Show Animals

2022 and 2023 are going to be HUGE for in-person events.

— Joe Pulizzi

Content-marketing guru Joe Pulizzi is bullish on tradeshows, as are many who've attended one lately.

I'm not so sanguine, despite the Delta variant waning.

But a tradeshow-industry insider suggested to me this week that my bearish views aren't justified. 

He pointed to the recent shows held by Informa, the National Association of Convenience Stores, the National Confectioners Association, and the Packaging Machinery Manufacturers Institute as examples of the industry's recovery.

I allowed I was perhaps underestimating tradeshow organizers' resiliency.

But whether you back bulls or bears, don't put your money on these two species: cows and pigs.

They're done for.

Three decades ago, I wrote an investigative article—the first of its kind—for the tradeshow-industry magazine EXPO.

It revealed two best-kept industry secrets: one, that most organizers' shows were cash cows; and two, that most organizers' net margins were piggish—well over 70%.

The article, entitled "Porcine Profits," made a few show organizers uncomfortable; but none disputed its accuracy.

Pent-up, post-pandemic demand notwithstanding, those heady yesterdays are over.

Show expenses are up; show participation, down; and no broad-scale economic rebound is going to change either of those facts.

Organizers are going to have to forget about bulls and bears and cows and pigs, and at last become rhinos.

That, or become dinosaurs.

HAT TIP: Thanks to Dan Cole for introducing me to the rhino.

Burn Rate

Desperate for cash, the organizers of Burning Man are auctioning art to stay afloat another two months, according to Billboard.

The event operator has partnered with Sotheby's to sell 100 works of art, so it doesn't go under before it can begin to sell tickets for its 2022 event. Prices for the art reach into the tens of thousands of dollars.

Burning Man, which normally attracts 70 thousand attendees and generates $43 million in registration fees, has cancelled its annual event two years in a row. CEO Marian Goodell told Billboard his company was in "dire straits."

Will other event organizers follow suit?

Talk about a fire sale!

Happiness is a Warm Brush

Happiness lies in the joy of achievement and
the thrill of creative effort.

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

On Saturday, I had the distinct pleasure of painting en plein air outside the studio of N.C. Wyeth in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, under the guidance of my realism teacher, Randall Graham.

Initial charcoal sketch

The afternoon was warm, the autumn sunlight lemony. 

I found that to bathe in that warmth and light and in all those Wyeth-family vibes in the air inspired me to paint freely and loosely—even though the results are highly questionable (another of my teachers found the following day innumerable faults in Pumpkin on Boulder, all clearly on display to a knowing eye like hers).

The painting aside, my memories of Saturday will last me a long, long time, because I was swept up for five hours in the wellspring of happiness, flow.

I recently asked Delaware painter Lena Moaney why she paints and her reply was immediate: "I paint to relax. When I paint, nothing else in the world matters to me. I’m using my full imagination and all my skills in the moment."

That puts it nicely.

Happiness is a warm brush. 

Above: Pumpkin on Boulder. Oil on canvas. 18 x 12 inches.

Villany vs. Stupidity

You have attributed conditions to villainy
that simply result from stupidity.

— Robert A. Heinlein

As we sail toward Columbus Day, Madrid's “Trumpista” president Isabel Díaz Ayuso took advantage of an interview in New York this week to bash Critical Race Theory.

Díaz Ayuso warned that the theory is a "revisionist, dangerous, and pernicious" ideology that will lead to "cultural regression." 

She also lambasted the Indigenous movement, calling it a "dangerous current of communism" and an "attack against Spain." 

Díaz Ayuso called New York's recent decision to rename Columbus Day (now Indigenous People's Day) "fatal."

"Why are we revising the history of Spain in America," she asked, "when all it did was bring universities, civilization, and the West to the American continent?"

Her remarks echo Steve Bannon's 2014 Vatican remarks, in which he described Europe's past exploits as the foundation of a "civilization that really is the flower of mankind"

The day after the interview, Díaz Ayuso denounced Pope Francis for apologizing for the Catholic Church's support of the conquistadors.

Why vilify Spain, she asks, when the conquistadors merely made a few mistakes?

Robber Barrens

Two centuries before Tony Soprano, New Jersey's Pine Barrens—a million acres of coastal woodlands—harbored gangsters during the American Revolution. 

Known as banditti, they used the desolate woodlands as a base of operations, from which they robbed citizens' homes and smuggled contraband into and out of New York City, in open defiance of the Patriots fighting to separate the colonies from England.

The roughest and toughest of the banditti was John Bacon.

A shingle-maker by trade, Bacon began raiding the homes of Patriots in Forked River in the summer of 1780, carrying off everything of value that he and his men could find. In December of that year, Bacon upped the ante when he shot and killed a Patriot militia officer in Tom's River, as the soldier tried to arrest him.

Bacon's reputation as a robber blossomed a year later, thanks to an incident that became known as the “Skirmish at Manahawkin.”

When it learned he was leading a raiding party in the area, a group of local militiamen assembled to ambush Bacon at a Manahawkin crossroads. But when Bacon didn't materialize by 3 am, the militiamen retired to a tavern to get drunk. Bacon's party arrived at daybreak and shot and killed one of the militiamen as he fled the tavern. 

Bacon was indicted for high treason, as a result; but that didn't deter him. He continued raiding homes the Barnegat Bay area throughout 1782, "taking whatever he wanted—money, food, and clothing—at the muzzle of a musket or point of a bayonet," a one historian has written.

In October that year, Bacon perpetrated the "Massacre of Long Beach Island," during which he used bayonets to kill or wound 21 Patriots from Cape May, as they salvaged boxes of tea from a derelict British ship.

New Jersey's governor then put a £50 bounty on Bacon's head.

Hoping to earn the bounty, a Burlington County group of militiamen set out in search of Bacon on Christmas Day, but were waylaid by his band at Cedar Bridge, where two were killed and another wounded.

Two months later, the Revolutionary war ended. Most New Jersey bandits fled the Pine Barrens for New York City, but Bacon, fearing arrest, remained behind. 

That was a mistake. 

In April 1783, the same bounty hunters he bushwhacked at Cedar Bridge found Bacon in a tavern in Tuckertown, and executed him on the spot. The governor awarded the killers the bounty.

John Bacon was the last man to die in the Revolutionary War.