Owing to the success of the still-funny NBC series, The Office, Scranton, Pennsylvania is enjoying a boom in tourism related to the show. (In what I think is a move that should have been made years ago, NBC is offering all of its original programming as streaming media online. Popular shows have 2-3 commercials every 10 minutes or so, but according to the Missus, crappy ones, like Las Vegas, only have one commercial at every break.)Now, let me say that I have never actually "visited" Scranton. I did drive through in 2002 on the way to skiing in the Poconos. It did not appear to be a particularly nice place to visit (one mountain was covered with what looked like oil/gas wells) and my friends from the area confirm that most of the traffic to the town is headed one way in the wrong direction. So it's good to see the town's government being smart enough to embrace whatever bones get thrown their direction by doing stuff like putting up a Dunder Mifflin banner at City Hall and recognizing a fake company on the Chamber of Commerce web site. This is in contrast to how the nation of Kazakhstan reacted during the buildup to the release of the Borat movie. They held press conferences denouncing Borat, pulled Borat's .kz web site, and even decided they needed to run several full page ads in the New York Times about the reasons why Kazakhstan was a great progressive place to do business (Reason #327: Age of consent has been raised to 8 years old).
Remember folks: any publicity is good publicity.
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