A Funny Thing Happened On My Way To Get Coffee

Well, kids, a cold and steady October rain is falling and the radiators are knocking. I'm not complaining, however, because such changes in the season are all strangely comforting to this Midwestern girl's heart. Also, I have a stack of New Yorker's to catch up on and the Shouts & Murmurs contributions are making me laugh so hard I'm scaring the cat.

First, in last week's issue we got a few words on program notes:

"The Dialogue Between the Wind and the Sea" pits roiling strings against strident brass, belligerent woodwinds, and unhinged timpani bent on physical reprisal. Again, the composer ingeniously juxtaposes regular and triple figures, a development that for many years was hailed as a breakthrough in modern composition, although it is now generally acknowledged to have been a printer's error. Still, the layered rhythms create a spectacular lurching effect that vividly evokes the roll of waves, as well as a tremendous desire to urinate.

And now this week we get a few tips on marketing when the only person left on staff is the intern:

If you already have a blog, make sure you spray-feed your URL in niblets open-face to the skein. We like Reddit bites (they're better than Delicious), because they max out the wiki snarls of RSS feeds, which means less jamming at the Google scaffold. Then just Digg your uploads in a viral spiral to your social networks via an FB/MS interlink torrent. You may have gotten the blast e-mail from Jason Zepp, your acquiring editor, saying that people who do this sort of thing will go to Hell, but just ignore it.

And if everything your tech department has ever said to you sounds something like that, it only gets better from there...