Have you seen the trailer

I'm not a fan of camping. To me, roughing it is a three-star hotel without cable.

Many times in my life, some well-meaning friends (who apparently don't know me that well) have tried to con me into going on a camping trip with them. They immediately sense my resistance, and try to appeal to my more earthy side: call of the wild, at one with nature, back to the beginning and all that.

It never works. Ever.

It's not that I've lost the desire to sleep in the woods, use toilet paper I could sand my coffee table with and eat powdered filet mignon (Just add hot water and stir!), I never had it in the first place. I like my creature comforts.

Which is why it surprises me as much as you to hear myself say this, but, not that I was looking for it, I may have found a way to have my amenities and camp with them too.

The 2016 Airstream International Signature.

For only $64,048 I can be in the wild and the lap of luxury at the same time. Here's how Airstream describes this silver beauty on their website:

"With an interior designed by award-winning architect Christopher C. Deam, the International Signature is the definition of upscale. Light pours in through panoramic vista windows, reflecting off sleek polished surfaces. The result is an open environment that will take your breath away.

It’s style that sizzles, with Corian® galley tops, premium fabrics, rich modern colors, and plush Ultraleather™ seating. Signature design meets the iconic Airstream line."

I don't know what Corian galley tops are, but I like them already.

Of course, if I picked up one of these babies I'd have to get a Ford 350 to haul it around to campsites. And when I'm not using it out on the road, it'd just be sitting in my driveway, blocking my asshole neighbor's kitchen window and pissing them off.

Now that I think about it, my driveway is a perfectly good place to camp out.

Simon says

The list of songs that've managed the virtually impossible task of rhyming the words yacht, apricot and gavot is a very short one. In fact, there's only one.

The song is You're So Vain. And the songwriter is Carly Simon.

You'll be hearing a lot about both of them in the coming weeks, because Simon has a new memoir coming out. (Ironically, it's being published by Flatiron Books, and not Simon and Schuster, the publishing powerhouse Carly's father, Richard L. Simon, co-founded).

To be sure, Simon has led a colorful life that's included lovers from Mick Jagger to Warren Beatty. When she was married to James Taylor, they were at one point the richest entertainment power-couple with a heroin-addicted guitar-playing husband in all of Martha's Vineyard.

One thing Simon promises to address, sort of, in the book that has the entertainment press chomping at the bit (if you've seen Simon's smile you know why that last line is so funny) is one of the timeless mysteries of the music world: who exactly is You're So Vain about.

She's already said in past interviews one of the verses is about Warren Beatty. Beatty himself has said the whole song is about him. He's so vain. Which brings up a contradiction inherent in the song that's bothered me each and every time I've heard it.

The main lyric is "you're so vain, you probably think this song is about you...." Here's the thing: the song is about him. So is he so vain, or just right in what he's thinking? Discuss.

Admittedly it's not a mystery on the scale of say who shot JFK, or did we know about Pearl Harbor ahead of time. But I have to say I'm kind of curious. Maybe we'll find out, time will tell.

The one thing I know for sure is it's not about me.

As an only child, I have to say that hurts.

Don't ask: Borrowing a book

I'm not gonna lie.

My Don't Ask series of posts - Don't Ask: Watching Your Stuff, Don't Ask: Working the Weekend, Don't Ask: Loaning You Money, Don't Ask: Writing a Letter For You, Don't Ask: Sharing a Hotel Room, Don't Ask: Picking Up at the Airport, and the perennial Don't Ask: Moving - is one of the most popular and requested of all the random musings I slap up here at the last minute.

Even more than Guilty Pleasures, Things I Was Wrong About and The Luckiest Actor Alive. Even more than Why I Love Costco.

To the untrained eye, it might look like linking all those prior posts is just a blatant act of shameless self-promotion. Actually, I prefer to think of it as making quality writing available to the general public.

Anyway, since Don't Ask is the most read series, a new Don't Ask it is. Tonight, it's Don't Ask: Borrowing A Book.

It strikes me odd that for all the huffing and puffing about Kindles and iBooks, people still love the feel of a real hardcover book in their hands. Especially if they didn't have to pay for it. And it's mine.

It's still a free country, and you can ask whatever you want. But if the question is "Hey, can I borrow that book? I'll get it right back to you." the answer is no.

The world is lousy with Kindles, iBook apps and, yes, libraries. Go on them and in them and choose your own book to read. But this brand new hardcover copy of the latest best-seller, the one I've been waiting months for, the one I'll be adding to my Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Anne Ursu. Jonathan Kellerman, Gillian Flynn, Scott Smith, J.K. Rowling collection? This one's mine.

I reserve the right to be the first to smell that new book smell of fresh ink on the pages. To bend back the binding, and hear it crack as I turn the pages faster and faster because I can't put it down.

It's not that I don't trust you. However I believe that all across the city, there exists a library in my name, made up of books I've loaned out in the past. Except instead of one building it's spread across dozens of houses one book at a time. It took me years to build that library. I don't plan on building another one.

So kudos for wanting to read a good story, a tall tale or an educational volume. My heartfelt suggestion would be for you to learn the Dewey Decimal System, break out that Barnes & Noble Gift Card you got last Christmas, or perhaps find another friend who hasn't been shocked and scarred by the ever increasing space on his bookshelf.

However you get the book you want, I hope you enjoy your copy. I know I'll be enjoying mine.

Nous sommes à Paris

J'aimerais dire à l'inimaginable qui s'est passé. Mais malheureusement, il n'est pas inimaginable. Et c'est déjà arrivé.

Comme le monde en général, mon coeur se brise pour Paris ce soir. La violence insensée semble en quelque sorte plus offensive, plus vulgaire pour avoir passe dans un lieu aussi beaux et joyeux.

Nous allons tous être plus vigilants partout où nous allons maintenant, et le peu de paranoïa que nous portons avec nous d'hier de l'avant est malheureusement justifiée.

Mais nous, comme Paris, se poursuivront. L'image ci-dessus est un rallye après le massacre de Charlie Hebdo il y a dix mois. Parisiens la bravoure inspirer le monde entier. Et le message que la vie ne doit pas seulement être défendu pour mais vécu est celle que nous ne devons pas oublier.

Que Dieu bénisse les amis et les familles des victimes. Puissent-ils trouver le courage de continuer, et éventuellement retourner vivre dans leur paix Bienvenue Esprit.

Comme pour les auteurs, pendant qu'ils sont peut-être mortes estimant que leur récompense est en attente dans le ciel pour leur martyre, ils auront droit à une mauvaise surprise.

Parce que je pense que nous savons tous que le ciel n'est pas où ces bouchers vont.

Talking TED

Although I have almost 800 posts that might make you think otherwise, I actually have a lot of things to say about a variety of subjects - random though they may be.

Well thought out ideas. Inspirational, motivating stories based on my own experiences. And funny. I'm nothing if not funny.

Ask anyone who knows me - as well as anyone can know someone - and they'll tell you I like playing a big room. Plus thanks to serving a little time early on in the telemarketing industry ("Hi, my name is Jeff. How does two-weeks a year in a Peruvian timeshare sound?), I can rock a headset microphone like nobody's business.

I mention these things because they're all essential ingredients for giving TED Talks.

If you're not familiar with them, TED Talks are inspiring, enlightening, humorous and often surprising lectures on a variety of subjects. Everything from how to improve education, pancreatic cancer detection, how not to become an obsolete know-it-all (necessary viewing for creative directors) and many, many other topics.

I bring all this up because I'd like to take the stage and give a TED Talk. If not me, who? If not now, when? My 18-minute lecture would have a snappy title, like Say It With Cash or I'm Jewish-We Don't Do That.

The good news for me is I can actually be nominated to be a TED Talk speaker.

I'll bet you know what's coming next.

I'd like you, dear reader, to help me get a TED Talk of my own. You can go here to find out how to nominate me. I'm sure they get hundreds of nominations each year, but I'm not going to let a little thing like that stop me. As Han Solo put it so eloquently, "Never tell me the odds." Besides, if you do not play you cannot win.

So tell your friends, get out the vote and let TED know you'd like to hear what I have to say.

As long as the subject's not How To Make Money With Your Blog I think I'll be okay.

We're all freelancers

My friend, fellow blogger and dog-surfing instructor Rich Siegel – who runs Round Seventeen – put up a post today called Too Many Freelancers.

The gist of it is far too many of our staff brethren are packing it in for the seemingly greener, albeit much more competitive, grass of the freelance life, although not all of them are suited for it. Of course, he’s right.

But I’d like to offer another point of view. We’re all freelancers, whether we’re on staff or not.

It’s a quaint notion, a carryover from the Mad Men era, or a time you could work at IBM for forty-four years and have a nice pension at the end of it to see you through the rest of your days, that having a full-time gig at an ad agency somehow equals job security.

Ask the teams that work at Mitsubishi’s new agency every two years how secure their jobs are. The creative teams on Dell Computers can probably whip up a spreadsheet showing why that theory is wrong. Take a drive with the former creative director at Doner, Mazda’s old agency for thirteen years that created the Zoom Zoom campaign, and ask him how he feels about job security. The battlefield is littered with examples.

My point is we’re all just one agency review, one client loss, one new marketing director, one client’s wife’s opinion, one budget shift to digital, one creative director in a bad mood away from being shown the door.

Don’t get me wrong: I very much like the idea of job security. I also like the idea that I’m six-foot-two, a hundred eighty five pounds, totally ripped and get mistaken for Chris Hemsworth on a daily basis. But just because I like it don’t make it so.

The Round Seventeen post talks about Smiling and Dialing, Dry Spells and Making Nice, all daily chores freelancers are far too familiar with.

But they occur on the staff side as well.

Staffers get paranoid when it slows down, and try to look busy in case management is doing bed check. Not so much politically motivated as a survival strategy, staffers can be found making nice to people most in a position to turn the idea of job security into a reality. And day in and day out,the phone lines are always open to other agencies. Especially if an account's rumored to be shaky (SPOILER ALERT: They all are. Always).

So if you're on staff at an agency, thinking about making the leap to the freelance life, congratulations. You already did.

Revisionist history

With the number of revisions almost every project seems to go through now, it seems like clients are less interested in making the work better, and more interested in securing their place in the Guinness Book Of World Records.

To my colleagues in the creative department, this isn’t exactly breaking news. But what has changed is the sheer volume of revisions.

Where it once was a middle-management client trying to show how he made an invaluable contribution to the process by changing the copy from sometimes to always, it’s now evolved into a cage match to see who can initiate the most changes.

The other thing is there are now more layers than ever. There's lower-middle management. Middle-middle management. Upper-middle management. Lower-upper management, and so on. Everyone who comes in contact with the copy feels like it's in their job description to have an opinion. And of course we all know what opinions are like.

My friend Rich Siegel even paid homage to the practice of client revisions by naming his book and well-written blog Round Seventeen. Every time I see that name, all I do is wish seventeen was where the revisions stopped.

There's an old adage about clients getting the work they deserve. Or maybe it's just karma. Either way, never is that more true than when the project manager brings the deck back for revision 68 (yes, actual number).

I think I’ve posted this story before, but it’s worth posting again. One time Paul Keye, a Creative Director/Copywriter and President of his now legendary creative agency, the long gone Keye Donna Perlstein, was in a client meeting. As the client was carefully scrutinizing the copy, at one point he turned to Paul and said, “I think it would read better if we changed an to the." Seeing the reaction on Keye’s face, the client followed up with, “What can I say? I’m a frustrated copywriter.”

To which Paul Keye said, “No. I’m the frustrated copywriter. You’re an asshole."

It would all run a lot smoother if the people who had the final say had the final say the first time around. Sure, it'd mean the middle-management types would have to actually find other ways to justify their almost six-figure salaries, and titles like Assistant Vice President Of Enterprise Integrated Product Analytics & Corporate Audience Targeting.

But if they really wanted to look smart, they could do it by focusing more on their jobs and less on ours. Their job is to make sure the work is on strategy. It'd be a far better use of their time if they stuck to that. It'd also go a long way towards making their corporate overlords and the bottom line more successful.

And the agency less resentful.