I was overjoyed when occasional PR client and leading urbanist blogger Aaron Renn (@urbanophile) republished my recent tourism post, Meet Me in St. Louis, Not Milwaukee: How Not to Oversell Your Urban Tourism Campaign, on his Urbanophile blog. I was a little taken aback when “Dave,” an anonymous commenter, left a scathingly ad hominem response in both places (here and here.) Whereas I think the current tourism campaign of Milwaukee’s Convention and Visitors Bureau, Visit Milwaukee, is overblown, “Dave” thinks it’s just fine. He also thinks I’m a rotten writer, Renn’s an egomaniac, and that neither one of us has enough standing to opine on urban issues.

As our readers know, that last part is ridiculous on the face of it. But what’s even more ridiculous is where the anonymous comment seems to have come from…within the walls of Visit Milwaukee’s own PR firm. Earlier today, a Wisconsin blogger contacted me about a suspicion that “Dave” might actually be a Visit Milwaukee insider. I doubted that could be the case–what CVB or PR firm would ever allow a staffer to discuss company business in an anonymous, attacking manner? Especially by leaving an anonymous comment regarding public criticism of the public PR work of a firm’s high-profile, publicly accountable client?

It should come as no surprise to anyone who has ever browsed the Internet that when you merely visit a web page–much less leave a comment on one–you leave a trail behind you. That trail is the IP address from which you’re connecting to the web. For home users, that address is often a dynamic one–it may change every time you go online. For many business users, however, that IP address is static–i.e. permanent. Fixed. Unchanging. To paraphrase John Carpenter’s cinematic masterpiece, Halloween, IP addresses stand where man passes away.

I bet you can see where this is headed.

“Dave” signed his comment with the spoof email address, “no@gmail.com.” However, my blog’s content management system recorded his I.P. address: 67.52.198.230. According to this IP trace, that address turns out to be the static IP of a business in Milwaukee, Wisconsin: “NOISE-INC.”

Doesn’t that name sound like a PR firm? It should. In fact, Noise Inc. is not only a PR firm, it’s the PR firm with the Visit Milwaukee web-brand contract. They say so right here on their site. But don’t just take their word for it, the Milwaukee Business Journal says it, too. Just as curious, a simple Google search associating the firm with the name, “Dave,” returns on the very first page a LinkedIn listing (which out of respect I won’t link here) for a…get this…”Social Media Evangelist” of the same name, living in Milwaukee, and employed by none other than Noise Inc.

The only thing missing from the jaw-dropping adventure of Googling all of this today was a bag of popcorn and a stadium seat, folks.

While I can demonstrate the “Dave” comment came from the IP address of Noise Inc., I cannot say that it was an employee of theirs who left it, even the one noted above. It could have come from a third party using a computer of theirs or perhaps signing into a Wifi network they may operate. And even if the comment did come from a Noise Inc. employee, that doesn’t mean Noise Inc., itself, condoned it.

But honestly, an ad hominem comment responding to a blog post critical of the Visit Milwaukee ad campaign that’s written like a love letter to the campaign and was submitted from the IP address of a PR firm associated with the campaign? How much more like a duck does this story have to walk and talk before someone throws it back in the pond?

Two and a half hours ago I emailed Noise Inc.’s three top officials regarding the comment, including most of the links I shared above (and the LinkedIn one as well.)  As listed on the company website, those I contacted include chairman and chief creative officer John Sprecher, chief executive officer and partner Milissa Sprecher, and president Mary Parodo. As of this writing, I have not heard back from the firm. That’s fine. All I really have to say on the matter is in this post.

To wit: Noise Inc. owes itself–not to mention the Milwaukee Convention and Visitors Bureau, which I doubt would find the offending comment as amusing as “Dave” did–to figure out how that comment got on my blog from their office. If it was written by a third party, the company should be more careful about whom it allows to access its network. If it was written by an employee–especially a “Social Media Evangelist”–perhaps they should find another employee (and this time, one who actually understands social media.) And if, on the off chance, they happen to condone the comment, then perhaps the Milwaukee CVB should find another PR firm.

I hear St. Louis has a good one.

Last Thursday, I did the Wisconsin State Fair badly. In my defense, I meant well. But having been to only two state fairs in my life–Arizona’s in 1990 and New York State’s in the Shea Stadium parking lot–I was ill-prepared for the scope of Milwaukee’s century-old annual festivity. Not to mention the heat.

I was looking for a brief break from my Windy City work-at-home day to day, and a ten-dollar Megabus ride to rekindle an old friendship with my Milwaukee friend Big Buddha on the first day of Dairyland’s State Fair seemed like just the ticket.

My inability to figure out how to work the A/C in my overly sunny, upper-deck front row seat on Megabus should have been a clue as to the impending tenor of the day, though the bus’s speedy WiFi made the two-hour trip a multitasking dream. Big’s thirty-minute late arrival at the Cream City’s Intermodal Station to pick me up should have been another.

Late or not, it was fun to take a spin through Chicago’s smaller, northern neighbor. New Yorkers often call Chicago a little NYC due to our town’s smaller but still-imposing skyline, though nothing could be farther from the truth. Yet even for its almost non-existent skyline, I often have a similar impression of Milwaukee: all the lakefront yuppiedom and mid-town slumminess of Chicago, but in a convenient, travel-sized dose.

Even with one-fifth the population, though, driving across Milwaukee’s industrial Menomenee Valley from the staton to Miller Park and back–then south to St. Francis–then further south to Cudahy–all in search of a Chase bank, made the city seem postiviely enormous last week. Big works at an Apple Store and we both have iPhones, so there was no excuse for not Google Mapping the nearest branch. But I wanted to see the city–especially it’s less-touristy side–so I settled in for the ride.

Eventually, we made it to the Mitchell Domes, which provided a respite from the morning’s 80-plus heat. Last time I saw them was with Devyn. They’ve since been renovated and are more spectaular than ever. The modernist in me has to love any botanic conservatory squeezed into three massive, breast-like 1960s conoidal domes.

(Photo: Milwaukee’s version of the Garfield Park Conservatory always puts me in a happy, Jetsons mood. More in my flickr.)

But after an hour, I felt the clock ticking on my already-delayed day trip. So canned goods in hand for a nifty $7 Hunger Task Force Day admission discount, off we headed for West Allis, the near-west suburb that hosts the Wisconsin State Fair since (incredibly) 1892. The town sits in the same location relative to Milwaukee that Oak Park sits relative to Chicago–but with yuppies and BMWs replaced by mechanics and Harleys.

I bit my tongue–mostly–as we parked half a mile from the fair to save on the parking fee. As we reached the ticket booths after a sweat-infused walk back to the fairgrounds, I noticed a woman trying to pass off a roll of toilet paper as a non-perishable food item. I inwardly begged God to bring Twitter back up from its Denial of Service attack to let me tweet the moment.

Once inside the mile-square fair, snap judgment gave way to the pleasure of surrendering to a big, fat, grassroots, down-home day of fun. The kind that urbanites like me only admit to at the time and later on blogs, but rarely in mixed company once returned to our metropolitan high rises.

(Video: No, I didn’t. Yes, I wanted to.)

Food and beverage booths extended into the distance down multiple pathways as far as my eyes could see, punctuated by gargantuan show houses, with a lazy skyride hanging above all. How much did I get into the mood? I stood on a ten-minute line to buy a four-dollar ticket to stand in another ten-minute line to buy a “famous” Wisconsin dressed baked potato. And liked it.

It was the Midwest my New York friends warned me about when I moved here in six-and-a-half years ago, and it was a blast. But it was also something just short of 1,000 degrees. That kept Big and me off the sky ride. That and Big’s distaste for amusement rides kept us out of the Midway most of the day. And that, my damnable lactose intolerance, and a line of hundreds kept me away from the equally “famous”, gargantuan cream puffs.

Good sense didn’t keep me away from a Noon-time, open-air beer in full sunlight, though. Nor did good sense motivate me to stop taking “No” for an answer every time I tried to maneuver Big into a shaded, air-conditioned show house. (Much as I respect the guy, refusing to enter a livestock barn at a state fair because it would “smell like animals” reached so far up my nose I could feel my brain hurt.)

So by day’s end, what should have been a relaxing end to a really fun, absolutely out-of-character stint in Laverne-and-Shirley town headed south, and quickly. As we exited the fair, I could feel a dehydration headache growing.

By the time we reached downtown’s uber-urban Historic Third Ward to hang out before my trip home, headache had grown to a migraine of historic-hangover proportions. As I sat with Big on the second floor of the Public Market with my sunburned head on the table and a frosty Sprite Zero held tight to my forehead, it was all I could do to apologize–in what feeble voice I could muster–for the unspectacular end to the day.

Big drove me back to the Intermodal Station–a trip that could have been a five-minute walk from the Third Ward if my head hadn’t wanted to explode so badly–where I ditched Megabus for a speedier Amtrak Hiawatha ride back to my home downtown. I did my best to think happy, healthy thoughts the whole way to try and avoid my rampant sense of spew-at-any-second nausea. Thankfully, by the time the train pulled into Union Station, my head had pulled itself together enough–with the help of a pint of vitamin water–to allow me to make the 20-minute walk to my house in relative comfort.

All in all, it wasn’t a bad day. I still love Milwaukee–though next time I’ll stick to the lakefront neighborhoods I’ve frequented in the past. (For Milwaukeans, that would be the yuppie spine of the #15 bus from the East Side, down through downtown and the Historic Third Ward south to Bayview.) I’ll do State Fair again, too. Only I’ll be sure to arrive with a stash of Lactaid pills so I won’t have to avoid the cream puffs. And friends will enter air-conditioned buildings with me voluntarily or via being moved there bodily.

And considering the flu-like symptoms I developed the day after returning home, if ever again I run into a small child hacking his lungs up in the Milwaukee Intermodal Station, I’ll run like hell.