WildWildEast is now my Facebook URL

Yes, this morning in true geek fashion I awoke to set my Facebook URL at 12 midnight Eastern Standard time in the US which turned out to be 11am here in Vietnam. Much has been made over the last week about making sure you register early so no one else can steal your name and as it turns out, that was of importance to me.

DavidCarlson.com is owned by a real estate agent in Los Angeles. WildWildEast.com is owned by a name-squatter in Florida and WildWildEast.blogspot.com is owned by an artist in Japan, so it was important that I own WWE on Facebook. My other choice of course, was WildWildEastDailies, which is the name of the blog but I didn't figure that would be too much in demand and it's already 7 slots on page one when you Google it - and my own name, no matter how you configure it, seems to be doing a good enough job on it's own of helping old friends find me and old bill collectors not find me, so I decided that WildWildEast would be my FB handle, since that is the name of the book and what got this whole enterprise started in the first place.

So here's the ticket: http://www.facebook.com/WildWildEast You should see the picture on this post when you get there.

Check in. Be my friend. Don't sign me up for any stupid "Vampire Bit Me" or "Here's a Virtual-Frigging Drink" games and we'll be good to go. See you on #FB!

Anniversary: Wild Wild East Dailies

Today, February 7th, 2009 is the one year anniversary of the Wild Wild East Dailies blog. Whooooooooooooooopiy! ~ To see where it all started, click here.

For more on blogs, blogging and bloggers, check here:

Advertising People & Blogs - The Travis Diaries VI
How to Write the Best Damn Blog in the World
Throw That Blog a Bone!
If Blogs Are Free Are They Worthless?
What If Gutenberg Had a Blog?
If You Like the Blog, Read the Book>/a>
2008 Annual Report - The Wild Wild East Dailies
Blog Redesign WWED
BarCamp Saigon 2008
Attraction vs. Conversion - How to Power Your Blog
Are the Bloggerati Missing the Market?

To the lost:

Hello lost. You became lost when you went away. Not by some disaster or force majur, but by sheer inability to be there when it mattered most. One of you left for money and the SEC, another left for god, and yet another left because she was just terribly unhappy with herself and her business. Another left because he doesn't know how to balance business and marriage. My wife left when my company transfered me to Korea. Shit happens. People don't get lost because of you. People loose themselves because they don't know what to do. People get lost because they weren't looking for where they were going in the first place. Care for your friends and lovers but don't be surprised when they leave. A dollar has become a precious thing. Follow the money. That's how people get lost. Then in the end, finally, you can see what you've found.

How tiny is my pee-pee? And how far will I go to fix it?

Dear friends:

Recently the subject of penis size has come into question regarding yours truly. I wouldn't have noticed the pitiful size of my diddley-digit had the Internet not ever so helpfully pointed it out and, yes, age factors figure in here as well as probably early childhood memories of extremely well-hung men in public swimming pool locker rooms and sex shops boasting devices that could make an elephant blush. But what do women expect from me at this stage in life here in banana-land? Am I the laughing stock of every well-hung tropical fruit tree? Hell around here, the coconut trees alone make you consider your own hanging spherical embellishments. But, thankfully, help arrived last week in the form of the following email offering me a free penile enhancement product for, well... absolutely, no cash. I found this positively amazing. And you know what? You might too. And so I am printing the offer for all of my friends as a sort of gift, exactly as it appeared to me.

Read through it. It's really quit genuine and honest and I'm sure a lot of other men out there could be helped by it. I was touched.

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Hello, I'm the webmaster of www.peloop.com I wanted to know if by any chance you would be interested in doing an unbiased review of our site www.peloop.com on your blog http://wildwildeastdailies.blogspot.com/ If you agree you can choose between receiving a product sample or receiving a payment.

If you choose the product sample instead of the payment the sample is yours to keep and you don’t need to send it back.

The product sample that you can get is Peloop - a penis enhancer and you can see it at the address above. If you are interested please click here to receive your sample or your money:

www.seoblogreviews.com/acceptreview.py?e453c26cfc5d13217b

If you don't want to ever receive mails from us, just click the following link:

http://www.seoblogreviews.com/unsubscribe.py?param=e453c26cfc5d13217b4d05ba83490843

If you have any questions just send a reply to this email. Thank you

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I hope this proposal can prove beneficial to some of my more manly-challenged readers but I myself have opted not to participate in the program. It was a heart wrenching decision. With all the time I've put into my book and this blog should I sell my soul to the sultan of schlongs just for a few more hits on my site? Didn't really add up to me. I figure I hit far more women with this blog than I do with my winkie these days and my bets are better placed here. (Cue: drooping noodle sound)

"Ignore Everybody" : A plug for Hugh MacLeod

Next spring Hugh MacLeod from Gapingvoid.com will publish, in book form, his manifesto, "Ignore Everybody" and it will not have been an overnight success. He has been working on parts of the ideas for well over 10 years. Following is a response I sent to Hugh on one of his posts a few months ago. It would do you well to read his post first, here:

"When your dreams become reality, they are no longer your dreams"

and then my response, second, here:
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This smells charmingly like the last chapter in "How To Be Creative". Touche!

When you've realized your dreams the only thing to do is to come up with new dreams. (Screenplay?)

When I started in the advertising business the first thing I realized was that I had turned a hobby (writing and drawing) into a business. It was no longer fun. Who said I had to "feel" creative at 9am in an office cubicle beside an expressway in Dallas? I didn't. But like all good working stiffs, at least I knew it wasn't a steel factory and that this job was better than a lot of people would ever have the chance to do – so I proceeded to churn out "product", today called "content" and then cherry-pick the best of it for my portfolio.

Who really thought that I had a deep creative desire to find the underlying meaning and subtleties in the Texas real estate and banking markets? No one, fuck all. I was doing a job and I knew it.

So I set about developing other hobbies outside of the office. I learned to shoot dove in West Texas (very near to you). I picked up sailing on Cedar Creek lake from Pat Beckman and his 25ft Catalina. I became Tower Records best customer by weekly stoking my collection and I developed a serviceable reading jones at the hands of Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Robbins, Brautigan, Vonegut, John Irving and so on. And life balanced out.

I never had any misconceptions that I was writing the great American novel aside from my work to hawk toothpaste, laundry powder or video games. I married, bought a few houses and became a weekend warrior on a 100 year-old money pit in Michigan. Life was good. Yet, like you, it was all random.

The call to go top Korea was about as weird as I thought things were going to get – until two years later when I started my own company in that odd and foreboding land. Random? But, not really. Over time I've just learned to accept the twists and turns as gifts from above and make them work for me. To stay a perpetual student and maybe, after time, to be able to teach others how to run the maze.

The trick, I've found is in being able to decide, quickly and decisively, what it is you "do not" want to do. That skill will keep you from wasting time on things that just aren't going to work out anyway.

Hugh, you say the business card cartoons have been going for ten years but I beg to differ with you on that count. I can remember as long as we have known each other, you working with this format. You really were doing it in the early 90s in Chicago, after UT. It's what has kept us in contact all these years. When you first put up Gapingvoid, I was on your mailing list. And then, this last year, when I finally got a real chunk of my book Wild Wild East, on the net, you were one of the first to respond and link me in. And that fueled my current blog and got me into a weekly 3-post diet.

Now, I've got writing, drawing, blogging and marketing all working together in one of the oddest symphonies I ever could have imagined. This week, I met an American who works in the Internet industry and has moved to Vietnam, who found me because of my blog. Next month, a woman from Singapore will come to HCMC, who had also found me from my blog. Last Saturday I had a date with a woman who has been a loyal reader and this Friday I will attend an industry function and meet another woman who has been following the writing.

Niche, what niche? Okay, it's not "Cartoons drawn on the back of business cards" but if "Smart-assed marketing guy in the bowels of a communist country" is a niche, I've got that baby sewn up!

The Internet has given us previously undefinable types the opportunity, to, if not go mainstream, go "slipstream" into sideways and previously uncharted social marketing and networking philosophies that have probably always existed, but never had a reachable platform.

Being paid to be exactly who we are has got to be the ultimate reward and measure of the word "success". Million dollar checks don't often come with that, but million dollar smiles really do.

Rock on, Hugh.

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And if you like what you've read from Hugh, you can download a PDF of the work from www.ChangeThis.com, or better yet, buy a copy of his book next spring. Only too bad it won't be available for Christmas shopping this year.

For more on digital marketing and social networking see:

Xing vs. LinkedIn: Round II
Trial and Error: The New Normal
What's Wrong With My Social Networking? Xing vs. LinkedIn I
Low Tech Germany. Who Knew?
Advertising People and Blogs
How to Write the Best Blog in the World
What If Gutenberg Had a Blog?
If Blogs Are Free Does That Make Them Worthless?
Detri-Viral Marketing II: The Top 10 Social Media Blunders
Bright Lights, Big Internet and the WWED
Saigon Digital Marketing Conference Successfully Avoids Plumbers Convention
A Tale of Many Marketing Conferences
Detri-Viral Marketing I: How Web 2.0 Can Go Against A Brand
Marketing Predictions for 2009
Barcamp Saigon 2008
"Ignore Everybody" is Born: A Plug for Hugh MacLeod
Are the Bloggerati Missing the Market? Asia has Risen,
Into the Gapinvoid - Web 2.0 Social Networking Born 20 Years Ago

A Buddhist Funeral Prayer

A few months ago a friend here in Saigon, Ramsey Montgomery passed away at a rather young age. His parents held his memorial service in a Buddhist temple. Following is a prayer passed out to the gathering. We didn't speak this prayer in unison. Rather we were left to use it as we chose whilst the monk chanted and tapped out his rhythm with a wooden stick on a gourd.

The phrasings and Capitalization are how it was passed on to me:


O Buddhas and Bodhisattvas,
abiding in all directions,
endowed with great compassion,
endowed with fore-knowledge,
endowed with the divine eye,
endowed with love,
affording protection to sentient beings,
consent through the power of your
great compassion to come forth.
Consent to accept these offerings concretely
laid out and mentally created.
O Compassionate Ones,
you who possess the wisdom of understanding,
the love of compassion,
the power of doing divine deeds and of
protecting in incomprehensible measure.
( __________ ) is passing from this world to the next.
He/she is taking a great leap.
The light of this world has faded for him/her.
He/she has entered solitude with his/her karmic forces.
He/she has gone into a vast Silence.
He/she is borne away by the Great Ocean of birth and death.
O Compassionate Ones,
protect ( _________ ),who is defenseless.
Be to him/her like a father and a mother.
O Compassionate Ones,
let not the force of your compassion be weak,
but aid him/her.
Forget not your ancient vows.


My enjoyment and surprise is this particular evocation comes in the last line – "Forget not your ancient vows" – in that it nearly chides the Gods should they be remiss in their duty to our human friend. To me it indicates a sort of equality, a communication between the two parties, in that the Gods and we as devotees share a symbiotic relationship – something not stressed in the Christian faiths.

For clarification of the manuscript, Buddhas are the Gods and Botisattvas are the reincarnated Buddhas such as the Dalai Lama - people who are believed to be Gods but in a human form only for a lifetime. The painting is by Robert Spellman.