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From colleague Gary Milner, further dour sentiment towards Facebook and Myspace as marketing vehicles (see my earlier pointer to P&G’s new CMO saying essentially the same thing — marketers aren’t that capitvated by advertising next to photos of frat boys doing keg stands).

“However, more than half (55%) of the 180 responding chief marketers–representing brands with revenues ranging from $250 million to more than $10 billion–indicated low current interest in actually incorporating the networking sites into their plans.

“One-third said they’re “not interested at all” in getting Facebook and MySpace into their plans, and 22% said they’re “not too interested,” while 35% are very or somewhat interested.”

Mediapost

December? Eeek! 2008 is now a runaway train.

Monday 12.1-Tuesday 12.2: Cotuit

Wednesday 12.3: St. Louis for Lenovo’s annual industry analyst conference

Thursday-Friday 12.4-5: St. Louis then back to Cotuit.

Not much travel on the horizon in December. I’d like to get to NC for a quick visit, but other than that, trying to economize on the air fare, hotels and rental cars.

This four-day break I tried to find a couple hours each day to sit down with a great book or film and unwind from the sometimes bloodless world of marketing, powerpoints, conference calls and key performance indicators. This vacation has been a particular relief from a season of grueling bad news and I took advantage of the time to put my gardens to bed for the winter, exercise, cook, and spend as much time outdoors as possible with my family.

FILMS: Two films worth noting. The first, Andrei Rublev, was highly touted by my son Eliot, a senior in the cinema studies program at NYU’s Tisch School. He specializes in the obscure, but has guided me to some amazing movies in the past, including my all-time favorite, Ordet. Eliot is a good guide to difficult films, providing a smart narrative during the film to keep things in context. Andrei Rublev is by the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, and is based on the life of a medieval Russian icon painter, a monk who actually is less at the heart of the narrative than the era itself. The tale unwinds in a series of chapters, all presented in a strange impressionistic fashion where plot and exposition of the story are discarded in favor of long lingering tracking shots of roots and mud, flaming cows, holy fools, and rapacious Tartar hordes. As Eliot himself admitted, on first viewing he thought the film was unwatchable, indeed he fell asleep, but on subsequent viewings he has rethought the film to the top of his ever mutating list of great films.

I would not recommend it unless you are seriously into new experiences. Let me say that a patient viewer will be well rewarded by the last vignette, in which Rublev, existentially blocked from his art by doubt, is reinspired by the raw passion of an orphaned teenaged boy who is called upon to cast a massive bronze bell for the medieval capital. Tarkovsky depiction of the process, of the insanity that besets the young bell maker as he tries to recall the secrets of the craft that were barely passed on to him by his late father, the forging of the bell, the drama of its first ringing. Serious stuff. A very important scene I would watch several times.

Movie two has been long awaited since I read the masterful novel it is based upon, The Leopard, by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. I blogged about the book last summer, reading it just before I departed for Beijing and the Olympics. This is the tale of a Sicilian prince in the late 19^th century, and the film adaptation, by the Italian director Luchino Visconti is pretty amazing, but I would caution incomprehensible or wasted on someone who has not read the novel. Burt Lancaster plays the Prince and nails the role, despite Visconti’s apparent preference for an Italian actor in the role and dislike for Lancaster who was forced upon him by the producers (Lancaster went on to be cast in the masterpiece, 1900, by Bernando Bertolucci, and ultimately reconciled with Visconti who was his friend for the rest of his career). The role of Tancredi is played by Alain Delon, and the leading lady is Claudia Cardinale, for whom I’ve always had a serious crush since seeing her in Once Upon a Time in the West.

The Leopard (Il Gattopardo) is a gorgeous film that rises to a crescendo with the final ball in Palermo. Visconti’s treatment of the costumes, the interiors, the amazing scene of a room filled with chamberpots brimming with urine from the ball’s dancers …. Read the book, then rent the film.

APPLETV: I watched The Leopard on the new AppleTV video on demand device which downloads the content from the iTunes store. Pretty good stuff, but there’s a long way to go before AppleTV or video-on-demand is going to win my heart over. DSL based WIFI connectivity and interminable download times is not a real game changer in this day and age of instant gratification expectation, and the library is not amazingly comprehensive enough to be interesting to a film student like Eliot (let’s just say it will be a long time before iTunes offers Andrei Rublev). We also downloaded The Unforgiven, Clint Eastwood’s awesome western, in HD. That was good as always.

BOOKS: I’m juggling a few books as is my habit. I have started Constantine von Hoffman’s copy of Lives of the Popes (which I borrowed from him three years ago and have yet to return, earning the epithet, “David Churbuck, Book Thief of Lenovo” on his blog). This is good stuff as I am a big fan of Byzantine history and need to expand my studies into Catholicism and early Christianity having been lopsided towards the Greeks due to Gibbons and Norwich’s excellent Byzantium trilogy.

The high point of the recent reading season has been Peter Matthiessen’s Shadow Country, his fourth novel about the controversial Florida murderer, settler, and pioneer, Edgar Watson. I was a devout fan of Killing Mister Watson, Lost Man’s River, and Bone by Bone, regarding the set to be among the most important works of American fiction in the 20^th century. I will go way out on a superlative limb and say that Shadow Country is a masterpiece, the first work of fiction I would put on a syllabus of American literature were I teach such a course (along with Moby Dick, The Great Gatsby, etc.). Matthiessen is often viewed as an “environmental” writer, a zen craftsman, but in his Watson series he proves himself a master of much more, exposing, through a tale told by many narrators, the literal end of the road of America, a place so hostile and brutal that it remains to this day. I have made a pilgrimage to the scene of Watson’s murder by neighbors, the beach in Chokoloskee, and I have journeyed into the abyss of the wilderness below that Indian mound into the island and channels verging into the Everglades. Nothing I have seen is more wild or closer to America’s own heart of darkness.

Shadow Country is, by Matthiessen’s admission, a reworking of the first three novels into the book he set out to write. I would nominate him for the Nobel prize in literature for the result and have long maintained it is a subject Hollywood should make into a film. The book just won the National Book award this month.

FOOD: I did a lot of cooking this past week. Of particular note.

1. A classic quahog chowder made according to Capt. Chatfield’s recipe.
2. A daube de bouef derived from Julia Childs: I would default to her beef bourguignon next time, but it was quite good.
3. Brussel sprouts with pancetta in a balsamic reduction with shallots. This came from a New York Times article a few years back featuring a dozen side dishes by top chefs. I can’t recommend it highly enough and I am an inveterate hater of brussel sprouts.
4. Leftover turkey converted into a turkey marsala with mushrooms over farfalle with pesto.
5. My new addiction/affliction: armagnac. I dunno, I’m a big fan of anything French. This is basically French moonshine made from grapes. Less refined than cognac but a lot more interesting.

WALKS: A few standard beach walks under gorgeous pink salmon Cape light, a great trek through the Crocker Neck conservation lands, a roadtrip to Nyes Neck on Buzzards Bay in West Falmouth to seek the Churbuckian manse, Windsway, as noted by Facebook pal, Frederick Churbuck. I think we found it, not sure. I will upload photos anon. The Churbucks of Falmouth are best known for Leander Churbuck, a painter of some repute and note.

Mark Cahill on PC Mag’s decision to ditch dead trees and go all-digital, a reminder of why Mark remains one of the best media strategists out there.

“I believe we’re seeing the tip of the iceberg. Those that can make the jump will start to make that jump quickly. Notably, I expect to see trade journals become a relatively rare beast. Ivory towered experts lecturing professionals about their profession is a thing of the past. Instead, users will gravitate to profession-based niche social media. The journals will slowly cease to exist, and the magazines that remain will be serving the less technical of the professions.”

PC Magazine To Kill Print Version | All Things Cahill.

* Mark and I worked together at Reel-Time and IDG.

Every holiday season the good folks at Concept2 — my favorite brand of all time, inventors of the Concept2 Ergometer, or indoor rowing machine — conduct the Holiday Challenge: a hellacious 30 day challenge to row and log 200,000 meters on the rowing machine between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

In the past, if you succeeded at rowing at least 7,000 meters per days for the duration of this challenge, you would win a printable certificate, the opportunity to purchase a t-shirt, and a free pin to wear with pride.

This is not a trivial pursuit. I have succeeded three time since the first time I did it in 2002, and find that if I don’t get the minimum number of meters rowed in the beginning I won’t be motivated to make them up later on. Well of course I didn’t row yesterday — two helpings of turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes and brussel sprouts followed by two slices of pecan pie, one of pumpkin, a snifter of armagnac, and two glasses of Ruffino chianti — it was Thanksgiving and I did do the Crossfit workout of the day (which is going to make this year’s Concept2 challenge all the more horrible as I intend to do both in my quest for eternal youth and the ability to snap off 10 real pull ups followed by 100 pushups).

Oh well, it’s in my DNA to abuse myself so. Some Anglo-Celtic-Teutonic yeomanic stock that makes it imperative that I turn myself into a human piston for 60 minutes every day.

As my stepbrother says, “The body is evil and it must be punished.” Well, having logged 11,000 meters this evening, that means I have to row only 10,000 tomorrow to be on track for the little pin and certificate. Yay.

Two things that are really cool about Lenovo this week.

First: we announce a very cool way to disable a stolen or lost laptop by sending it a text message that will disable it. I think we should put a big dye bomb under the keyboard so when the text message is sent the machine dyes the thief a nice shade of indelible orange.

Second, we announce this external hard drive with a high security numeric keypad thing going on. Master designer and Lenovo blogger David Hill posted this most excellent photo of the rejected ideas last night. I like working at a company that has great designers.

The Scots have a word for the mood I’ve been in lately — heck the mood the entire world has been in the past couple months — and that is “dour” – which I’ve heard pronounced “dow-er” but think is more accurately spoken as “dew-ar” which is appropriate since a Dewars on the rocks with a twist is about the best recourse I can recommend for someone feeling battered these days by the dour news coming from the world’s markets.

With those markets off 40% from their highs in the fall of 2007, marketers are also feeling very dour right now, and despite feeble exhortations that now is the time to double down and crush the competition, all signs are in place for a major flattening and decline in global marketing programs from advertising to PR. It is an article of faith that one of the first expense items to get whacked in a downturn is marketing and other corporate services perceived as “soft” and nice-to-have versus essential to make payroll and keep the lights on.

Some marketing activities will survive and continue through these hard times, and I believe it will be the newest techniques and tactics which endure thanks to the simple fact that they can be measured so well. These are the days when every dollar or Euro spent on marketing has to defend itself from that king tyrant Le ROI.

I was talking to my friend John Bell yesterday. We were talking about how far the world has shifted since August when his firm, OgilvyPR’s Digital Influence Project helped my team run the Olympic athlete blogging program. That was the high water mark for Lenovo’s online brand efforts in 2008, and now, a mere three months later, I listened to myself declare to John that the next 12 months are going to be a dour test for this new wave of conversational/social/engaged/word-of-mouth/collaborative marketing that me and a gazillion other optimistic theorists have been blogging and tweeting and opining at one conference or council meeting for the past three years.

Fast forward to February 2009 and imagine yourself telling a CFO or someone in finance that you need cash to improve “brand reputation” through a “conversational marketing program” involving blogs, wikis, vlogs, photo sharing, tagging, twittering, and crowdsourcing. I guarantee the response will be something on the lines of “how many buggy whips will it sell?” I don’t think Social Media Marketing is ever going to go away – I am a huge fan – indeed I think it could be the tactic that actually thrives through this shitty economy, but only if practiced at extremely low cost and with some evidence that it can drive revenue.

So, henceforth, let me commit to a mini-series here on Churbuck.com on how to market online through a downturn. There are three groups who will be pissed off by what I have to say. I will say “sorry in advance:

1. Agencies: Sorry, but these are the times when you better learn how to do-it-yourself. It’s like when I was 28 and bought my first house. I did the sheet rock, not Ned the Nailbanger.
2. Vendors: Sorry. That $150,000 a year “reputation monitoring” system you want me to buy? Nevermind, time for DIY. That social media technical platform that offer single-sign on seamless interoperability between the company’s forums, blogs, and wiki? No license fees for me, it’s all got to be open sourced, in the cloud, and as close to free as possible.
3. Consultants: Sorry. Consultants won’t be hosed – CFOs prefer contractors to full time employees during hard times – but theorists and strategists are a dime-a-dozen right now and these are the days when actions and direct revenue improvement are going to speak louder than the torrent of theory and drivel that has been skipping like a broken record or a scratched CD for the past year or more.
   

I will go out on a limb here and say this: any organization can extend its marketing reach for an initial investment of $0 by doing two basic things. The only cost will be time. The only risk will be reputation. I’ve complained about “101″ level marketing advice being parroted over and over again by the analysts and consultants, well, here’s my contribution in the form of a simple action plan to do two essential things in the new marketing environment that won’t require a visit to your finance department.

1. Open a blog. Wordpress.com. Stop. Go no further. Go there. Open a blog. Go battle with your PR and legal teams and before you visit them do a quick Google search for “corporate blog policy” and print out one of the many policies held up as classics by the experts. Do a search and replace and put your organization’s name in the appropriate places. Get permission. Start blogging. Cost: zero.
2. Monitor what other blogs say about your organization. Google Blog Search. Technorati. An RSS reader. Google Reader. Bloglines. Whatever. Learn them. Set up RSS search feeds on your brand names and start reading. “Engaging” with bloggers? Google search on the topic. There’s more advice out there than a herd of consultants could impart for a fee in a year. Cost: zero.

That’s enough dourness for the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. Next post – how to turn this stuff into sales and look really smart.

Seen in Osterville a few weeks ago.

Tip of the hat to Francois Gossieaux who tweeted a link to this Brand Republic piece:

“Procter & Gamble’s head of marketing, Ted McConnell, has said companies should not advertise on Facebook, saying social networks have no right to monetise their customer’s conversations.”

P&G marketing chief questions value of Facebook – Brand Republic News – Brand Republic.

I don’t view it as a matter of “rights” as much as intrusion factor and ROI/benefits. While it may be au courant to put a social network into one’s media plan, and while it may be noble but ultimately misguided to establish a brand outpost inside of a social network (be it a SecondLife island or a fan page in Facebook or MySpace), in the end it comes down to the old question: does it convert? Socially pushing soap — which Proctor & Gamble does — is different than socially pushing tech which because of its complexity requires more aftersale support between the brand and the end user.

That said, I think any advertiser who rolls into a conversational medium and starts shouting “Buy” is going to get their hats handed to them fairly quickly. Those who inveigle their way in gradually, and who don’t hijack the medium with the 2008 equivalent of pop-ups, lead gen registration walls, or blicking epilepsy inducing display ads, and who study the anthropological subtleties of the natives may find, if they are clever, that they actually don’t have to pay for the attention. Dunno, just a theory. But I, like Mr, McConnell, remain chary of advertising next to someone posting a picture of a keg stand or their sick guinea pig than I do running the message on PC Magazine or PC World.

Five pairs of waders. All of them leak.

Row out to motorboat with wet feet, wet socks, inside of expensive wet cracked boots at low tide, 8 am, blustery warm November morning, going to get some clams. Get onto motorboat which is awash in rainwater. Bilge pump has failed. Battery dead. Row by towing the 18-foot water laden dead motorboat with dinghy. A gazillion itty bitty strokes into the blustery wind later, get motorboat to ramp. Get crescent wrench, pop the terminal leads off the battery, load into the back of the car, take home to charge. Will haul boat later today on the high tide and leave it on the trailer.

And so ends the boating season of 2008. Leaky waders. Dead boat. No clams.

Interesting front page story in the NYT this Sunday morning about President-elect Obama likely having to surrender his Blackberry and email privileges for the duration of his term due to security concerns and public information laws. At first I was reading the piece, saying “Boneheads. Email good. Luddites in government, bad.” Then the security concerns were cited and I suddenly thought it is maybe not such a good idea to have the Commander In Chief on the RIM network sending emoticons to the National Security Advisor: “Dude. Chechnya! WTF? Call me! (Go Sox)”

Still, for an administration that is releasing weekly “fireside chats” on YouTube, that is seeking a National CTO, and which delivered on the promise of technology first opened up by Joe Trippi and the Howard Dean campaign,  it seems utterly ass-hatted to take away email. But, unless a secure alternative can be developed, the president-to-be may be in the same boat the president-that-was found himself eight years ago when he sadly signed off of his AOL mail account and told his friends it was nice knowing them electronically.

Monday – flying to San Jose, Interwoven meetings

Tuesday-Wednesday: San Martin, CA

Thursday-Sunday: Cotuit

Following week, another quick flipturn to California, then home for Thanksgiving.

If I pay for the New York Times to be delivered to me in hard copy every morning, do I have an automatic right to the electronic edition delivered to my Kindle? If I pay the Wall Street Journal.com an annual fee do I deserve to get the Kindle edition for free?

This is a buy once/use many times in many different formats argument – not a multi-user argument, though the metaphysics of simultaneous media consumption is very trippy, e.g. I pay one pay-per-view charge for the movie and the entire family can watch it. But each of us pays a ticket to enter the theater (obviously because the theater is in the business of renting seats, not content). Being a music copy protection crank, and a notorious copyleftist, I will acknowledge my responsibility to pay for original works and not pirate them, but must I pay, as the man said in Men in Black, for The White Album yet again because a new format has been developed?

The newspapers in particular – that’s a tough one. Obviously they need every dime of new revenue they can get, and if they can build circ electronically then power to them, but what about faithful subscribers to that content in other mediums? Should we not get an all-inclusive license however we want it delivered? I can see the papers actually paying me to go paperless – a green rebate like the grocery store that knocks a nickel off the tab for every recyclable bag I bring with me in lieu of paper of plastic. But no, I suspect a couple things at work – specifically to the Kindle case.

1. Kindle doesn’t feel like an open format that the New York Times can offer like, say, a PDF version for download from its site. It’s Amazon’s and that’s that.
2. Amazon is getting a piece of the transaction, so what do they care that I pay the NYT directly for the paper edition?

So, what happens if Bezos opens the Kindle format to the public domain and publishers can suddenly go direct to their subscribers, and if their circulation management tools are strong enough, recognize a subscriber seeking a multi-channel license and discount it accordingly?

Amazes me that 12% of all Amazon purchases of that portion of its book inventory that has a Kindle version are indeed for Kindle owners. E.g. – take a best seller, put it online in print and kindle formats, and more than ten percent of the customers buy it for the electronic device.

Monday-Friday 11.10-11.17: Cotuit, no travel. The following week fast trip to California.  Week after is T-giving.

Foggy Saturday afternoon in November with temps in the 60s and a low tide means it was time to go clamming after seeing the clam police had opened up my favorite clam spot for fall harvesting. This is a spot you need a boat to get to, so it tends to be hardly hit by the recreational crew. As a somber aside, in my daily sculling this fall I have seen a massive increase in the number of clammers out looking for clams. It makes me wonder if some of this activity — both commercial and recreational — is driven by the economic cycle and the simple fact that people are looking for some income and some protein.

Anyway, I needed some quahogs for chowder and stuffed quahogs. All waders were leaking, including a hardly used pair of new neoprenes some f%$king rodent like a mouse or chipmunk decided to chew up for nesting material. All the other pairs were cracked, a sign of either ozone rot (never store waders near anything with an electric motor, like a refrigerator) or old age. So … I know what I want for Christmas.

When we went to the landing to get the boat I discovered some Cape Cod version of a horse thief had taken a set of bolt cutters to my dinghy’s lock-up chain. Fortunately the dinghy didn’t get pinched, but now I am in a high state of paranoia that either some yacht club moron officer is deciding a new policy that no dinghy’s shall be chained to the yacht club fence, or the town is going to get serious about cleaning up the abandoned mess of abandoned dinghies, canoes, catamarans, scows, punts, and skiffs littering the shore around the landing. In any event, I need to go down there with some sort of waterproof plea to leave my dinghy alone as I intend to continue using it until mid-December. Any way, if you who wields bolt cutters is reading this, do me a favor next time? Post a notice or call me?

Like I said, it was foggy. But this time of year there isn’t much boat traffic to worry about, and the course to the clams is basically head due south from the mooring for two minutes and stop.

Son and I focused right on chowder sized clams, the ones with shells as big a closed man’s fist. Instead we found some decent ones — right between cherrystones/littlenecks and true chowders. Here Fisher lives up to his name and demonstrates some jerk rake technique (a Ribb jerk rake no less).

I came up with this in my rake, a perfect baby horseshoe crab. Horseshoe crabs are right out of the days of dinosaurs, living tribolites, so I wanted to make sure this one survives to make more. They are hard hit by commercial fishermen who cut them up for trap bait.

The void between smartphones and ultraportable notebooks has been called the “tweener” space in computing. This week, in his review of the so-called Netbook, space, the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg dinged this not-a-phone-not-a-laptop device as one that has never taken off. UMPC is a perfect example.

So what is a tweener? To demonstrate I like to line up my ThinkPad X200 and my Blackberry 8300 and in between drop down a 7″ x5″ moleskine notebook. That, in my mind, is the Tweener, the device that hasn’t lit the world on fire yet. But … I’ve owned a tweener for two months now – an Amazon Kindle – and while it is version 1.0, it has definitely found a place in my life, even if I can’t run a spreadsheet on it or make a phone call.

Why? The interesting thing about the Kindle — aside from E Ink, the technology that permits it to display text in such great resolution – is the points in has in common with phones. Instantly turns on – no boot time, long standby battery life, and pervasive, always on wireless connectivity (switched on or off with a hardware switch at my discretion). That wireless service, unlike a phone, does not carry usage or monthly charges, doesn’t require a separate relationship with a carrier like Sprint or TMobile, indeed, is “free” in the sense that it is subsidized somehow by Amazon to provide a channel for me to buy books and have them delivered to the device.

Whispernet – the name of the service built atop Sprint’s network – is a big innovation, but not one necessarily conducive to always-connected internet. Yes, there is a web browser on the Kindle, but the device is not intended to be anything like the crop of 7″ to 10″ mini-laptops that have taken the market by storm thanks to Intel’s Atom processor. Those machines, which are moving rapidly towards 3G wireless connectivity, has so far relied on ordinary Wifi (802.11 wireless lan) connectivity atop XP or various Linux flavors.

Would I seek out a reading experience on a netbook the way Amazon has positioned the Kindle? No. Kindle is optimized for ambient light reading and as such is indeed a book replacement. A netbook … I need to get my hands on one our Lenovo S10s and see what the fuss is about beyond the sub-$400 price.

Anyway, long way of saying I think the future is bright for Tweeners, especially when connectivity becomes pervasive and people begin to seek them out for dedicated tasks such as e-books, GPS nav devices, etc.

I went sculling this morning under grey, windless skies, taking advantage of a rare chance to get out on smooth water in November before things shut down late next month. I walk down Old Shore Road with the shell on my head, and launch at the bottom of the hill next to the new boat ramp. As I stepped into the shallows I saw this cool creature, about eight to ten inches long, dead, but only recently so gauging from its good condition.

This is a mantis shrimp – at first I thought it was a lobster tail some well-to-do bait fisherman had discarded after an expedition for a big striped bass (lobster tails are legendarily good bait, but at current prices, better in one’s stomach) – according to Wikipedia, mantis shrimp are so named for their resemblance to a Praying Mantis, but they are not shrimp. They are also known as “thumb splitters” by scuba divers because of their ability to destroy an appendage brought too close to their mandibles. Indeed, they can allegedly shatter aquarium glass and are apparently highly intelligent creatures.

The Chinese call them “pissing shrimp” for their penchant to void their bowels while being cooked.

I have never seen one of these on Cape Cod before, but know from saltwater fly fishing that they do “move” into southern New England waters in the fall and have the fastest “strike” time of any creature in the world. The Cape is their northernmost range on the eastern seaboard, and I know from experience that the south side of Cape Cod, jutting out as it does into the Gulf Stream, is last stop for a lot of tropical species which work their way up the coast all summer, only to get stunned and stranded by the first chills of the fall. A manatee died last month after making its way to Dennis, and there have been catches of tarpon, barracuda, and tiger sharks in Nantucket Sound in the past.

Here’s a video of one attack a crab.

Staying put on Cape Cod this week – first week in who knows how long (not counting recent “staycation”) where I haven’t gone somewhere for something. Big project brewing, lots of desktime needed.

However, this past weekend saw the restoration of the old chicken coop continue. With my son and I re-roofing the little shed with fancy architectural-grade shingles donated by the munificent Cousin Pete, who also gave us the chapter-and-verse lesson in how to shingle.

Rest of the weekend was filled with, a lame Halloween (1 set of trick or treaters), sculling on the harbor, a good beachwalk under gunmetal skies, some clock change adaptation, a big writing project, the start of Moneyball on my Kindle, and the psychic crossover from summer mode to winter bunker mentality. Here’s a cheery sight. The Lowell’s dock getting taken in before the winter ice trashes it.