Please help support my ski team to fight Multiple Sclerosis

Faithful readers of Bank Gothic Overload:

As you might remember from last year, I traveled to Washington state in February 2008 for a fundraising event called the Jimmie Heuga Snow Express for Multiple Sclerosis. Once again, this year my brother Alan and I, along with some people who hail from the Pacific Northwest, are traveling to Crystal Mountain to compete in this unique event. I am sending this email to you in hopes that you will be able to donate some money to our team so that we can help fund the Heuga Center to better do what they do.

The Snow Express for MS supports the Heuga Center in Colorado, which is a research and treatment facility for people with Multiple Sclerosis. The Heuga Center helps people with MS learn how to live healthier, happier, more active lives. Most of you probably know someone who’s life is affected by MS. Our friend and team captain Alex was diagnosed with MS in 1995. Further testing called this diagnosis into doubt, but as he puts it “I still feel the after-effects of the ‘attacks’ to this day.” The Heuga Center has made it easy for you to support our team by setting up an online donation site.

Just go to our Snow Express for MS donation page and give your pledge. There are all sorts of graphs and stuff so you can see how our team is doing. As usual all donations are tax-deductible, and this system will get you your receipt right away.

What is this event? Well, we’ve got two teams this year (much as last year). Hilariously and idiotically, our names are very similar:

Team Teledu – the original team. A teledu is a Javanese Stink Badger. See below for image and a bumper sticker we used for self-promo purposes a few years ago.

Team Teledeux – I’ve never taken French, but I’ve been informed that deux means two. This is a genius second name, because now both teams sound the same. Organizers were very confused.

Both these teams are named Teledu because we are all telemark skiers – like the dudes in this pretty cool ski video:

Teams Teledu and Teledeux all travel to Crystal Mountain in Washington, ski a few days, drink a few beers per hour, eat these disgusting meatballs, and ski in the charity event on Saturday. We all pay our own way to get there, and all of your donations go directly to charity.

I’ve decided that I’m going to take last year’s HD footage of the event and will try to make a video of it in the near future. Stay tuned.

Hopefully you have a few bucks to spare, but in today’s economy I understand if you don’t.

-Josh (and the rest of Team Teledeux, Matt Wiley & Alan Mishell) and our new mortal enemies/evil twins, Team Teledu. (Alex Olsen, Jeff Koenig and Perry Brown)

*Not knowing French is sort of crappy because I really would like to go to northern Africa, and French is the official language of many of them (e.g., Mali). C’est la vie, whatever the fuck that means. OK, I know what that means.

PodCamp Boulder was much better than SpaceCamp #pcb09

I should preface this blog entry by saying I’ve never been to SpaceCamp®. But I have seen the movie. There’s no way that kid fit into a spacewalking suit to save the day. C’mon, man!

In a last-minute sponsorship for Flying Dog Brewery, I was able to cruise up to Boulder a few days ago for PodCamp Boulder. Organized by Jeremy Tanner, PodCamp Boulder was a day-long gathering of social media people. We met up at the brand-new Threadless office on Pearl Street, a great space.

There were seminars about all things social media, from audio and video engineering, ethical business practices on twitter. A bunch of people from the Denver/Boulder social media scene. And my favorite thing, a bunch of people learning the MJ Thriller dance, as taught by fellow PodCamper @naomimimi:

@flyingdog was happy to provide the beer, in the form of a half-barrel of K-9 Cruiser, our Winter seasonal brew. People were excited for free beer, and I was excited to see what people were talking about throughout the day.

Being on the brand side of things, sometimes I forget that what I’m thinking isn’t necessarily what a consumer is thinking. I’m looking forward to interacting with the Denver/Boulder social media crowd in the future. Any events I should be attending? Let me know.

The Woody Principle

I never got anything done for the Inauguration of our newest President. And this seems like a pretty momentous occasion to not write a blog entry about Barack Obama, marking the event. And now it’s the day after the Inauguration. I hope that the coming years of my infrequent political blog entries are as enthusiastic as I feel today.

Watching Cheers tonight, though, I found out where the flawless strategy of the Obama campaign came from. You guessed it, it came from the episode about Woody Boyd’s successful City Council campaign. The episode is also called “Woody Gets An Election” – which is hilarious. Check out this poorly made but hilarious short video from the episode:

OK, so President Obama (ooh, I like how that sounds) didn’t probably use that exact strategy. But I love that the syndicated show chose to play this episode on Inauguration Day. There have to be a million ways for a brand to market itself based on current events and holidays.

Bank Gothic Sighting: Barack Obama Presidential Coins

Well, 2009 is young. And already I’ve seen some wonderful uses of Bank Gothic. Like with this awesome Barack Obama Presidential Coin Set! As seen on TV, it was a sweet commercial which was hosted by Montel Williams. Don’t believe me? Check out www.obamacoincollection.com