CBS Jericho Lives Experiment

UPDATE: CBS cancels Jericho, sorry fans!

You should be lucky to have a bunch of strangers rooting for you, just like
that! It is hard enough to pay someone to work for you, let alone volunteer. But such is the passion of “millions” of people who feel strongly about a service or a product.

Briefly, this site is dedicated by fans of the now cancelled show, who ended up sending CBS a few tons of Nuts (has something to do with what a character utters in the season finale episode), spamming, faxing (yes, faxing!!) and emailing Les Moonves and his coterie to bring the show back this fall.

I’ve not seen the show so I can’t figure out what the big deal is about. The style of writing on the website by the “Core Team” and others is evidence of their rabidity; I wouldn’t want to pick up a fight with them. Are people so jobless that they actually have time/money to put up such a site, spend hours chasing network executives and organizing themselves into a credible force? Is this the work of a group of people who want to be famous?

Surely, all they gain from this is merely bringing back one of the many hundreds of shows that are on air these days. Aren’t you sick of the reality shows already? Fox has its own Reality channel – shocking! Such is the desire to be famous and on TV (yes, I’m guilty as charged as well).

That got me thinking about blogs. Over the past 1 year, I’ve become an “international journalist” of sorts. No, I’m absolutely not a professional writer, but if you look at the map on the left, you will see readers from every continent except Antartica, have visited and read my thoughts. The web allows “schumi” (the founder?) to launch his battle on a much wider front.

As a startup, I don’t think many of us use the web to generate such buzz. It must be a multi-headed attempt if one wants to generate marketing chatter around a product or a service. I don’t think it has to be wide enough to cover unrelated segments (I’m not going to think twice about Jericho Lives or the show after this post) so it must be a focused approach. If you sell staffing services, then targeting procurement or IT managers on IT magazine websites is a great way to network. And I think the content on many company websites is way too “static” or overly professional. The cool thing about Jericho Lives, is you can CLEARLY feel and see the passion of these jokers jump at you from the website. While I’m not suggesting letting your guard down, think about the target audience from a personal perspective. A lot of times, the content we dish out is so stiff and “professional” that it may not resonate. I’ve been a victim of this ‘disease’ in my older posts and letting my guard down seems to liberate my thought process. I’d be willing to trying it out for my business marketing as well.

A link to all you want to know about Jericho. Banner belongs to www.jericholives.com.

On another note – Relationships

I recently lost a close family friend’s father, known to my family for over 20 years. That event was catalystic in prompting me to write this post.

This garland of souls that one has in his/her life – parents, siblings and spouse, is probably once-in-a-lifetime combination. You can never get them back even if you were the most powerful person on Earth. This is especially painful if you deeply love any or all of these people.

This friend’s death made me reconsider my parents’ mortality, something that has deeply bothered me ever since I understood the ever-looping cycle of births and deaths. My mother, father, sisters, and now wife, are probably exclusive to this lifetime and may never come together again.  Of course, this is a moot point if you don’t believe in rebirth, unlike me.

I share a very tight relationship with my folks so it breaks my heart to imagine that when they pass, I won’t be able to talk or touch them, spend time laughing or hearing how their voice resonates. Once they go, they’re gone for eternity; who knows if I’ll ever get back with them in the same ring of relationships.

The sadness turns to emptyness because it is truly unimaginable by someone who hasn’t suffered a close personal parental loss yet to fathom the void. Both my parents are alive but I’ve been consumed by this mortality review to the point that every word spoken with/by them, is like a drop of water on dry land – a fading memory that slowly seeps away. It adds to the misery that those memories can never truly capture the tenor of their voice, but just be a distant, pictorial playback of that sound.

Pictorial playback of sound. That’s how the mind stores audio memories. You can never hear their voice again. You’ve lost them forever to Time or Nature. While it is good to let go of the past, it tears my heart. These painful words written now are mere reflections of the inevitable true pain of final and permanent separation.

When my time to lose comes, I won’t have the courage to flip the page on the biggest chapter in my life so far, and move to the next. True, Time is a healer, but fundamental to healing is undergoing terrible pain, the inability to retrace your steps, nee, turn back Time and go back to the point of contact – talking with your parent or feeling their  warmth in a hug or a kiss. 

No matter what happens, I am fortunate to have been associated with these souls, whose passing is something I know for a fact, I will never get over with. It pains to enact the actual moment of passing, the sinking feeling of the reality and the need to take action in a moment when all you want to do is take it all in. I am more cognizant of this delicate balance, the "defective" system where you are forced to give up your oldest and most sacred/loved relationship in an instant. I don’t think I’ll ever get over it.