Wonderful story in the San Francisco Chronicle this week about the small Welsh town of Hay-on-Wye. You have to love the town for its name alone. A name to conjure with: Why-oh-why in Hay-on-Wye? And who woulda thunk that in May, Hay was twinned with the Malian city of Timbuktu?

Why-oh-wye indeed.
The town is a now famous destination for book lovers from around the world. The annual literary festival attracts the likes of Al Gore, Bob Geldof, Cate Blanchett, and Elvis Costello. Bill Clinton called it a “Woodstock of the Mind” (claiming, no doubt, that he browsed but did not inhale). It’s a quaint British market town with forty bookstores and as many pubs. Sounds wonderful.

While America boasts a variety of ‘destination towns’ such as “The Live Music Show Capital of the World” Branson, Missouri, B&B destination Mendocino, California and, of course Sin City itself, Las Vegas I’m not aware of any other UK destination town apart from Hay-on-Wye for books. “What’s read in Hay, stays in Hay”.

Just as Vegas needed Mobster Bugsy Sigel to launch it, Hay-on-Wye needed its don — the improbable anarchist eccentric Richard Booth is the self-appointed King of Hay.

He set up the first bookshop in town in the 1960’s. The well-heeled Oxford graduate bought the 800-year-old Hay Castle and, seeing no apparent contradiction between a belief in anarchism and self-proclaimed monarchism, set himself up as the “King” of the town lording it over an Empire of books. Dusty books. Brown books. Books with broken spines and books of fine vellum. Paperback and hardback. Soft core and scientific. All became part of his kingdom which prospered mightily until it is as it has now become: a rural fastness for bibliophiles.

Expressing an opinion that would get him tarred and feathered in many towns in rural America, Booth states “I feel the right to read a cheap book is more important than the right to bear arms.”

The festival is a marvelous smorgasbord of cross-cultural literary entertainment. Here, in no particular order, are some random snips from a small fraction of the events being held between 24 May and 3 June:

The causes and implications of our terrible war of attrition against the native mammals and birds of England and Wales from the middle ages to the present day….25 years of contemporary Turkish society….bilingual Welsh poet (Perfect Blemish) reads and talks with the Israeli poet, translator and publisher…the charismatic anatomist explores the vital organs and functions of the human body…how recent developments in cosmology and particle physics have led to the remarkable realization that our universe – rather than being unique – could be just one of many universes….traces her heroine’s options for losing her virginity from the Gambia to London, Boston and Mali …the significance of the Prophet for some of today’s most controversial issues…Rugby’s greatest full-back talks about his career with his biggest fan…Nigerian Nobel Laureate…the documentary about China’s building boom explores the idea that the concrete revolution has destroyed more than the cultural revolution…the Indian novelist…the great Welsh-Chinese short story writer…the Super Furry Animals singer-songwriter talks music, politics and the subtle art of being angry…the brilliant Syrian journalist…can Islam and democracy ever find common ground?…Bollocks, I wish I’d said that….the amazing tale of the brilliant and sexually voracious Welsh psychoanalyst…el rhan o ddathliadau penblwydd Radio Cymru yn drideg, bydd gohebydd gwleidyddol y BBC, Guto Harri, yn cadeirio trafodaeth fywiog ar hynt cyfrwng sydd yn parhau i oroesi ac addasu yn wyneb…the Australian polymath…a conversation with three of the greatest stars of contemporary Hispanic literature – Cercas (The Speed of Light), Grandes (The Wind From The East) and Abad Faciolince (Olvido Que Seremos)….the Sri-Lankan-born broadcaster and writer…Vivienne Westwood - The iconoclast fashion Dame…the editor of leading Israeli daily Haaretz discusses how to run a newspaper…the victory of shopping over politics, the collisions of government and people, and the resilience, comedy, cars and greatness of Britannia…the Castillian writers are joined by British actors…DUE TO CHANGES IN THE POLITICAL SITUATION IN PAKISTAN IMRAN KHAN HAS HAD TO POSTPONE HIS VISIT UNTIL 2008…the ancient tales of Prometheus and Pandora, Theseus and the Minotaur, Daedalus and son beg the eternal question: just because you can, does that mean you should?…a series of walks to local farms…Morris Dancers…egocentric writers…the origins of Christian anti-Semitism… The Ghostwriters Séance - The inside track on the great act of literary ventriloquism…he wry comedy of Rhodes’ Gold and the Nigerian-London-Cuban dislocations of Oyeyemi’s The Opposite House…the chaos, corruption and sexual depravity of the 1815 Congress of Vienna…Bob Geldof in Concert…a 100-day, 1500-mile journey with camels from Lake Chad to Tripoli accompanied by a Chinese scientist, a 77-year-old Kenyan rancher, warring tribesmen and Gaddafi’s secret police…Craswall farmers life under the Black Hill…Tamasin Day Lewis…Roy Hattersley…Adrian Tinniswood…Geraldine McCaughrean…Guillaume Canet…Karate princesses, seasick pirates and demon vacuum cleaners…subject to hygiene compliance, visitors may be able to help milk the cows and feed the calves…General Sir Michael Rose examines the parallels between the guerrilla tactics used by Washington against the British in 1775, and by the Sunni insurgents against the Allies in Iraq today…the only overweight gay Bengali GP working the comedy circuit…the Russian novelist…the Yiddish Policeman’s Union…Monty Don discusses his project to engage drug-addicted youngsters in a farming rehabilitation…after the final full-stop.

What other town with a resident population of 1,846 could boast such offerings?

Back on March 30 I entered a Toastmasters Speech Contest in Silicon Valley which was held at SAP. I gave this speech on my first months in the US in the mid-1970’s, when I arrived as a graduate student to study sociology at Tufts University. Every word is true, describing things that actually happened to me.

I won the contest and and went on to the next level. Unfortunately I had added some killer phrases and a compelling conclusion while forgetting to do a word-count or rehearse with a stop-watch. I went over the 7:30 maximum allowed time by a few seconds and was disqualified.

Still, it was ton of fun. An adrenalin rush. Every speechwriter owes it to their clients to stand on the podium from time-to-time. Experience an audience first-hand. Otherwise, you’re like a celibate writing a sex-manual. You might describe the position accurately, but until you assume it yourself you don’t know Jack.

Thanks to Brady for sending me a link to a thought-provoking YouTube video created by a high-school teacher at the Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colorado. If you’ve got six minutes to spare click on the link below and ponder the implications:

Teacher Karl Fisch has scrupulously documented the sources for the video and the process he created it (in PowerPoint, natch) on his blog. The video was adapted by Scott McLeod.

As with all run-away successes on YouTube, it’s spawned a number of remixes (one nice mash-up ends with a clip from The Matrix).

I don’t have the skills or time to create a re-mix, but I do have a couple of thoughts to share.

One. The reference to Gilder’s Law 4:37 into the video, where the explosion in bandwidth is highlighted:

Third generation fiber optics has recently been separately tested by NEC and Alcatel . . .
That pushes 10 trillion bits per second down one strand of fiber.
That’s 1,900 CDs or 150 million simultaneous phone calls every second.

reminds me of Neal Stephenson’s prophetic words from the era before glass-fiber sharded the earth in circles of light:

The cable is carrying a lot of information back and forth between Hiro’s computer and the rest of the world. In order to transmit the same amount of information on paper, they would have to arrange for a 747 cargo freighter packed with telephone books and encyclopedias to power-dive into their unit every couple of minutes, forever.

p.20 Neal Stephenson, Snowcrash, 1992 (yes, 1992)

Two. The soundtrack took me back to the west coast of Clare, and old pubs where fiddlers love to play, imagining the text as one half of a conversation between two Irish lads nursing their pints of Guinness on a soft evening with the turf fire lazily warming their shins:

Did you know . . .
No, what, Pat?
Sometimes size does matter.
Get away, why’s that?
If you’re one in a million in China . . .
You’d find it hard to stand out in a crowd I’d imagine. It’s a terribly crowded place, China. So I understand…
There are 1,300 people just like you.
Get away. Imagine that. That’s very mathematical. Cases of mistaken identity must be fierce common.
In India, there are 1,100 people just like you
Really? Who’d have thought there were that many identical Chinese living in India? Do they clone them in Bangalore? Ah. Globalization, ’tis a wonderful thing. Your round?

Thanks to Brady for telling me about about an amusing Oddcast demo.

Oddcast does text-to-speech conversion. You can play with the nationality and sex of the speaker. Hear the same words spoken in the voice of Audrey or Charles from the UK. Then skip over to the USA and hear how Claire or Mike would say it. Next, switch to any one of a dozen other nationalities to hear Jolie or Bernard from France; Reiner or Klara from Germany or many others speak.

You could be boring predictable and type in a phrase like “You are so sexy” or more adventurous and cut and paste the text from a Robert Frost poem or the opening words of your next speech.

Beware, you can only play around a few times before the system thanks you for visiting and puts a stop to the fun.

Enjoy!

Thanks to NSA member and Search Engine Optimization maven Steve Mertz for highlighting Wordtracker - a keyword research tool. This is invaluable for anyone writing a blog, researching a book or conducting a marketing campaign. It’s simple to use. Just enter a keyword see the ranking of the most popular uses of that term for the past 90 days.

Why bother?

If you are delivering online content the best keywords to use in your copy are those words and phrases commonly typed in by your potential customers, but which aren’t used much on your competitor’s websites. Wordtraker lists popular search terms.

For the cultural anthropologist or sociologist this also provides fascinating insights into contemporary mores. Here are a couple of examples.

Culture

An edited list of the rankings:

6104 the culture show
2324 mexican / mexico culture
1904 japanese culture
1867 chinese culture
1171 italian culture
1055 brazil / brazlian culture
1035 french culture
881 american culture
707 spain culture
650 aztec culture
631 native american culture
594 irish culture
592 german culture
590 african culture
587 indian culture
582 greek culture
569 jamaican culture
529 india culture
514 spanish culture
458 organizational culture
453 mayan culture
167 british culture
162 corporate culture

I’d never heard of the BBC program The Culture Show - it looks interesting and its popularity means it outranks the next five searches combined.

The listing of different country cultures contains some surprises. Mexico is the most popular individual country. Combining Mexican / Mexico/ Spanish and all the Latino countries (including Mayan) gives a total count of 8708. The next most popular individual countries are in Asia. Then Italy, Brazil and France. There’s a drop off to American culture (an oxymoron?). However, the real loser is British culture - the sun long since set on that yardstick of civilization.

At the bottom of the list, deservedly, is corporate culture. The ultimate non sequitur.

Speech

I did a detailed analysis that combined the many variations of ‘Wedding Speech’ ‘Best Man Speech’ and ‘Free Best Man Speech’. The result clearly shows the overwhelming interest of the general public in the wedding ceremony as the ultimate public speaking venue. One can only imagine the sweaty palms of the fathers of the bride and the best men across the nation furiously Googling their way out of a tight corner.

Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech lives on as the single most influential call to action ever delivered. I don’t believe he employed a professional speechwriter for that one, did he? The next most popular individual speaker was also, unfortunately, influential in his own way. The third name on the list has never, ever, delivered an influential speech. Period.

19956 wedding speech
8013 i have a dream speech
3102 freedom of speech
2411 persuasive speech topics
1088 famous speeches
693 parts of speech
631 text to speech
911 free retirement speech
419 hitler speech
368 speech recognition
347 great speeches
336 figures of speech
540 speech writing
289 speech therapy
264 bush speech
261 free retirement speeches
259 graduation speeches
234 state of the union speech
192 speech pathology
190 informative speeches
188 informative speech
178 demonstration speeches
172 funny speech topics
146 christmas speeches
144 speech writing services
142 buy a speech

Other interesting keyword searches using Wordtracker: thin, free, green, paint, print, stock, Bill, Ian.

What have you discovered with Wordtracker? Leave a comment.

Ever noticed there’s a slew of consultants out there who will offer advice on what the well-groomed public speaker should be wearing?

It all began with Dress for Success.

Now, for the executive on the fast-track, there’s outfits like Global Image Group who offer to

Perfect your understanding of industry appropriate business attire using The Style Scale System and define your own personal style.

Why sweat the details of speech structure, message and authenticity in communications when it can all be reduced to implementing the guidelines of confident dressing and dress for the position you want, not the one you have. Look for help from Michelle, a Certified Image Master.

If people are wow’d by the clothes you wear they’ll not even notice the sweat on your brow and upper lip; detect the fear in your eyes or even take much notice of your face at all.

On my last morning in DC I visited the International Spy Museum. It opened in 2002, post 9/11, in a city which had only just escaped devastation by a fourth gang of saboteurs operating behind enemy lines with impunity.

The Museum serves to remind us, Lest We Forget, that the history of espionage is filled with the actions of foolhardy men and women (brave fellows if they work for us, cowardly scum if they work for the opposition), who used deceit, disguise, cunning and forged documents to further their interests. Hero, villain or traitor, it depends which side you’re on. The Museum celebrates espionage in all its glory, gory detail. Espionage (spying) is the practice of obtaining information about an organization or a society that is considered secret or confidential without the permission of the holder of the information. It’s a form of warfare waged “unfairly” since the day the Trojans learned to Beware of Greeks Bearing Gifts.

It was spooky (pun intended) to learn that Washington DC has one of the world’s largest populations of spies. I wonder how many have paid their $16 admission to experience this celebration of their chosen lifestyle. I wondered if the couple with the Eastern European accents standing next to me in line were here to learn a thing or two.

There’s a delicious irony in visiting an institution which puts on an exhibit aspects of a clandestine world.

I remembered the decommissioned Regional Seats of Government in the UK which are now identified by a tourist information sign:

If it’s ‘Secret’ why, err, have a sign on the highway showing you where it is? Of course, a grammatically accurate sign would read “Formerly-Secret-Nuclear-Bunker-Now-Open-To-The-Public”.

So it is with the International Spy Museum, which has items on open display that people, literally, once died to protect from view.

The Museum does a great job entertaining visitors with a stage-managed entrance routine. We’re marshaled into an elevator and asked to choose a ‘cover’ for our visit. The make-believe is that we are being groomed to become spies:

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to take an unforgettable hands-on tour of the all-but-invisible profession that has shaped history and continues to impact world events every day.

The driving directions for the Museum warn Beware. You may be followed. The ticket proclaims ACCESS GRANTED.

All familiar stuff to anyone who rents a DVD of the excellent BBC series MI5 (recommended).

Once inside, there’s a fascinating range of 007 gadgets: tear gas pens and lipstick pistols; decoder rings, invisible ink and Enigma machines - there’s even Bond’s Aston Martin.

This, however, is the real stuff, which caused real people to really die. Example: a Bulgarian Umbrella like the one the KGB used to murder Georgi Markov on Waterloo Bridge in 1978.

The exhibits are well researched and explained.

There’s a broad swath of history and geography covered: the Rosetta Stone; Jefferson’s cypher of 1790; WWI and WWII paraphernalia; Cold War tunnels; fragments of the Berlin Wall and of the cement foundations from the US Embassy in Moscow so riddled with bugs they tore it down.

There’s a very educational video showing how to pick a lock; an eye-opening series of bugs and listening devices which, like everything electronic, have shrunk to pin-head-size over the last 60 years.

There’s a rogues gallery of traitors: from the Rosenberg’s to the CIA mole Aldrich Ames and the FBI turncoat Robert Hanssen. There’s surprising detail on the extensive network of German spies operating in the Eastern US in WWII. But nothing to explain why we placed Japanese civilians in West Coast concentration camps.

Indeed, for a Museum that celebrates the Intelligence Services, there are aspects of the exhibit that are curiously misleading. The plaque discussing the Cambridge Spy Ring wonders if the “4th Man” would ever be found. “Could it have been…Anthony Blunt”? Duh. Is this misinformation deliberate, or just coy? Is the Red Scare video on McCarthyism so hidden inside a blanket of ‘enemy within’ propaganda that all but the carefully observant would realize the enormity of the witch hunt? Or was this more deliberate irony?

And what’s with the propaganda aimed at kids? The website lists a number of special programs which made me wonder.

So, once the School Outing jollies with which the Museum presents itself wore off, I was left wondering about the narrative they’ve chosen to tell the story of espionage. What’s their back-story? How did they select among the reflections in the mirror-world of spying. What choices were made between information and misinformation?

I think, my Dear Watson, two things can be deduced.

One, the ‘secrets’ on display in the Spy Museum are very much yesterday’s secrets. The Cold War is about as recent as it gets. Google Earth in the last room merely hinted at what the NSA (no, not the NSA I belong to, the other one) gets to see and hear down the road at Ft. Meade and over in Britain atGCHQ, Cheltenham.

Two, the Museum maintains a deafening silence on espionage involving today’s villains (or heroes) working in the Middle East. I’m afraid this is a case where no matter how much history we learn, we are destined to repeat it. The difficulty of infiltrating Islam outweighs those of building a cover to fool fellow-Caucasians in East Berlin. These are times when other side enjoys the Navajo code talker advantage. Our Farsi speakers are few and farsi between.

Executive Communications Lessons

A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.
– John Le Carre

So what lessons can a speechwriter take away from a visit to the International Spy Museum? Apart from the opportunity to make bad puns. What, if anything, could the cloak and dagger world of espionage have in common with modern business? I can’t possibly begin to imagine.

OK, OK, I’ll try.

• Speechwriters often have to tell a nuanced story. After all, if things were cut n’ dried they’d hire stenographers to write the damn things.
• We practice our tradecraft anonymously, with no expectation of public recognition for our efforts. John le Carre’s novels echo the politics of some Exec Comms departments. Speechwriters do come in from the cold. Some are disappeared. Luckily, very few are tortured, at least physically.
• Corporations can lose key players to the competition. He went over to the Dark Side. The profile on yesterday’s Royal Art Historian needs to be edited out when it’s suddenly found that he (or she) was not to be trusted.
• Employees and customers need to have the past re-scripted in light of new facts. Secrets must be kept. C-Suite executives are well versed in being economical with the truth. You may think that, I couldn’t possibly comment.
• Competitive intelligence must be gathered, legally. High-level candidates recruited from competitors:
  

  Tis the easiest thing in the world to hire people to betray their friends
  – Daniel Defoe, author, Robinson Crusoe and creator of England’s first secret service

• Way back yonder staff may’ve used carrier pigeons and dead letter drops to get word back from the field to headquarters. Heck, some companies probably funded improbable, costly projects like the Berlin Tunnel to gather G2. Nowadays, we seed the web with listening devices to monitor traffic (they’re called RSS feeds).
• SIGINT only goes so far. Few speechwriters succeed without running a carefully cultivated network of agents across the company. These informants must be recruited, tested, protected and pampered. The information they supply on the operations of their business unit must be verified, synthesized, stripped of extraneous detail and woven into the seamless story of the final product. At the end of the day the speechwriter is the one whose head is on the block if misinformation has crept in.
• The Moscow Rules work as well for corporate executives at a Trade Show or Conference today as they did for those Cold War CIA case officers in East Berlin. Memorize them:

1. Assume nothing
2. Never go against your gut (Jack Welch led straight from his)
3. Everyone is potentially under opposition control
4. Don’t look back, you are never completely alone
5. Go with the flow
6. Vary your pattern and stay within your profile (PR calls this being on message)
7. Lull them into a sense of complacency
8. Don’t harass the opposition (some even enshrine this in the Employee Code of Conduct)
9. Pick the time and place for action (as Sun-Tzu well knew)
10. Keep your options open (just don’t back-date them, OK?)

In one of the kookier news stories to come out of the mountain-top retreat at Davos this week, a German DJ proposes to subject executives to sensory deprivation in a totally dark room for an experiment in communications called Dialog in the Dark.

Participants will enter a totally dark room where they will only be able to communicate by sounds. All visual stimulation will cease. The man behind this experiment, Andreas Heinecke, notes that

The environment is nothing special for the blind people who are there to help them, but it’s a real shock for executives who rely on their egos and physical presence. . . They will have to listen closely, something most powerful men find difficult to do.

In what will obviously be a PowerPoint free zone one can only hope executives will experience what audience members at tedious keynotes have long enjoyed: a few moments without unnecessary visual stimuli. It’s known as a nap.

Hard on the heels of my DVD experience with Code 46 I made a rare visit to a matinée movie to see the equally stunning Children of Men. Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón does an impressive job of capturing a down-at-heel Britain some twenty years from now.

It’s impossible to comment on the movie without using the cliche that this is a dystopian portrait of a future when things have, as they say back home, gone seriously pear-shaped for society. Women have been infertile for two decades, the last baby alive has just died. The hero, Clive Owen, increasingly unshaven as the film progresses, battles the forces of a totalitarian State as he seeks to rescue a solitary pregnant woman from the chaos of the gangs of militia, freedom fighters and forces of Homeland Security (sic) who pursue them.

One highlight of the film for me was seeing my favorite actor, Michael Cain, as a backwoodsy pot-smokin’ oldster who bore more than a passing resemblance to Roy Harper.

See what I mean?

See images of Abu Ghraib in Bexhill-on-Sea (the interment camp for illegal immigrants where men and women are dehumanized, caged, shrouded and spreadeagled).

See Bosnia, Baghdad and Beirut re-enacted in the streets of London where freedom fighters battle stormtroopers in the bombed out shells of empty shopping centers; commuting home involves running a gauntlet of stone throwing mobs and the ever-present round-up of illegals reminds you that you are lucky to be on the inside, if only of a dying society with all hope washed out.

See echo’s of the 1973 Sci-Fi drama Soylent Green in the advertisements for voluntary euthanasia via the suicide pill Quietus.

See a rather too obvious re-enactment of Christ’s birth in the manger as the redemption child is born in a manger while mad gypsy women bar the door and battles rage outside.

See cultures clash as the reality of different times and different places are imposed on familiar settings.

Highly recommended.

The most amazing wet-dream of a movie for any middle-aged man whose been on a business trip to Asia, dreamed of seducing a 25-year-old gamine girl and loves a frosty mix of high-tech gadgets described in a polyglot argot of French, Spanish, Arabic, Urdu, Mandarin and Management cant:

Gracias
De nada
Pour quio
Ni-hao
Tiamo
Salut, ca-va?
A bientot

It’s filmed in a wash of color where faded dreamscapes bleed into daylight as nighttime activity leads to harsh indoldent noon clarity.

See subway trains and international planes; dreams and waking time; marble halls and security stalls; jet-lag and coffee; noodles eaten in backstreet booths.

See them shelter from a rain of sunshine ‘neath a shared coat at dawn.

See toll-booths on the city borders where the Outlanders hustle a living from the limousine liberals.

See the corporate architecture of tomorrow-land juxtaposed with shady dives where the cognisati meet with divas and fantasy unfolds into reality (what else is travel actually for?).

See the hero hack his way into corporate strongholds with empathy-virus enabled intuitive riffs on bespectacled high-class call girls in reception areas we half-recognize, half-abhor. “Tell me something about yourself.”

See deserts segue into cityscapes which segue into interiors of silken pajama-game intimacy: from the wide-open high-way to the squishy midnight my-way.

See the fever of love mingled with repulsion in Arabian one-night cheap hotels where wrist straps best science and the heat oppresses the unworthy.

See technology embedded in the soul.
See mystery ennobling the role.
See tomorrow, today.

See the most beautiful scenes ever filmed (53 minutes into the movie): mind-reading an amnesiac, driving an SUV on a dark desert highway. Shadow and light play and a soundtrack to sleep on echo’s still.

Hear dialog that will infest dreams you’ll have long after the final credits roll:

William: I always wondered why the coyote didn’t just go out and buy a Road Runner. He had enough money to buy rocket-powered roller-skates so he had money to buy a Road Runner.
Maria: How did you do that?
William: What?
Maria: Y’know I was thinking something and you heard me–that is weird.
William: Intuition – I can feel what you’re thinking.
Maria: No, I don’t believe in mind-reading, it’s all a trick.
William: It’s not a trick. It’s a gift.
Maria: What am I thinking now?

And

Maria: You have a kid?
William: Yeah?
Maria: Chico or chica?
William: Chico.
Maria: I bet he’s special.
William: He *is* special.
Maria: Everybody’s children are so special. It makes you wonder where all the ordinary grown-ups come from.

See it all end for her in headscarves and Muslim wilderness, over against his corporate bleached white sanity preserved with selective memories of adventures past. Domesticity at the end of the tunnel. Cover preserved.

Go rent this movie and blow your mind!