Lucy, the "itchy scratchy, wiggy" three-legged dog

My brother in law, Rob Fitzpatrick, has written a song for our family’s pet miniature poodle, Lucy.

It’s sung to the tune of the children’s song Head and Shoulder, Knees and Toes. The lyrics are “Itchy, Scratchy, Wiggy Dog.”

Lucy is a mess.

Ever since we adopted Lucy from the woman who rescued this three-legged poodle from an animal shelter outside Cleveland, Lucy has suffered from rotten teeth, ear infections, itchy skin and a never-ending propensity to bite her hind quarters.  Medicated shampoos, antihistamines, antibiotics and topical lotions offer little relief.

Of course, New York City is always ready to offer help to the seemingly endless supply of deep-pocketed pet owners willing to spend generously to correct Fifi’s overbite or restore Lance’s coat to its puppy-like luster. We took Lucy to a doggie dermatologist, who charged us $750 to rip a cell sample from her hair and skin with a piece of transparent packing tape, which they studied under a microscope to see if the infection was bacterial or yeast.  Novel, but damn expensive.

Several years and millions of scratches later, Lucy paid another trip to a vet this week.  Our goal in bringing her to see Dr. Thoulton Surgeon (yep, that’s his real last name) was to get her teeth scaled and to extract the rotten tooth.

Dr. Surgeon, who made a point of telling me he didn’t attend Cornell University’s veterinary college so he could sell expensive dog food, is a serious practitioner.  He looked at Lucy’s skin condition and frowned.  He then proceeded to share the contents of a presentation he gave a month earlier during the Veterinary Dental Forum conference in Boston, where he lectured about early successes his patients were experiencing with clinical trials of nitric oxide therapy.

Huh?

PLASON device - NO (Nitric Oxide) therapy

After assuring me he didn’t mean laughing gas (nitrous oxide), Dr. Surgeon wheeled in a machine about the size of a small cappuccino maker and explained the Russian-made Plason device could generate heat of 3,000 degrees Celsius.  But the cool “arm” of the machine emanated a steady stream of puffs that, when applied to lesions, seemed to kill bacteria, yeast and other cells that inhibit the healing process.

Lucy didn’t mind being blown on by the machine.  I loved knowing that a machine capable of creating a lightning bolt was being tamed by a doctor willing to buck the veterinarian establishment in the interest of science — and reducing Lucy’s wigginess.

We’ll bring Lucy in for a few months and let you know how the treatment progresses.

Unfortunately, the one promise Dr. Surgeon was able to make about the Plason device was that it could not stimulate her missing leg to regenerate.  “This isn’t stem cells,” he chuckled.

An odd benefit to growing up with two legally blind sisters in the 1970s was my very early DJ career.

Along with magnifying glasses and the weekly large-print edition of The New York Times, our house also had a collection of state-supplied audio equipment that was way too tempting for a pre-pubescent boy fixated on Top 40 radio.

So when my siblings’ specialized phonographs – so-called “talking book machines” that played vinyl records at 8 1/3, 16 2/3 and 33 1/3 RPM – were dormant, I put them to use playing music.  I learned to cue records to start at precise beats, and how to transition music seamlessly.  I also quickly wished for a fourth speed, 45 RPM, to play singles.

That early comfort with technology and music turned me into a radio station groupie, a volunteer answerer of the request lines at Rochester’s WAXC, WHAM’s on-air traffic reporter at age 15, and a DJ at WDNY in Dansville and WTLB in Utica during high school and college.

Despite my sabotage of their talking book machines, Shelley earned a master’s degree and Shifra a Ph.D.  My radio career ended when I joined PR Newswire in 1989, but I never forgot the connection with an audience that could be forged with two turntables.

Fast forward 30 years and it’s no surprise I was mesmerized when I met Rob Principe and learned how he built Scratch Music Group around DJ training schools in New York, Los Angeles, and Miami, and how his national network of 700+ A-list DJs were routinely performing at corporate events for brands from H&M and Google to Diesel and ESPN.

Chronicled in his book, On the Record: The Scratch DJ Academy Guide, Rob founded the business with Run-D.M.C. DJ Jam-Master Jay in 2002 and has an all-star list of current and past instructors.  A testament to the genre’s massive popularity: the book’s forward is written by Moby.

Rob and his partners, Mike Cannady and Colin Kelly, have ambitious expansion plans for Scratch.  I was thrilled when they invited me to help them further leverage their unparalleled network of DJ talent into new vertical markets and geographies.

So if you get me on the phone and hear a pulsating beat in the background, I’m probably taking a lesson.  And if you see a tweet with a DJ term you don’t understand, we’ll get you a lesson.

Scores of Americans who live outside of metropolitan areas lost some good friends in June. And they weren’t Michael Jackson, Billy Mays, Farrah Fawcett and Ed McMahon.

The companions who disappeared on June 12 ranged from Wheel of Fortune’s Vanna White and Pat Zajac to Providence, R.I., television weatherman R.J. Heim.

They were the personalities on channels 2 through 13 and, for homes not served by cable TV, they disappeared permanently when VHF stations turned off their old transmitters and began sending out a less powerful digital signal on the UHF band.

It wasn’t until this week that I got to experience first-hand the impact of the federal government DTV decision requiring television stations to abandon the channels on which they have been broadcasting since the 1950s. I was shocked at how even tech-savvy homeowners could not coax the new digital signals into their TV sets.

The “South County” region of Rhode Island is not rural America, by many standards.  Located just 35 miles south of Providence, the county has numerous year-round communities — like Wakefield and Narragansett  — as well as summer vacation havens for beachgoers.  At the local Radio Shack outlet, a sales associate admitted that more than half the digital television antennas sold were being returned because it was impossible to receive the ABC, CBS and NBC affiliates that had previously supplied area residents
with news, weather, sports and entertainment.

I had planned ahead for our summer sojourn by buying a $59 device to convert digital broadcasts into an analog signal that our cottage’s 1980s-era TV set could display.  When the box did not find any signals powerful enough, I bought a $35 amplified digital antenna. That maneuver succeeded in locating four undesirable channels run by the bankrupt media organization formerly known as Paxson, perhaps best known for its religious and home-shopping networks.  Still no luck finding the mainstay Providence stations.

Failure of the recommended consumer solutions meant taking this technical challenge into the capable hands of several neighborhood macho men, all well-versed in building and repairing electronics.

We attached to a mast a commercial-grade UHF antenna that looked like some sort of Cold War military apparatus and hoisted it above the rafters of our beach cottage.  Then we employed a smart phone application that provides a digital compass so we could aim the antenna directly at the television transmission towers we were targeting, using http://antennaweb.org to get the precise coordinates.

After we wasted several quality vacation hours that should have been used consuming beers and absorbing UV rays on the beach, we determined that Narragansett, Rhode Island, population 16,361 at the 2000 census, is a television black hole for those without subscriptions to cable or satellite services.

If it’s this bad in New England, I can only imagine how challenging it will be to serve off-the-grid citizens in the rural South, Great Plains and other regions.  Suddenly, it seems likely that media bad boy Michael Wolff was correct in April when he predicted that the big three TV networks would soon have audiences no larger than a mid-sized metro daily newspaper.

Embracing new media technologies has been a defining characteristic of my professional life.  Yet I find it distasteful when government and industry turn their back on consumers who made older media successful.  Forced upgrades are fine, as long as they work just as well as legacy systems and the financial investment in modernizing is not too steep.

This digital TV conversion was characterized as an upgrade when it actually leaves millions of formerly loyal viewers, outside the regions served by insufficient UHF signals, with a choice of a monthly cable or satellite bill or no service at all.

New Yorker Sandy Cohen has started an unconventional translation company, Speaklike.  Rather than thriving on the conversion of encyclopedia-sized documents from English into Arabic or Portuguese, Sandy’s start-up offers Twitter users an inexpensive way to translate their 140-character messages into just about any language.

At about 25 cents per language per tweet, this can add up in a hurry.  But it’s a godsend for B2B and B2C users of Twitter who cater to multicultural and global audiences.   His service could also be used in the email and Web fulfillment world.

In another departure from the mainstream, Sandy is taking a play out of the Wikipedia playbook by crowd-sourcing his network of translators.  The similarity to Wikipedia ends there, though, as a fraction of each micropayment  will trickle down to the translations.  (Will this be the basis for a new Twitter economy in Brazil and Belarus?)

I just started using SpeakLike today and look forward to seeing if anyone in the Spanish-speaking world cares about my tweets.  My new Latino persona is @SenorDaveArmon.

The other interesting crowd-sourced translation business model involves Web video.  dotSUB , created by Michael Smolens, is free for users to upload video and a transcript so each spoken word appears as closed-captioning on the bottom of the video  (click on the “CC” button at the bottom of the player).  Those two steps opens up your video to the hearing-impaired audience.

For video producers who want to reach those who speak another language, dotSUB has a network of professional translators who will do the work for a few bucks (the charge was around $10 a video minute the last time I checked).  There are free translators who know how to use the dotSUB tool, but the content has to be interesting enough for someone to volunteer their time to convert your video into something that will win an Oscar in the Ukraine or Nepal.

There are already a few examples of marketing programs taking advantage of dotSUB and Speaklike.   Use the Comment function below to let me know your thoughts about these tools.

Being politically correct is not working in New York politics.

I am not surprised but terribly disappointed that the Empire State’s legally blind, African American governor, David Paterson, is being vilified by right and left, black and white, poor and rich.

“Paterson’s so low, Spitzer looks good,” read Tuesday’s front-page headline in the free New York City commuter daily Metro.

For those who are not riveted by the antics of Albany, Paterson became governor abruptly in March 2008 when the testosteronally overcharged Eliot Spitzer resigned after getting caught with a call girl. A veteran pol whose father has been a fixture in the state’s Democratic party since the 1950s, Paterson had time for neither formal media training nor staff vetting when he was thrust onto center stage.

The results have been nothing short of a disaster for someone who has dedicated his life to public service.

The Marist College poll, reported in Metro, shows Spitzer was the preference for 51 percent of those questioned versus just 38 percent for Paterson. The question asked by pollsters was, “”Who would you rather have as governor right now?”

I don’t think I’m sticking my neck out here by saying that being man of color is not the problem. Barack Obama seems to be getting on just fine in the White House, enjoying a 68% approval after 100 days. Only two presidents in the past half century – John F. Kennedy, 83 percent, and Dwight Eisenhower, 72 percent — had a higher approval rating at this point in their presidencies.

Analysts point to a lack of strong leadership for Paterson. Yes, he embarrassed Caroline Kennedy and blabbed far too much about his decision-making process in filling the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Hillary Clinton. He has also taken flack for legislation regarding gay marriage and solving unprecedented fiscal woes, like funding New York City’s perennially mismanaged Metropolitan Transit Authority.

What no one’s saying is that Paterson shows up at every major disaster and crime scene — from the ambush of a police officer in Rochester to the murderous rampage by a suicidal immigrant in Binghamton — and that the state budget was passed just one day late. The budget was weeks or months late when Republican George Pataki was governor.

My contention is that Paterson’s public image problems relate to his blindness.

Unlike Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles, New York’s governor, who was 3 months old when he suffered optic nerve damage because of an ear infection, does not hide his off-center eyes behind sunglasses. His salt-and-pepper beard contributes to an appearance uncharacteristic of Hollywood-ready governors and presidents.

With no provocation, the media has pounced on Paterson with venom usually reserved for public figures who are either prison-bound, like Rod Blagojevich of Illinois, or morally devoid but not yet convicted of being jerks.

Saturday Night Live’s Fred Armisen has used Paterson’s disability on a number of occasions to draw laughs as he keeps one eye closed while holding charts upside down, walking aimlessly around the set and bumping into chairs.

Sean Delonas, a cartoonist for the New York Post, depicted Paterson sitting behind a desk on which sits a framed photograph of the bumbling animated TV character Mr. Magoo. The Delonas cartoon also included a seeing-eye dog.

Paterson has had to work harder than his sighted peers to graduate from law school and achieve his professional accomplishments. There’s nothing in the LexisNexis news clipping database that portrays him as a jackass.

Yes, he has faults.

Paterson, and his wife, admitted marital infidelity. The governor, a former assistant district attorney in Queens, also talked openly about youthful cocaine use.

Coincidentally, Obama’s autobiography also chronicles his use of cocaine.

As someone who has spent my career in news and PR — including a brief stint in the state Capitol bureau of United Press International — I would love to see Paterson address the issue of media discrimination of the handicapped in a more forceful manner.

With poll numbers like these, he doesn’t have anything to lose.

(Disclosure: I serve as a volunteer member of the marketing and education committees at Lighthouse International, a 104-year-old New York-based not-for-profit agency that provides services to the blind and visually impaired. Two of my four sisters are legally blind.)