Rodent Regatta

Memphis can be a muddy little river town at times. It comes complete with all the corruption, scandal and fly-coated filth one might expect. As instruments of the politicians in this town, the local media have long hedged any inclination toward serious, investigative reporting—particularly of politics. It’s been this way for decades. With the mayor’s recently announced indiscretions comes a new low in how the local media sees things. Yet, we remain proud of our new basketball arena and the one we’ve left sitting mostly empty.

A year ago today, Memphis was still trying to recover from a serious straight-line wind that tore through the city. At approximately 7:30a.m. on the 22nd, power was cut to over 300,000 customers of the city’s public utility. My power was restored at about 5:20p.m. on August 4, 2003. July and August heat in Memphis with no power is no fun. Living without lights in the middle of the night is no fun, either.

For the first time today, I had the need for a concise list of postal or email addresses. I wanted to send a simple, business-oriented press release to sixteen media outlets in Memphis, TN.

Do you have any idea how time-consuming and difficult it is to identify the right sixteen contacts? I’ve got a couple of hours in the task already, and it is nowhere near complete. Sixteen names and addresses for people who might want to receive a press release about a business matter are hard to find.

Google or not, we’ve got a ways to go. One piece of good news in all this. I stumbled into another Memphis web site with an RSS feed. Feed subscribed!

[Note: This is not a cry for a solicitation from every advertising and public relations agency in Memphis. It’s sixteen pieces of mail for crying out loud.]

The Memphis Manifesto continues to list all the places that are to be preferred over Memphis for one reason or another. Most of the time this is measured based upon the number of creative people or businesses that exist in a given metro area. Here’s a copy of the Manifesto.

I’m sure I’m not enlightened enough to understand all of this, but it seems that when your mayor is under investigation by the FBI, your city may have bigger problems than its artistic headcount.

One of the biggest challenges I have faced trying to do business in Memphis is its apparent lack of sophistication. I don’t mean the kind of snobbery that masquerades as sophistication. I’m talking about tools, techniques and approaches that involve something more than good ’ol boy methods. Were I attempting to illustrate this with an example, I’d compare the old shop-keeper who simply reorders what he sells each day as a means of inventory control. Contrast this with automated techniques for running linear algebra problems that can lead to truly optimized inventory and profit management results.

Memphis businesses lean on the older methods in many, many cases. To the extent that ”creative people” can bring with them the sophistication, I’m all for the effort to build that talent base. Remember, this absence of sophistication is why I travel.

Here’s one more example. Ephraim Schwartz has written An Automated Audit for Infoworld’s June 28, 2004 issue. The contents of that article are probably important to no more than one hundred individuals in Memphis. Of that group, we’ll find they are concentrated at one or two big banks, a hospital and FedEx.

I simply could not join the Rocky Top Brigade because of loyalties that run very deep elsewhere. This places in me in direct contradiction with a key tenet of their constitution as well as their official religion.

Now there’s the new Memphis Redblogs, ”a collaborative website featuring conservative and libertarian-minded rightwing types in the Memphis area.”

As a classical liberal I’m not sure I fulfill all of their qualifications either. However, it’s good to finally identify some fellow weblog writers in the area.