Churbuck.com

How hot is it?

It’s so hot that I walked as slowly as possible across the parking lot so I didn’t turn into a human fountain and soak through my shirt. It’s so hot that exercise this evening would be suicidal.

Does Search Get Too Much Credit?
Thanks to Chris Kobran for sending this AdWeek story to me via del.icio.us:

“Search is getting more credit than it deserves—that’s because if you go upstream from those clicks, a lot of users have been to the advertiser Web site before because they’ve been exposed to other advertising,” said Young Bean-Song, vp, analytics at Atlas.

Search advertising has become a dominant force in the online ad industry, thanks largely to Google’s popularity and its ability to deliver quantifiable results. According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, search accounted for 40 percent of all Web ad spending in 2006.”

I won’t disclose our method of giving credit in our revenue attribution tracking, but last-click is not the methodology we’re deploying. Search can get overweighted in an online media plan, but it is, by far, the most predictable and efficient from an expense-to-revenue point of view.

I also have to question the impartiality of a metrics guy at Atlas — the Aquantive ad server acquired by Microsoft in May. Sorry, but Atlas has more to gain by discrediting search.

Fake News, Deception, and Entertainment « Bernaisesource

Excellent analysis of fakery and blogishness — from Lonelygirl 15 to Fake Steve Jobs — we’re awash in it, and here my colleague Mike Etherington, the genius behind last year’s Lenovo Tapes, should take a bow for doing bogus right.:

“A wink and a nod to the audience may be the difference between a wildly successful viral campaign and outright hostility. It’s the difference between the saga of lonelygirl15 who was in fact just an actress and the fake blog of a cosmetically-challenged woman Claire who was just a creation of Vichy, a division of French cosmetics giant L’Oreal. The former was entertainment; the latter was an attempt at a fast one.

Consumers need to be in on the joke, not made to feel that the joke is on them. At some point, there must be a sign or signal that what they are seeing, reading or listening to is entertainment or make believe.

And that’s exactly what The Lenovo Group did. Most people don’t they are the world’s third-largest personal computer maker. What did they do? They went viral with a spoof Web site. As Steve Hamm reported in BusinessWeek that the site attracted 3 million visitors in first few weeks. The campaign pretended to let viewers in on some super advanced technologies being tested by the company. The site’s anonymous producer had supposedly received some videotapes revealing the secret research. The joke is apparent once viewers click through to the tapes.”

I was asked to give an impromptu tutorial in “widget advertising” last week in Bangalore. What started off as a casual request turned into a cubicle with a few people looking over my shoulder at a web browser with four tabs loaded with:

• My iGoogle page
• The new Lenovo/Microsoft Live Portal
• The plugin directory at WordPress.org
• Fred Wilson’s Blog, A VC

I have heard it said the best way to learn something is to teach it, and having never commissioned nor served a so-called “gadget ad” I found myself in the same mode I was in three years ago at CXO Media, when I conducted a series of brown bag lunches on the silent revolution occurring in the post-bubble world of web media. This is the abridged version of what I told the gang in Bangalore last week.

Traditional web advertising is defined by a call-and-serve model where a publisher fences off some turf which is occupied by a string of code which calls for an advertisement housed on an ad server. Getting that ad onto that server is the act of trafficking, and can attach conditions to when and where the ad is shown. For example, an advertiser might buy a specific section of a web site for a certain period of time, and only want an ad to be shown during certain hours, or to users from a certain geographical area, and further insure a visitor would not see the same ad more than three times. All of this is enabled between the code on the web site and the ad server.

Changing the terms — the duration of the ad campaign, the creative (say lowering the price in a banner ad in response to a competitor lowering their price), and making any modifications is a gigantic pain in the ass that requires a change order and all sorts of ad ops pain which one’s agency has to deal with. Therefore, the old model of serving ads, Dart trafficking, purchase orders, etc. , in my opinion, sucks.
Now, look at what is possible if the ad were fixed in place, like a plug-in feature embedded in the right side gutter of this blog. See the Flickr gallery? The My Blog Log thingy? Those are widgets. Apple has em. Yahoo has em. Google has em. WordPress has em. They are supposed to be all the rage and bloggers more eloquent than I have waxed eloquent about them. Some rag apparently declared this to be the year of widget. Um, okay, but how do they work for advertisers?

Let’s start with my personal Google page (my default homepage, except fricking Lenovo.com takes it over like a jealous girlfriend every other day). You understand the principle, it’s like every other portal page ever developed. MyYahoo, MyWay … pick a content module — a clock, a calculator, quote of the day from The Big Lebowski (“the Dude abides”), and place it where you want it. When you start selecting stuff, search on HP (yes, I am showing my competition some love here) and up comes this gadget.

Now, note to Eric Kintz, this thing hasn’t been updated in months, but the spirit is there and the potential is immense. So, for some reason, let’s say I am a real fan of HP cameras, I decide I need to see what they are selling every time I go to the Google portal. HP could, if they refreshed it, modify the price, change the image, push promotions, in short — this is a “perma-ad” that me, the user, can decide to place or alter.

What’s the difference between this and an ad unit? First off, it isn’t served by an ad insertion engine like DoubleClick or Atlas. Second, to modify it I don’t need to replace the entire ad, only elements inside of it. Think of this as a site within in a site. A mini-site.

Similar to this is what we’re doing with Microsoft for our homepage default in Internet Explorer. Setting the default on the browser to Lenovo.com isn’t a good idea — we get lots of garbage traffic that immediately goes elsewhere because the user can’t or can’t be bothered to change their browser’s homepage default. No, instead you want to offer the user a homepage with some modicum of utility, something that — dare I invoke the term of the year of 1997? — is sticky and will be useful. This page, a cobranded version of Microsoft Live at MSN, is an attempt to do that, and we are building a widget/gadget thingy to keep our customers informed, tell them about features and functions they may not be aware of, and let them know when we’re conducting a promotion or having a sale.

Then there are plug-ins. Plug-ins are modules a site-side publisher — like a blogger — can download and embed on their blog. Some of these plug-ins are “badges” or fixed spots that a blogger can grab as part of an affiliate program with say Amazon or Bass Pro Shops. The concept is simple — give the vendor some real estate, and any sales that result from a click from the affiliate badge will carry a unique identifier which yields the blogger/site owner a percentage of the sale.

Finally, if you want to see a site in action that uses a lot of plug-ins, widgets, gadgets, etc., you can’t do much better than Fred Wilson’s A VC. Fred is a venture capitalist at New York’s Union Square Ventures and he invests in a lot of the companies that produce these plug-ins. He’s also blogged smartly on the topic.

So, to recap:

Gidgets are the next wave in display advertising. They pose a challenge to creative teams who need to design a unit that can be easily updated, through a syndication pipe using RSS/XML principles to publish new content from a remote owner. They pose a challenge to publishers who are accustomed to a random, or roadblock model in ad tagging and serving. They probably will simplify the lives of the people running metrics as they aren’t subject to any randomness and probably will have a longer shelf life than other units served on a campaign basis. Will they perform better than banners? The Jury is out.

Jesus Phone Stumbles « Cheaper than therapy

Benjamin Lipman on the iPhone activation process. Money quote:

“Discerning the truth from the fiction is always a fun game with phone reps. Mine was very pleasant, especially for someone who has undoubtly been answering the same questions all day. He claims Apple is 100% in charge of activation and transferred me to an Apple number dedicated to iPhone whose weary rep told me that activations may “take 24-48 hours right now due to overwhelming demand.”

Excuse me? First impressions are everything and demand is only overwhelming if it is unexpected. Apple expected high demand. Heck, Apple created that high demand with one of the most brilliant marketing strategies in recent years. To not have the activation system robust enough to handle millions of concurrent activations quickly is beyond stupid and so, well, un-Apple. Strike 1.”

Mixing business and personal is becoming a bit too much of a tightrope act for me. Mitch Ratcliffe told me — don’t go to a multiple-blog format, it’s a nightmare — and given my inabilities to keep one blog alive without the help of the master, Mark Cahill, why would I think two or three blogs would be any better.

Maybe Peter Kim’s designation of this as a top ten client marketing blog has me a little freaked out. I don’t pay a lot of attention to my technorati rank and it shows, but mixing in posts about clams, wind farms, beach rights, and rats in the roses with pedantic displays of professional insight into page views, metrics, engagement marketing, and customer satisfaction is way too diverse. Sure, people can sort by the tags, but ….

So, I am seriously thinking of subdividing ….

UPDATE: ok, ok, no subdivision. Screw it. One blog, indivisible, and lead us not into Penn Station ….amen.

7.16 – Monday, Cotuit

7.17-7.19 – North Carolina

7.20-7.22 – Cotuit

Finally some face time in RTP, looks like mega-travel may resume with a Tokyo-Beijing-Singapore swing in mid-August. Vacation — I’m talking up a solo week (no family, no friends) on the Vineyard the last week of September or the first week of October to fish and write. Need to make plans. I know what I want to rent and it is one of these harbor cottages in Menemsha.

Leonard Peck slipped the hawser Saturday morning, passing about the time the tide turned and began to ebb.

By coincidence I was at his shop buying some wire for a new gaff bridle from his son John, paying his granddaughters who were working the same register I worked in the 1970s when I was the clerk with Leonard’s other son Geoffrey, and I asked John how the Cap was faring, but the news was sad, and the prospects of a visit weren’t good. Today I learned he passed.

The Francis Minot
I will remember Leonard Peck as a literary man (a Harvard English major), with a Lincolnesque white beard, and a laconic way of speaking that belied a love for telling a good yarn. He was one of the last of a generation of Cotusions (his son John’s coinage) that made their living on and around the water, running Peck’s Boats forever, building Cotuit Skiffs, and his incongruous tugboat, the Francis Minot.

The Peck’s and Churbuck’s were close families. My grandfather gave Leonard his frame for building skiffs, the Peck’s rented this house one winter in the late 40s or early 50s when my grandparents moved off Cape. I sailed with his sons, Geoff and John, but only knew his eldest, the late Bill Peck, from afar. All three were named after Leonard’s favorite authors, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Milton, and William Shakespeare.

Leonard took the Francis Minot on an epic voyage down the Mississippi and back up the east coast. He wrote a memoir about his life in Cotuit, For Golden Friends I Had, and last year, at the dinner commemorating the 100th annivesary of the Cotuit Mosquito Yacht Club, delivered a masterful speech about the yacht club, and the fleet he helped build.

My condolences to his wife Betty, his sons, John and Geoff, and his grandchildren. This is Cotuit’s loss.

History – Shaw & Tenney – Orono, Maine

The five-foot basswood crap oars I’ve been nursing for five years are about three strokes from giving up the ghost and having invested several coats of Epiphanes varnish, Churbuck Yellow  on the blades, and tacked on leathers and buttons, I’ve decided enough is enough, no more lipstick on the pig, and for once it is time to get some real oars.

I looked at a pair at an antique shop on Martha’s Vineyard over the weekend, the lady quoted $125 for a so-so pair of six-footers, maybe 50 years old. I was tempted, but I was basically paying New York prices for something some hedge fund manager was going to turn into a piece of wall art. It was time to call Shaw & Tenney, makers of the best oars on the planet, and the third oldest marine manufacturer in the country.

I dropped $180 for a pair of six-foot spruce oars with a leathers/button kit I’ll sew on myself. These should, knock on wood, wind up in the hands of my grandchildren. I was tempted to get ash — the “ash” breeze is the old nickname for rowing — but ash is heavy and overkill for a set of dinghy oars.

This fall I think I’ll clamp a sculling notch on the transom of the dinghy and learn how to propel myself with one oar. Interestingly, Shaw & Tenney charges more money for a single sculling oar than they do for a pair of conventional ones.

I went to Menemsha today for some excellent fried clams at  The Bite — and five pounds of harpooned swordfish from Larsen’s. On the Lobsterville beach inside the jetties was this huik, the wreck, allegedly, of the Orca, Quint’s boat in Jaws.

Avinash Kaushilk, something of a hero to web analytics people, writing incisive stuff at Occam’s Razor has published Web Analytics: An Hour a Day and I returned home to find the package from Amazon, having pre-ordered it about six months ago.

Now to read it. Knowing Avinash, and appreciating the expertise he’s been sharing at his blog, it is sure to become a bible for the art.

A 25-hour plane ride and 10.5 hour jet lag makes me goofy. Tonight, over a restorative burger and beer on the back deck, a friend said “… it’s summer. Their friends are all here. They’re discovering their bodies …”

In disbelief of the inane Marin County New-Age Psychobabble of that comment, and delirious with the lag de’avion, I blew a mouthful of burger onto the picnic table, and said “Discovering what?”
My cousin across the table jammed his hand down the front of his shorts and said, “Whoa. Look what I found.”

This went on for five minutes until I laughed so hard I think I tore an intercostal muscle between my ribs. But I digress.
Peter Kim at Forrester has named this one of the top client-side marketing blogs. Max Kalehoff notes the prevalence of personal in a list of professionals:

“Examining Pete’s initial list, I think it is important to note that many also are largely personal and passionate endeavors, as evidenced by the quasi-independent relation to their employers. In other words, these are not “official” company-sanctioned blogs; they live on completely different hosts and domains. Most are personal blogs and digital profiles likely to travel with these individuals regardless of their future relationship with their employer. This is a new phenomenon in business, where niche yet potent and personal brands are playing a bigger role in marketing. They’re benefiting the companies while changing the dynamics of employee-business relationships.”

It’s not that I wouldn’t have an official blog, but shit, could I say “shit” if I did? Or post a picture of my dog with a shaved ass? Or make fun of people who marvel that teenagers are discovering their bodies?
Or talk about clams? Blogging is fun for me, not blogging about marketing. This scratches the ol’ cacoethes scribendi and keeps the pencil sharp.

Here’s the list. Peter has good taste.

1. Flooring The Consumer :: Technorati authority = 504. Authored by CB Whittemore, Director of In-Store Innovation, Wear-Dated Carpet Fiber.
2. Marketing Nirvana :: 424. Mario Sundar, Community Evangelist, LinkedIn.
3. ExperienceCurve :: 332. Karl Long, Web/Social Media Integration Manager, Nokia.
4. The Marketing Excellence Blog :: 254. Eric Kintz, VP Marketing, Digital Photography & Entertainment, Hewlett-Packard.
5. cgm :: 191. Pete Blackshaw, CMO, Nielsen Buzzmetrics.
6. Decker Marketing :: 167. Sam Decker, VP Marketing, Bazaarvoice.
7. Masiguy :: 162. Tim Jackson, Brand Manager, Masi Bicycles.
8. AttentionMax :: 153. Max Kalehoff, VP Marketing, Nielsen Buzzmetrics.
9. Churbuck.com :: 148. David Churbuck, VP Global Web Marketing, Lenovo.
10. Emerson Process Experts :: 130. Jim Cahill, Marketing Communications Manager, Emerson Process Management.
11. Bernaisesource :: 99. Dan Greenfield, VP Corporate Communications, Earthlink.
12. John Dragoon’s Blog :: 29. John Dragoon, CMO, Novell.
13. Randy’s Journal :: n/a. Randy Tinseth, VP Marketing, Boeing.

Whole Foods Is Hot, Wild Oats a Dud — So Said ‘Rahodeb’ – WSJ.com

Need an explanation of the perils of “sockpuppets?” Read this page one in the WSJ. The CEO of Whole Foods (aka “Whole Paycheck”) logs onto the Yahoo finance forum for the Whole Foods stock and posts for years under a pseudonym, trashing the competition’s stock and praising his own haircut. WTF?

“In January 2005, someone using the name “Rahodeb” went online to a Yahoo stock-market forum and posted this opinion: No company would want to buy Wild Oats Markets Inc., a natural-foods grocer, at its price then of about $8 a share.”Would Whole Foods buy OATS?” Rahodeb asked, using Wild Oats’ stock symbol. “Almost surely not at current prices. What would they gain? OATS locations are too small.” Rahodeb speculated that Wild Oats eventually would be sold after sliding into bankruptcy or when its stock fell below $5. A month later, Rahodeb wrote that Wild Oats management “clearly doesn’t know what it is doing …. OATS has no value and no future.”

The comments were typical of banter on Internet message boards for stocks, but the writer’s identity was anything but. Rahodeb was an online pseudonym of John Mackey, co-founder and chief executive of Whole Foods Market Inc. [emphasis mine, .ed] Earlier this year, his company agreed to buy Wild Oats for $565 million, or $18.50 a share.”

Nothing beats a little bindle of paan in one’s cheek at the end of a big Indian meal other than the expression on the face of a bewildered colleague who stuck the silver triangle in his mouth and bit down on a melange of spices and betel nuts. He asked: “What does this remind me of?”

“Old Spice men’s deodorant? A urinal cake?” I replied. The art was not getting it in one’s mouth — the bravest man in the world was the first one to eat an oyster — (many people before me have grown addicted to paan, their teeth stained red from the betel, but few outside of India have tried it) the trick for me was trying to figure out what to do with it after ten minutes.A lot of exterior walls and sidewalks around paan stalls in northern India are stained red from paan expectorations, so I assume the proper thing to do is what any good ballplayer does with a cheekload of chaw, and that’s spit. Problem is what to do inside of a nice restaurant. With no spittoons in evidence, and my Indian hosts displaying no stuffed-cheekedness, I swallowed mine down.

There are things you swallow and things you don’t. I believe I was eating a fairly sissy version of paan known as meetha paan, or “sweet paan” which is not as hardcore as some of the tobacco and masala based ones the pros swear by. Anyway, here I sit, burping perfume.

Dosas, on the other hand, are good things, especially for breakfast with a bowl of sambar. I could live on dosas, and was very fond of them when I was working in New York, sometimes eating them twice a week at the Madras Mahal on Lexington Ave. with Om Malik. These are big lentil flour pancakes wrapped in a flamboyant crunchy tube around spicy mashed potatoes.

This one, from Flickr, by late_blOOmer, is just about right:

Remember, never eat anything bigger than your head, and don’t swallow the paan.

Rob O’Regan at Magnosticism reports Nielsen’s decision to drop pageviews as the primary metric for site measurement. Good riddance say I.

Ranking top sites by total minutes instead of page views gives Time Warner Inc.’s AOL a boost, largely because time spent on its popular instant-messaging software now gets counted. AOL ranks first in the United States with 25 billion minutes based on May data, ahead of Yahoo’s 20 billion. By page views, AOL would have been sixth.

Google, meanwhile, drops to fifth in time spent, primarily because its search engine is focused on giving visitors quick answers and links for going elsewhere. By page views, Google ranks third.

I posted on this a while back, arguing that Ajax and other page-cache models were making the Web 1.0 model of page-by-page sessions irrelevant. Expect to see some sites rail against this decision, and don’t expect the IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau) to make a move anytime soon.  Here’s the pdf of the Nielsen-Netratings release.

The saturation of global brands in this office park in Bangalore is pretty impressive. I’m sitting in a perfectly modern office building near other perfectly modern buildings housing Fidelity, Goldman Sachs, IBM, Target, Microsoft, Dell …. A golf course runs down the length of the development and a steady state of construction is an indication that more brands are coming.

Bangalore is the third largest city in the country, has a new airport under construction, and is quite pretty in a tropical way, with the same wonderful coal smoke smell I remember from 1991.

But, in truth, I am here to sit in conference rooms and talk to people. Here’s my view today.

….or so proclaims my sagacious colleague, Glen somewhere over Mumbai, who is sitting next to me in Lufthansa Business Class from Frankfurt to Bangalore, and who has amended the statement to include a full Ipod, and the latest book by David McCullogh.

The entire business class thing is very embryonic. I’m sitting in some strange teutonic carbon-fiber pod designed by Recaro, the Italian bucket seat designer, long given up on the 30-page operators manual for a seat which delivers a non-sensual massage, can play first run movies (I watched Zodiac, the latest David Fincher, and found it awesome save for the 7-point text at the end which tied up all the loose ends and was completely illegible on the seatback LCDs) and contort itself into every attitude except prone. I avoided the temazepam for the JFK to Frankfurt leg, instead doing my usual contortion act in a seat which is, without fail, always one inch too short for a truly stretched out nap. I went into twilight zone mode, woke up feeling like my sinuses had been raped, with my one monocular contact lense warped and dried like a scab on my poor right eye.

Quick German frushtuch (there are umlauts in there somewhere) of dense rye bread, cervelat and cheese, a couple drops of rewetting solution in my eye, and I was ready for leg number two to Bangalore. Frankfurt was Frankfurt — under-airconditioned so I  developed a thin sheen of airport terminal sweat which was improved by four coffees and anxiety over the contents of my Blackberry. I even got to tick off the ladies at the coffee bar with my atrocious self-taught Schweitzerdeutsch (“Gruzi! Ich mochte ein bier bitte!). Germans do not tolerate beginners in their language. They let you get all wound up and then correct the phelgm-hocking sound you’re supposed to make when uttering the word “mich” before they launch themselves into flawless condescending English. The German language is best explained by Mark Twain in Innocents Abroad, but I explain it by pointing to Yoda’s sentence syntax.

Since I am arriving in India around 11 pm, I decided not to sleep on this long leg but to work and save the big sleeping pill for some point after midnight, when I am down prone on a hotel bed and assured of six hours of uninterrupted shut-eye. I worked the entire flight thanks to in-seat A/C power, whittling away at an inbox with 1200 stale emails in it. There is nothing like replying to a three-week old email to prove email bankruptcy, and when I get to the hotel and replicate my Notes account, about 75 emails are going to go spamming out of this laptop to bewilder people from our CEO to the summer interns.  I was able to get the total message count down to 755, which is an improvement but not a victory.

My Ipod died in Cotuit — probably the victim of too many recharges and Apple’s enlightened embedded battery program. So I have had to make due with a quite excellent collection of Grateful Dead soundboards I had forgotten on my hard drive given to me by Jim Louderback, the EIC of PC Magazine a year ago in Augusta. I’m particularly glad to discover the 6.15.76 Beacon Theater show as that was the year when I went on “tour” for the first time and had the sublime experience of seeing six New England Dead shows in the magical month of May (I saw my first show in August of 1976 at Hartford’s Colt Park). So, a new Ipod is needed. I live on the thing when I use the erg and fly. The noise cancelling headphones have been a godsend in shutting out my seatmate in row 14, the Italian IT consultant who has his SecureID random-number-generating fob on a bracelet and who fell asleep when the plane was taxiing in Frankfurt and has been making cartoon snoring sounds like Curley in the Three Stooges ever since. The man is doing that “snark-phwee-phwee-phwee” noise with flapping lips and everything. The stewards are impressed and roll their eyes at me whenever they walk past trying to get me drunk on good wine which I decline in favor of wasser mit gaz.

As far as books go: I read Cormac McCarthy’s “No Country for Old Men” in three hours. A waste of a perfectly wonderful book (soon to be a movie by the Coen Brothers) that deserved to be enjoyed. McCarthy, I have concluded, is the master of conclusions.

Camera is charged, bandwidth rocks in Bangalore, so I’ll try to post through the week with photos of Bangalore, the Lenovo offices, and whatever food gets put in front of me. I am heartened to read that Bangalore’s cuisine is essentially my favorite (and hardest to find in the US), vegetarian with an emphasis on dosas and thalis.

Three working days here — topic is agency relationships, production, and our new marketing hub — then back to the US on a 1:50 am flight on Friday. That is sure to be special, especially since I am consigned to coach for the Bangalore to Frankfurt leg. So, I shall enjoy business class while it lasts, which is about one hour.

From Moby Dick:

“Round the world! There is much in that sound to inspire proud feelings; but whereto does all that circumnavigation conduct? Only through numberless perils to the very point whence we started, where those that we left behind secure, were all the time before us.

“Were this world an endless plain, and by sailing eastward we could for ever reach new distances, and discover sights more sweet and strange than any Cyclades or Islands of King Solomon, then there were promise in the voyage. But in pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of, or in tormented chase of that demon phantom that, some time or other, swims before all human hearts; while chasing such over this round globe, they either lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed.”

Barren mazes indeed. Think about the dread in a person’s heart in 1840 when slipping lines in Nantucket for a six-month sail to the Antipodes, versus a middle-aged guy sitting in an airport in Providence, about to embark on something which would have seemed as fantastic  to Ishmael and Captain Ahab as a Star Trek teleporter would to me.

The car picks me up at noon, kicking off six days of long travel from Cotuit to Bangalore and back again on Friday. I haven’t thought about packing yet, but intend to get by with a single duffel bag and a backpack jammed full of ThinkPad, headphones, iPod (into Stoner Metal this month, so lots of Fu Manchu and Queens of the Stone Age) books (No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy and maybe the new Pynchon), passport, sleeping pills, etc. etc. etc.

Cell phone will work, but please do the math before dialing. I get whaled on at 3 am in Beijing by well-meaning people who think it is 3 pm. And yes, I leave the phone on.

I’m planning on Raleigh the week after this.

Sailing this afternoon in a fluky (erratic) breeze with my son, I realized it isn’t the sailing that appeals to me, but the boats. I’ve always wanted to build a boat — a small rowing skiff or a kayak perhaps — but haven’t had the time. So I make myself content with the annual painting thing, some boat “dentristry” and best of all, the ongoing art of keeping a boat sailing known as marlinespike (or marlinspike) seamanship.

This is a world of sennets and turk’s heads, grommets and whip finish (with and without a needle), eye splices, back splices, long splices and end splices. Of bowlines, clove hitches, half hitches and sheepshanks. The art of making baggywrinkle, of finishing off a crown knot, of weaving a bell rope.

I keep my tools in my “ditty bag” a canvas bag with rope handles (if I was truly gifted I would have sewn it myself with a sailor’s palm, seam rubber, a piece of beeswax and a spool of sail thread). They consist of a rigging knife with a fid (a pointed implement for breaking open the strands of rope for splicing), heavy, big-eyed triangular sail needles, a ball of Italian marlin that smells the way the sea should smell, smoky and mysterious, tape, cords, light line, manila, bell cord, and pliers.

I am, by no means, even a novice, but I am one of the few people I know who can knock out a new anchor or mooring pennant in ten minutes, complete with galvanized eyes and shackles properly locked down with bronze wire.

When I was ten I went skiing in the Berkshires at my cousin’s place in Adams, near Williamstown in the extreme northwestern corner of the state at the base of the state’s highest mountain, Mount Greylock. There was a small ski hill with a rope tow — a big 1000 foot loop of heavy hawser that ran up the hill and around an old car wheel before going back down to a tractor engine modified to drive a big spool. The rope tow was pretty old, and didn’t get used very often, and within ten minutes of starting the rope snapped.

I was disappointed as were about 100 other people. The man who owned the hill apologized and offered to pay back everyone’s dollar.

“Why would you do that? We want to ski,” my father lived to embarrass me. The ski hill owner said there was nothing he could do, the rope had parted and he couldn’t tie the ends together with a knot, the rope was too thick and the knot wouldn’t pass through the pulleys at the top and bottom of the hill.

“You don’t need a knot. You need a Long Splice. Let me show you.”

My father took off his coat, lay it on the snow and placed the two snapped ends of rope on it. He borrowed a knife and cut the line back a foot on each piece and then unraveled about 15 turns worth of the strands. He “married” the two lines and began to re-lay the strands into the opposing line, making a seamless connection that was no thicker than the original line. He shaved down the strands as he went, and in about 30 minutes, stood up, asked for a hammer, and pounded the line smooth.

Then he asked my uncle to find the splice. He couldn’t, or pretended he couldn’t.

“Where in hell did you learn to do that? The Boy Scouts?” asked one of the other fathers.

“Junior Seamanship test at the Cotuit Mosquito Yacht Club,” said my father. And we were back skiing.

That spring I asked him to show me the …. ahem, ropes. He obliged, getting an old manila (hemp) halyard and cutting it up into small lengths for me to practice knots on. He drilled me through about a dozen standard sailing knots, then moved me onto whip finishes — the use of a waxed piece of string/thread to “finish” or bind the end of a cut rope so it won’t unravel. By the end of the summer I could do every splice except the long splice, the one that saved the ski hill (and I still can’t do it, as it is very challenging).

Over the years I learned how to do decorative work such as turk’s heads and sennets from Dr. Robert Oldale, the preeminent geologist at the United State Geological Survey in Woods Hole. He is a very salty man, and showed me some very good tricks for making stuff like this:

Tim Whitten, Marlinespike.com

The best rope worker-rigger I know is Jeff Higgins here in Cotuit. He can do industrial level rigging, including splicing steel cable and rigging sophisticated towing set ups on commercial tugs. He can go aloft in a bosun’s chair and do mast-top repairs, and in general knows more about marlinespike seamanship that anyone in my generation.