As I’ve been looking to increase traffic to my Blog, I decided that like the Heene family– who pretended that their six year-old son was trapped in a balloon and hurtling across America– that I should pull a similar publicity stunt.
Although Rachelle and I don’t have any children, we do have a dog, a miniature Dachshund named Heidi, and she’s way cuter than the Heene’s stupidly named son Falcon. The media would not be able to resist a cute dog in peril story.
With that in mind, I got one of our empty moving boxes and attached several helium balloons to it, which I affixed with masking tape. I placed Heidi in the box, with her squeak toy, and held her out from our first story balcony. By my calculations, with a the wind blowing west, Heidi should have floated gently down Queen Street to the City TV studios in about an hour. Timed at rush hour, this would have created a mad house of attention—much like the OJ car chase, and garnered me all sorts of excellent publicity for my Blog.
The first thing that I did, before releasing Heidi, was call City TV to report the incident.
ME: ( weeping and hysterical) Oh Lord, Lord, Lord!!!
City TV: Calm down.
ME: I’m a Blogger and I’ve lost my dog!!
City TV: You’re a logger who has lost his job?
ME: Yes!! WWWDOTMICHAELMURRAYDOTCABACKSLASBLOGBACKSLASH
City TV: Who is it you’d like to speak with?
ME: Heidi!! Heidi!! She’s so cute the cameras will love her!! And she’s in her Halloween costume—a hot dog!! She’s flying!! She’s a flying dog now and I’m so sorry I took her squeak toy away!
At this point the phone connection went dead, but I was confident that they would scramble their helicopters, and so, holding the Heidi box out over the railing, I released her. Slowly, she descended onto the awning of the Korean convenience store beneath us. In short order, the dog began to bark, which alerted Hyang-Soon, who got a stepladder from the back room and climbed up and took the Heidi box down. Looking up at me, Hyang-Soon said, “Michael, I have your dog here. It looks like she somehow managed to get out onto my awning. In a box with balloons attached to it.” And then he paused for a moment. “Is Rachelle away again?”