all-caps fashion, to Swift for ruining her moment. Interestingly, the apology was removed within hours, replaced with this little snippet. Was this the work of West himself, or on the advice of his publicist?

Now, some conspiracy theorists are going as far as to suggest that West’s VMA outburst was nothing more than a publicity stunt. And it wouldn’t be the first time.

A teaser clip posted on NBC.com shows West near tears as he talks about the incident and apologizes to Swift publicly yet again. Is this a shining example of damage control, a sympathy-seeking show of emotion… Or was it just part of the “plan”?

And is it just me, or does West’s ensuing remorse reek of insincerity?

Perhaps because his outburst was so incredibly public, West is publicly scrambling to make amends with Swift. If he were truly, sincerly sorry for the events of Sunday night, a private phone call to her would probably be the most effective. As an added bonus, then only Swift would have to see West scamper away with his tail between his legs. But no; instead, West continues along the talkshow circuit in his attempt to deflect the public’s sympathy for Swift back on himself.

But, just for arguements sake, let’s say the whole thing HAD been a planned stunt. Was this really a good move on West’s part? The “stunt” may have had the intended effect of getting people to talk about him again, but did anyone really think that such an outrageous, ungraceful display would win West fans?

Just what is a publicist or firm, mostly responsible for maintaining their client’s image, to do (except stock up on Excedrin Migraine) when that client’s name is now used as a verb synonymous with “to rudely and obnoxiously interrupt?”

An old quote by Irish author Brendan Behan states: “There is no such thing as bad publicity except your own obituary.” Whether an ill-advised stunt or true outburst, Mr. West certainly hasn’t drummed up any good publicity for himself, and from the looks of things, it will be a while before he does again.

But getting to the bottom line: isn’t the whole notion of ”no such thing as bad publicity” somewhat asinine?

Case in point: The first thing I saw on my morning visit to MSNBC was an article so endearingly titled Even Internet Hitler hates Kanye West. That can’t be good!

And it gets worse! In a Monday interview, fellow Chicagoan and (more importantly) the leader of the free world dipped into his cache of barnyard language to refer to West as a “jackass.”

If that’s not the epitome of bad publicity, I don’t know what is.