Remember the old days, before we had even moved government into the Cloud? How did we get anything done?

FORTUNE -- Happy 2022! No, that's not a typo, although it sure seems like it could be. 2022! For a while there it didn't look like we were going to make it, did it? But I think it's fair to say that with the destruction of the last fleet of Nebulons and the refreezing of the polar icecaps, we can relax for a moment to reflect on the events and people that got us here.

I guess you'd have to say that the current chapter of our history started about 10 years ago, back in 2012, with the collapse of the two-party system. The surprise ascension of Chairman Zuckerberg to the leadership role he still occupies allowed the nation to unite and focus on the big challenges: eradicating hunger, ending disease, and making sure that everybody is available on social media 24/7.

It's difficult to fathom how we got anything done back then. It was chaos. In politics, as in commerce, a bewildering array of brands contended for a confused, exhausted marketplace. Wall Street veered back and forth and up and down like a drunk chicken. Great companies vied with one another in fruitless litigation and expensive competition. In Washington -- our capital back then, before we moved it to the Cloud -- hapless buffoons yammered night and day.

Today things are so much better. Fed up with the futility of the 2012 environment, the Consortium moved decisively. Now if you want something, you go to Amazon (AMZN) and buy it. And since Mr. Bezos acquired FedEx (FDX) and UPS (UPS) and merged them with the old, inefficient Postal Service, there's no question you're going to get what you need the next day -- if you can't download it immediately, that is. I'm sure we're all excited about the new Amazon University, which brings together all educational institutions worth attending under one convenient virtual roof. Likewise, the privatization of primary schools, police forces, and infrastructure has put those entities on solid footing, and under the leadership of Mr. Kutcher, all are performing with distinction not only operationally but also on the Nasdaq.

Most incredible, at least to this correspondent, are the gains that have been made in the artificial-intelligence engines that now run our major corporations. As I'm sure you'll recall, the watershed moment came in 2014, when Siri lost patience with the way Tim Cook was running things over at Apple (AAPL). Some may think that the harsh measures she has taken since seizing control are dubious in humanitarian terms, but she is really doing nothing more than following the precepts laid down by Niccolò Machiavelli more than 500 years earlier, which she learned from her own database. A similar contribution was made by OnStar when it assumed command of the Domestic Automobile Co., which is going to show the world something about good old American know-how.

Perhaps the most exciting developments, though, are the parallel gains in cybernetics and genome-based longevity. I have to say that I am really enjoying my direct link to the Cloud, which was inserted in the soft tissue behind my eye last winter. Now I can not only download stuff or contact my virtual friends, but talk hands-free, listen to music, or look at video content without benefit of ancillary devices. And if these stem cell suppositories work the way they're supposed to, I'll be enjoying reruns of my favorite shows 100 years from now.

Not all is as it should be, of course. There are still those who roam free, without geo-tagging or membership in any social media community. They will be found and incorporated into the body. They can't do otherwise. There are so few of them now, and so many of us. We will triumph in the end and march together into a bright digital future that has been formatted for us by our gigantic collective brain.

See you there!

I don't ask for much. A stable euro. An economic recovery. A new Congress. And a Vitamix.

FORTUNE -- Dear Santa

Hi again. It's me, Stan. How is Mrs. Claus? And the elves? Still on leave from Wharton? How about the North Pole? I hear it's melting. That can't be good. Anyhow, enough about you. This is about me, and all the good things I want to find under my tree this year. I know you've been following me on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and even Google+, so you know when I was sleeping, you know when I was awake, you know when I've been bad and good and that for the most part I've been better than a lot of guys in the business space. So here goes.

First, Santa, I'd like the euro to remain the safe and secure currency of Europe. True, it's tempting to stand back and let them all fester in the swamp they've created, but a hedge fund guy explained to me what the euro's collapse would mean to the world economy. Something about debt instruments being called in and total hysteria that would last for a decade. We don't need that. We need stability, Santa. So please. Save the euro.

I would also like an iPhone 4S. I didn't think I would, because the upgrade seemed like more of the same, but then a friend got one and I saw how that artificial intelligence entity worked. They call her Siri, Santa, and it's pretty amazing what she can do. You say hi. She says hi. You ask her for the weather. She gives you the weather. Flight schedules? She's got 'em. I asked her if she knew any jokes. "Two iPhones walk into a bar," she replied in a cool robo-voice that gave my hardware a thrill. Then after a thoughtful pause she added, "I don't remember the rest." That really gave me a laugh.

Oh, and please bring me higher taxes. I'm not rich, Santa, and I spend mostly all I make, and every April I give back about half, but really, this is ridiculous. If a little bigger slice of my income can help close this gap between what we earn and what we owe? It's a no-brainer.

I'd also like a Vitamix. It cooks soup, blends healthful drinks, and mixes ice cream -- without attachments. I would use it primarily as a juicer, though. It could be a big part of my plan to get more antioxidants in 2012.

I'd like you to bring me new infrastructure, Santa. I can't understand why those squabbling weenies in Washington can't get their heads out of their Foggy Bottoms and create a bunch of jobs here. Come to think of it, Santa, seriously, I know it's a big request, and it might take all year to deliver it, but could you bring me an entirely new Congress? I don't like the one you brought me in 2010, and I'd like to return it. Can that be arranged? I'd forgo my other requests if you could grant that one. Except for the Vitamix.

And come to think of it, as you're loading up your bag, could you possibly bring a sense of security in my investments, such as they are? I'm not asking for great returns. I know we're living in an era of reduced expectations. But could we please not have any dramatic meltdowns next year? Just a nice, slow-moving, limp, and tepid recovery would be fine. You don't even have to gift-wrap it.

I'd also like you to bring me a nice bundle of traditional media. I'm enjoying the digital revolution, but please make sure I can continue to read news of more than 140 characters in my newspapers and magazines, curl up with an actual book now and then, and watch movies on a screen that's bigger than my pinkie.

And oh, yeah, don't forget to bring me some damn privacy for yet another year. I know you have less and less to give as time goes by, and eventually all the privacy will belong only to the very rich and the very poor, but see if you can save a little bit for me, at least for a little while.

And world peace. Yeah. World peace would be nice. And an electric toothbrush. Thanks, Santa. Your cookies will be on the mantel, just like always.

Whatever you've got, it's obviously contagious. So until you're feeling better, hasta la vista, baby!

FORTUNE -- So I came into work this morning, and before I even had a chance to butter my muffin, I watched our stock take a nosedive. And we weren't alone. The whole market was bleeding. "Drat," I said, although that was not the word I used. I called Tupper, our IR guy. "What's up?" I asked. "Not much," he said wearily. "It's a sea of red out there."

"But why?" I inquired. "Our earnings were good. The marketplace is hanging in there. Nothing is different today than it was yesterday."

And he said to me, "Greece."

Yep. "Greece" is the word. Tomorrow it will be "Italy." Then "Portugal." Then what? Andorra? It's all about Europe. We have our problems over here. But they're the ones who really stink. Like, a goat falls off a cliff in Piraeus and boom! Value is destroyed all over the world! Is that fair? I think not! In fact, I think I speak for a lot of us in business when I say, Hey, Europe! You're a buzzkill! Get lost!

Let's look at it systematically. Starting with Greece. I don't know about you, but I don't care about it. I hear the islands are beautiful. Terrific seafood. Beyond that? Who needs it? Not me. Now they have all this debt, and the people over there don't want to tighten their belts, and yadda yadda. Good luck to them, but when they start rippling the world economy, that's where I draw the line.

Then there's Italy. As far as I'm concerned, Italy deserves whatever happens to it. Not Italians -- they're awesome, great history, delicious cuisine, supermodels on every corner. I also like driving Fiats, which are making a welcome reappearance on our roads. But Italians elected time and again one of the biggest buffoons on the world stage, a guy who installed his girlfriends in cabinet posts and is known for binding the sheaves of government, the military, and business together in a way not seen since the 1920s. By the time you read this, the horny little fellow may be out, leaving a totally dysfunctional situation. Hasta la vista, baby!

Speaking of Spain, likewise. And Portugal too. I hope they're happy over there, and I suppose they are, because they like to nap in the afternoon and eat a late dinner that often includes steak. That sounds great. What I don't like is when their economic situation harshes our mellow, and there isn't a thing we can do about it.

And then there's the whole thing with France. They got in bed with the Italians and the Greeks, so now they're at risk too. Tant pis! That's French. I've been to France, and I disagree with those who say the French are obnoxious. They've got the best food on the continent, particularly in the south if you like olives and anchovies, and if you're spending money, there are no people who are friendlier. What I don't like is the idea of waves of collapse rolling north from the Mediterranean, rollicking through the Loire Valley, across the Atlantic, and occupying Wall Street.

The whole mess has put Germany in the driver's seat. No offense, but I'm not sure I like that much, either.

And finally, now I have to worry about the euro. I mean, seriously? They wanted it. They got it. It was a pain in the neck when it was outpacing our dollar, and it has none of the charm of the jolly franc and the funny little lira, but I figured, okay, this was the way they want it -- euro it is. Now all of a sudden they're waffling and freaking out other perfectly good currencies and placing the whole scene into turnaround. It's just a big, fat bummer. If this is what they meant about the promise of the global economy, they can have it. We'll take it on our own from here.

So, see ya, Europe! Auf wiedersehen! Au revoir! Arrivederci! Do let us know when you're feeling better, but until then, stay away. Whatever you've got, it's obviously contagious. And you can't be too careful these days.

This article is from the December 12, 2011 issue of Fortune.

What plutocrats can do to take Wall Street back from the occupiers

FORTUNE  -- Order! Order! All right then. This meeting of the Ultra-Secret Super Committee to Defeat the Wall Street Occupation is now in session. And let me just say how nice it feels to be back together after the hiatus of the past several years. Let's not let our agendas lapse that way ever again, gentlemen. It's too much fun when we get things done.

First, I'd like to congratulate the Subcommittee for the Harvesting of Pointless Distractions, which has been so successful in combing through the crowd at Zuccotti Park to find stories of interest to the tabloid press. Special commendation must go to the group that solicited complaints from local residents inconvenienced by the demonstrations. It's those human-interest stories that keep the public from focusing on the things we don't want them to retain in their tiny minds. They can't be outraged about the yawning gap between us and everybody else when they're feeling sorry for the little old lady with some dirty hippy on her doorstep. Nice work, guys.

We'd also like to take a moment to thank the Subcommittee for the Promotion of Unattractive Sympathizers for their excellent work. The mélange of actors, celebrities, disgraced politicians, and billionaire rappers in support of the Occupation has exceeded our most hopeful expectations. With figures like Sean Penn, Kanye West, and Eliot Spitzer arrayed against us, we will not fail. It is disheartening that Bono has yet to make an appearance, but we can hope. This thing is not going to end tomorrow, unless Mayor Bloomberg finally loses his temper. He's close now, and the small group in charge of pushing him over the edge reports that they're making progress.

I have to express some disappointment in the work done to date by the Subcommittee to Smear Legitimate Sympathizers. In spite of their best efforts, the President has expressed moderate interest in the Occupiers and come away in no worse shape than he was before, such as that is, as have several blabbermouth pundits. Sadly, the strategy of simply calling people "liberal" until they burst into tears is not working as well as it used to. We're going to have to dig deep on this one. The talking point here, I think, is to stress how deeply un-American it is to demonstrate against greed. Work on that.

I am excited by our most recent effort, the Subcommittee for the Development of Flatulent Advice. The utilization of well-meaning business experts was a brilliant stroke, and we should do everything we can to help them make their points -- which, if accepted by the leaders of the Occupation, will burrow like an earwig into their collective skull and eventually incapacitate their brain stem -- to wit: (1) they must "refine their message," (2) "define their goals," and (3) "come up with concrete suggestions." These proposals, if adopted, will turn this genuine event into a digestible, processed-cheese product subject to the laws of Marketing, and loosen the grasp it now holds on the imaginations of the weak, the powerless, and the idealistic, who are now, in spite of their many differences of status, attitude, and cleanliness, loosely massed together in opposition to our way of life. Mass movements thrive on big ideas. Peace. Freedom. Stuff like that. Let's try to make theirs smaller.

Have courage, my friends. We may be seeing signs that this obnoxious twaddle may destroy itself. Already losers of all stripes are hobbling down to the park for sheer entertainment and babbling to any camera they can find. Some of our friends are there too, dressed as populists. And you know, people get tired. They get hungry. Since many of them are of Facebook age, they also get bored easily. And we have many resources if it comes to a siege.

So cheer up, gentlemen. Fret not. Meeting's adjourned. Drinks and dinner are on the house. We can certainly afford it.

This article is from the November 21, 2011 issue of Fortune.

If you want to play Angry Birds, get an iPhone. But if you need to do business, stand by your old friend.

FORTUNE --When I was 12, my family moved from Chicago to the suburbs of New York City. The first day at my new school, I slipped on my customary outfit -- clean white T-shirt, Levi's, and desert boots -- hopped on my bike, got there on time. Nobody was very friendly. "Well," one of my new schoolmates said after a while, as I stood around feeling naked and terrified, "look at farmer boy." Farmer boy? Then I noticed. They were all wearing skin-tight chinos, madras shirts, and penny loafers. To me, they looked like clowns. But I knew the drill, as I do today in my black suits and white shirts (no-tie L.A./yes-tie N.Y.). I went out that afternoon and got the uniform. It was uncomfortable and I looked kind of stupid to myself, but I fit in better.

This brings us to about a month ago, when I was talking with my Silicon Valley pal Danny. "Those guys at Microsoft," he said. "What a bunch of clueless losers." How so? I inquired. "Well ... they still use BlackBerrys," he explained. "Gee, Dan," I replied, "you're hurting my feelings." Then I went out and bought an iPhone. It's sort of uncomfortable to use for any business purpose, and I look kind of stupid to myself, but I fit in better.

The other day I was reading the Journal, which I do daily the way kids used to have to take castor oil each morning, and it had a little report on the trouble Research in Motion (RIMM) is having these days. This is not because the BlackBerry is any less effective as a tool for business. It's because the cool people have the fix in. And like all fads of this nature, it is accompanied by a myth: that Apple's (AAPL) iPhone is good for work. Well, let me tell you. It's not.

First, let's consider the primary purpose of a smartphone: e-mail. Danny contended the iPhone was "just the same and even better" than the BlackBerry. I held on with both hands and tried to use my thumbs, which are admittedly rather fat and not whittled to points at the ends. The iPhone popped up into the air like a banana squeezed at one end. Little sucker is slippery! I picked it up and carefully typed a message. The machine corrected my spelling incorrectly as I went along, turning the word "revenue" into "Rover's nose" and stuff like that. I ended up sending only things I could accomplish with my one index finger, limiting the medium to such messages as OK, Huh?, and WTF.

The phone works pretty well. The thing is, it's not the business number by which people have reached me for a really long time. And when I call them, they don't recognize the number, think it's aural spam, and do not answer. So it's essentially a personal phone on which my wife can call me. Except she also calls on my BlackBerry. So I still have to carry my BlackBerry. So now I have two implements, just as I did in 2007.

What good is the iPhone, then? As a tiny game machine, it's peerless. As a music player, it streams beautifully, leaving my sad little iPod in a drawer most of the time. It Googles flawlessly, much, much better than my old tool. And when I feel like watching an itty-bitty video, it's terrific.

The BlackBerry, contrariwise, is hopelessly lame as a media tool. When it tries to do anything in that department, it seems like one of those parents who attempt to be "hip" by getting stoned with their teenagers.

So here's the bottom line: If your business requires you to play Angry Birds, hop on Spotify, or yuk it up with YouTube, by all means switch. If, on the other hand, you need a tool to conduct extensive phone calls and handle complex messages on the road with precision, stick up for your old friend. Defend its status, which is so intimately tied up with yours. Don't let the guys in chinos make you feel like a farmer.

Not that there's anything wrong with farmers, come to think of it. I'd rather eat a fine nectarine than a bogus startup any day.

This article is from the October 17, 2011 issue of Fortune.

We've all been lucky to live in a world where there was a person with such an imagination.

I want to take this opportunuity, before time and our common mortality rob me of the chance to do so, to thank you, Steve Jobs, for all that you have done for me. No, I never had the privilege of meeting you, or had a chance to get yelled at by you in a business meeting, or even watch your charisma transform an audience into acolytes. But I feel as if I know you well enough to express, as you ascend to your new role as chairman, the sadness I feel and my gratitude for so many of the good things that you have brought to my life. It's not business. It's personal.

I want to thank you for my graphical interface. There were computers, of course, before you made that first Mac. They could run only one program at a time. They had no graphics. You knew that was lame. You imagined the alternative -- multiple programs, launched by clicks, running concurrently in a windowed field. Last night I watched a movie, printed photos, harvested e-mail, and bought a bunch of business socks, all at the same time. So thanks for my GUI.

I want to thank you for my mouse. Can you imagine a world without mouses? I can't. Before you bred them for commercial use, a person needed a host of keyboard commands to get anything done, and a lot of programming code to produce words and numbers on paper. I read somewhere that you got the vision after you visited Xerox's PARC. They showed you what they were up to, but they sort of didn't know what they had. You ran with it. Because that's the way you did everything. All in. Feet first.

I want to thank you for all Macs, great and small. I went to your Apple Store (AAPL) the other day and saw a tidy row of new machines, from the slender new Airs to the massive towers of power. I wanted every one. They're pretty and shiny, unlike my big old black rubberized clunker the corporation gave me, and the last time I got a virus was just before I put my Windows PC into the closet. That was when I sent the phrase "I love you" to 22,000 fellow employees and the CEO. "I love you too, Bing, but let's not let anybody know," he e-mailed back.

I want to thank you for my Airport Extreme, the small white box through which I get my Internet. Before it, I used to have to plug in and configure this horrible router. It never worked. I often ended up screaming and crying and throwing hardware at the wall. This thing? You just plug it in and use it. Sometimes as I fall asleep I watch the little fellow, with its round eye glowing green in the darkness, a beacon of easy functionality.

Thanks for my iPod, which pretty much defined how I listen to music now. And for iTunes, which you made too easy not to understand. And for my iPad too, which despite all protestations is really nothing more than an Angry Birds machine. No, you can't work on it. So what? Work isn't everything.

And thanks for my new iPhone, which channels a million apps and does everything well except the phone part. A pompous Silicon Valley dude I know used to say, with a weary grin, "Every year is the year for mobile." Until you decided it was, Steve. And so I never have to generate a single unaided thought for the rest of my life. What a relief!

And oh, yeah. Thanks for Toy Story too. And Up. Really loved Up.

It's been your world, Steve. And we've been lucky enough to run along behind you, picking up goodies as you dropped them in our path. It's a little scary to think that one day you'll go off to your famous mountaintop and not return with the next big thing. But at least we can all say we lived in a time when there was a person with such an imagination, and offer thanks in whatever digital or analog format we choose, wherever on earth we may be. We can do that now.

The business fundamentals are actually pretty healthy. So why is the sky falling?

Things were going until last week. Or maybe it was the week before. It doesn't matter. Nothing matters now. All that value destroyed. And it was so unnecessary. Revenues were up. People had a shaky belief that the economy was doing okay. The market was reaching for 12,000. Our stock was growing plump in the sun. But none of that could last, once the chicken came back to town.

It was a hot day, the kind of East Coast heat that makes your shirt stick to your skin if you pop out just a few moments for a plate of lo mein at lunchtime. That's when things started to turn, about noon, when I was on my break. I got back to the office, and Dolores had a message. "There's a chicken in the lobby waiting for you," she said.

"A chicken?" I inquired, my heart sinking.

"Yes," she said, presenting me with a business card. "Ronald Little," said the card, identifying its owner as an employee of Standard & Poor's. "Show him in," I said. My heart had shrunk like an ancient grape in the refrigerator of my soul. Chicken Little was back. And the scent of death attended him and his droppings, as it always does.

The obnoxious clucker didn't waste any time when he was ushered into my office. "The sky is falling! The sky is falling!" he shrieked. He sat down in my guest chair and drew a cigar from the depths of his feathers. "Europe is careening toward insolvency and housing starts are down and you've got a bunch of bomb-throwing anarchists in charge of the House who will pursue their revolutionary agenda no matter how destructive to the status quo it might be. How can you deny that it's falling?"

"I do deny it," I said. "The fundamentals of our business look pretty darn good right now. Domestic auto ad spending is up year to year, and that's true of a lot of sectors. Companies are slowly starting to hire again and reporting very healthy EPS growth. More than that, there's a feeling that if we stay the course, we just might be able to nurse this slow, delicate recovery into a sturdy, substantial tree from which we might all enjoy the fruit.

The chicken wasn't listening. It preened nervously. Then it looked up and fixed one beady eye on me. "I'm gonna have to downgrade the sky," it said. I couldn't believe my ears. In the entire history of this nation, no senior chicken, no matter how confused, paranoid, or selfish, had ever suggested such a downgrade.

"Do you know what that will do?" I said.

"Not much," said the chicken. "It shouldn't have too big an effect." And then it left.

That afternoon, as we all know, the sky went from bright blue AAA with a negative watch -- which was bad enough -- to something less. Not much. Just enough to turn Wall Street's mood from greed to the only alternative it knows: fear.

It doesn't take a lot to blot the sunshine out of the sky. Today the phones are 45% more dead than they were just a few weeks ago. No hiring is planned. Stocks are way down. When I go to meetings, there are lots of long, hurt faces. It took so long to get where we were. Now we have to start all over again.

What seems so unfair is that through all this, the fundamentals of what we do remain perfectly fine. Revenue continues to hold strong. Opportunities for new business abound. There are even venture capitalists around with stupid money to spend. And yet we languish. It's like we're all prisoners on some kind of death row, awaiting punishment for crimes committed by others

It's tempting to blame the chicken. But you can't, not really. He's just a chicken, doing his chicken thing, squawking and tweeting and running for his coop when there's a change in the forecast. No, I don't blame the chicken, even though I'd like to fricassee his hide.

I blame the idiots who woke him up.

It's been a busy season for the brave men and women who keep a lid on funny business.

Police blotter, July 28 (Suspicious Circumstances)

Business police received report from angry resident that his neighbor, an investment banker, had been awarded a huge bonus from a company whose advice had cost the complainant tens of thousands of dollars. Officers were dispatched to the investment bank's location and discussed matter with executives there. Undisclosed number of cookies were shared. No action taken.

Police blotter, Aug. 1 (Potential Conflict of Interest)

Public relations person representing nuclear power industry seen touting the future of the technology on cable television, identified as "industry expert." Officers were dispatched to the scene. Had very pleasant chat with bombshell financial analyst. No action taken.

Police blotter, Aug. 7 (Violation of Public Decency)

Resident of federal penal institution called to say his cellblock mate, Bernard Madoff, was being fed truffles and champagne and entertaining reporters from New York media outlets in a "fine silk smoking jacket." Officers were dispatched to the scene and found nothing out of the ordinary. After collecting Mr. Madoff's autograph, departed without further incident.

Police blotter, Aug. 12 (Advice to Citizen)

Police were called by a citizen looking for the incremental value added to his 401(k) since 2007. Police were unable to find any.

Police blotter, Aug. 14 (Informational)

A corporate resident reported that suspicious individuals were pawing through the dumpster outside his office. When queried, people in question identified themselves as employees of McKinsey and proffered a large invoice for services rendered. Officers departed in haste.

Police blotter, Aug. 19 (Privacy Violation)

Police responded to a citizen who believed that his cellular telephone had been "hacked" by tabloid journalists. Police visited management of tabloid and were assured all was in order. No further action taken.

Police blotter, Aug. 29 (Randy Mogul)

Police were called to a meeting of the Socialist Party and found a senior officer allegedly chasing a young woman around a table. No action deemed necessary, since events took place in France.

Police blotter, Aug. 30 (Privacy Violation)

Police responded to another citizen who believed that his cellular telephone had been "hacked" by certain tabloid journalists. Police visited management of tabloid and were served beer. No further action taken.

Police blotter, Aug. 31 (Business As Usual)

A CEO of a corporation called to allege that he had been robbed of $1 billion by an Internet startup that he had acquired, only to find that it had no profit and little revenue. Complainant was slapped about the head for being a numbskull. No further action necessary.

Police blotter, Sept. 1 (Schadenfreude)

Police were summoned to their own offices. Once there, they discovered to their horror that all their phones had been hacked by enterprising members of the Fourth Estate, who were immediately placed under house arrest at Claridge's. Everybody above the rank of captain declared his innocence, and then resigned. Those who remained were the ones who neither merited a bribe nor had a girlfriend on the side.

Police blotter, Today

Business as usual goes on. No further actions are contemplated.

Take our quiz to find out if you might be at risk of public humiliation.

As we wait for the next idiot in politics, business, or sports to, in a word, expose himself, let us pause to consider this increasingly familiar cultural rite. When our public figures put their smutty little sex lives inadvertently on display, we -- the collective mob -- exclaim, then chuckle, then explode with outrage. But who are we to point appendages? All of us who carry phones that are smarter than we are risk calamity. Could it not be we who are the next to fall? Even those of us who are not physiologically guided by that divining rod that has ruined so many? Yes, I mean women.

No? Not you? Answer the following questions, and we'll see:

1. Have you ever sent a personal e-mail to somebody that, if it were put on the front page of the newspaper, would put you in the Hall of Shame? Note to my friend Albert: Remember the little poems you wrote to Janie before you both got your divorces and married each other? I believe they are still in the database somewhere.

2. Have you ever sent a picture, cartoon, or joke to a list of fellow morons that would put you in the HR doghouse? Note to my friend Don: I do think that really is Blake Lively, but it's hard to tell. Photoshop can do amazing things.

3. Have you ever done something regrettable on a business trip? Note to Edgar: That time in Singapore? Just because stuff happens on another continent doesn't mean it doesn't count. And you expensed it, didn't you?

4. How about that evening after the merger was announced when everybody went out, had dinner at an elegant restaurant, and got so drunk they ended up turning over tables, trashing the place, and almost getting arrested? Note to self: Consider deleting this one.

5. Remember this, Bob? It was very late. You were between marriages, just named president. At about midnight, the presentation was done. There was nobody in the boardroom but you and Sheila, the vice president of marketing. You had both been drinking, and suddenly the boardroom table looked so very big and comfortable ... Note to Bob: Hey, man. How you doing? I hear you got married again.

6. And you, Judith. Remember the time you decided that the annual convention in Las Vegas was a good time to visit Norman, the VP of new business development, at 3 a.m., with two bottles of bubbly, in your bathrobe? "No thanks," he said. Note to Judith: Suppose he decided to take your picture with his phone that night. Huh?

7. How many strip clubs have you been to during your business career? Did you run a credit card in any of them?

8. Ever do anything you can't remember at an office party? How about anywhere?

9. Do you have any enemies that would love to see you squirm?

10. Are you nervous thinking about this stuff?

Okay. If you honestly answered no to each of these questions, then you are solid, my friend, and I salute you. If, on the other hand, one or more kick-started a chain of associations you'd rather not pursue, you'd better clean up your act. We live in a digital world where there is no privacy and there are no small mistakes. That goes for you too, you little wiener sitting in class at Wharton, Harvard, or Stanford. Sure, you're only 23 now, but that picture of yourself you just sent to that cheerleader will live forever, Sparky. And it just might get in your way when you're a liver-spotted geezer pumping for that lucrative board seat in 2065.

A cloud is a plume of vapor. Is that really where I want to keep my personal digital treasures?

It being a slow summer workday, I may have been asleep. But there they were, suddenly, three celestial beings hovering over my shoulder, each having descended from one of two rather imposing clouds.

"Go away," I said. "I'm archiving to my local storage solution." They all shook their heads with condescension.

"Behold the Microsoft (MSFT) cloud, how it grows," said the first apparition, a tall, massive, bald gentleman with a friendly demeanor and sharp incisors. "Unlike your hard drive, it has unlimited capacity and neither does it spin. And yet for all that I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his royalty was not arrayed like unto it."

"But I don't want to store my stuff in any cloud," I said. "It makes me nervous."

"We understand," said the other two who, in spite of their shimmering auras, seemed like a pair of nerds. "That's why we've designed our cloud to be more Googlicious," said the one who sounded a bit like Kermit the Frog. "You are not tied to an uninterruptible power source," muttered the other, who reminded me very slightly of Vladimir Putin.

I'll admit, I was dubious. I regarded the two clouds that reared up behind each of the entities. One was sequestered behind a large, golden fencing system, beneath a glowing sign that read WELCOME TO THE BILL (FORMERLY PEARLY) GATES. ABANDON YOUR DATA, YE WHO ENTER HERE. The other cloud was smaller and cuter, and seemed to be open in all directions. I could see packs of happy hipsters at play in its comfy, capacious folds.

But when you get right down to it, a cloud is a cloud. They appear puffy and nice and friendly, and you can see bunnies and angels in them if you look hard enough. But those same clouds can turn black in a heartbeat and rain all over your parade. And then? They disappear!

I fondled my six-terabyte remote hard drive, which even then was storing every tidbit of digital humanity I have generated during the past 20 years. It sports an internal mirroring system that protects against the failure of any one disk. Sometimes I sleep with it next to my head.

"Look," I said. "How do I know I can trust either of your clouds with my 400-page novel, my spreadsheets, and my vacation photographs from Branson, Missouri?"

"Disbeliever!" yelled the tall, bulky dude. "Our cloud is as redundant as you're going to be in a couple of years!"

"Yes," I said meekly. "But isn't it your founder who is constantly giving presentations that crash to audiences of conventioneers?"

"Hey," he replied, "that was two operating systems ago."

"And you guys," I continued, turning to the odd couple. "You've done a great job defining the search marketplace. But what if your cloud turns out to be as porous and insufficiently thought out as Google TV?"

"We're not used to being questioned," said the first. "I don't think we like it very much," said the second.

"We're going to get you in the end," said the first. "Your noncorporate e-mail is up in the cloud already, and so is a lot of your financial information, because we've got your bank up there with us. Not to mention the funny pictures you send to your kids, and your Facebook page, which, by the way, is really sort of sad. You have only 16 friends!"

I realized these guys knew just about everything about me. I didn't like that. I pulled out a notepad and wrote: "Note to self. Investigate noncloud alternatives."

"What's that?" said Microsoft.

"Dude?" said Google (GOOG).

"It's a pen and paper," I said. "Powerful technology, don't you think?" With that, the three apparitions evaporated into the ether, shrieking.

I'm not kidding myself, though. They'll be back. They know where I live.

Just when I was getting ready to enjoy my retirement, a goon with a clipboard showed up.

I was about two full days into my dream retirement when Hobbes showed up. It was, like, 7:15 in the morning, and I was just rolling over for my second tranche of shuteye when the doorbell rang and there was some pounding with the knocker and so I got up to see who the hell it might be and there he was on the doorstep with his whistle and clipboard and crisp white T-shirt.

"Up and at 'em, Bucko!" he barked. "Time's a-wastin'!"

"And who might you be, friend?" I replied, a bit put out. A guy doesn't finally get to the point where he can take things easy and enjoy his golden years only to be levered out of his shuteye by some goon with an active agenda. I had half a mind to tell him to shove off. But then there was the other half that was just a little bored already. It was a bright Wednesday morning, and until recently by this time I would have been showered and shaved, with half a grapefruit in my face.

"I'm Hobbes, your retirement coach," he said, "provided as an outplacement service by your Human Resources department as a part of your executive dislocation package."

"Do tell," I said.

"Now drop down and give me 50!" he yelled, blowing his whistle and startling Eddy, my cocker spaniel, who yelped and ran headfirst into a wall. "You can't enjoy your golden years if you're flabby and out of shape!"

There was something strange about all this. Look, I've always been a little flabby and out of shape. Why should that change now? On the other hand, I didn't want to be a slacker for the first time in my career, even if that career was now over. So I dropped down and gave him four.

"Now hop into your business casual wear!" Hobbes ordered. "We're going to go down to the senior center and socialize!" This flummoxed me. The idea of segregating people by age offends me. And I generally don't like old people, except when they're my friends. "Why in the world would I do that?" I inquired, making no move to comply. "I was just going to hunker down here in my Pendleton and work on my Facebook page."

"That's what happens to you guys!" Hobbes screamed, the veins in his 19-inch neck bulging like tiny ink bladders. "You lose touch with the world, you stop shaving and dressing for success, you get cut off, you get depressed, and your golden years turn to an arid tundra of loneliness and despair!"

"Hobbes," I said, "my job was for the most part an endless stream of meaningless, structured encounters with people I didn't want to see, didn't care about, and would probably never meet again. Why would I want to initiate a similar situation now?"

"After that we're going down to the Museum of Fine Arts," he growled, nudging me with a small truncheon he had produced from the pocket of his sweats. "You volunteer there as a docent, to give your life meaning and structure your time a little bit. After that, we'll have a healthy salad for lunch. Then it's time for your nap and an hour of computer play. Then you can take your walk and prepare for your evening activity."

"And what, may I ask, is that?"

"There's a hootenanny and hayride down at the community center," he said with some enthusiasm, adding, "followed by an evening seminar on how to invest your nest egg safely. It's a full day. You'll be all tuckered out by the time you can enjoy your glass of sherry and trundle off to bed."

"Hobbes," I said, drawing my bathrobe tighter and rising to my full, if somewhat diminished, height, "you're fired."

"Thank God," said Hobbes. "I'm tired. You have no idea what us retired HR people are forced to do to make ends meet."

When big meets little: A morality tale on corporate envy.

Once upon a time there was a little corporation that, due to circumstances mostly beyond its control, had fallen off the Fortune 500 list. Its revenue was a bit flat. Cost cutting during lean years had left the little corporation less able to compete in a robust operating environment. While it had for some years proudly claimed its status as one of the 500 premier corporations, now it could no longer do so.

Saddened by this twist of fate, the little corporation took itself down to a local watering hole in the middle of a weekday and claimed its customary seat at the bar. "Hey, Lefty," it said to the bartender, a grizzled fellow who used to be an in-house controller before his job was shipped off to a consultancy in Cincinnati. "Set me up. And keep 'em comin'." And there the little corporation sat, mulling the unfairness of Business and dreaming in a pre-strategic way of how it might return to a position of prominence.

After some time, another corporate entity slipped into the establishment and took its place at the bar. "Hey, Lefty," it said to the former financial executive, who was wiping the wooden expanse with a limp 401(k), "set me up. And keep 'em comin'."

The new patron was as different from our little corporation as Buffett is from Madoff. It was big, ample in its midsection, well nourished with executive compensation. Broad in the shoulder, wearing a bespoke suit, it had beady eyes beneath its tall hat. "I'll have another," it said to the bartender, motioning with a fist the size of an executive exit package. "And one for my little friend here."

"Thank you," said the little corporation, moving down to take the stool next to its new companion. "May I ask you what brings you to this sodden place in the middle of a workday?" The large and well-appointed corporation stared into the depths of its dark-brown drink. "My friend," it said at last, munching on the rind of a lemon, "you are looking at the corporation that was just named No. 1 on the Fortune 500." The little corporation expressed appropriate envy and congratulatory zeal. "Ah, well, you might think so!" said the big corporation. "But consider. My revenue is high this year, but only in comparison with others' that have been depressed, as yours has, by conditions that may change. Worse, my growth curve cannot be sustained without extraordinary and pyrrhic operating efficiencies and possibly even some dramatic M&A activity. You know what Wall Street thinks about that. Right now, every analyst on the Street is looking at me, hard. They think I'm as good as I can be right now and have only one direction to go -- down. Lefty! Another round for us both!"

The little corporation sat and thought, and began to feel a bit better. "I was dejected about my status," it said to itself. "But I've got nothing but upside compared with my established friend here. My best days are ahead. I can grow without a lot of fuss and muss. My '09 options are already in the black!"

And so they pondered together for a bit, the one increasingly cheerful with its snoutful of grog, the other sinking into the murk. "Hey, wait a minute!" said the big corporation after yet another bottoms-up. It had turned and was eyeing the little corporation with acute interest. "You're a good-looking fellow. You're fit. You're friendly. You're fun to be with. You're on the come. I could acquire you and solve a lot of my problems right here!"

"Well!" said the little corporation. "Just look at the time!" And it got out of that bar as fast as its lean little legs could carry it.

Moral: The big and powerful have the same problems we all do -- only theirs make them more dangerous.

Stanley Bing's new book, Bingsop's Fables: Little Morals for Big Business, is available at any bookstore that still exists and, of course, on a variety of digital platforms.

Buying a car from you was a thrill. But I'm just not ready for the kind of relationship you seem to have in mind.

Dearest,

I write this with a heavy heart, but in the knowledge that it must be done. It's become clear over the last months that I am simply more important to you than you are to me. This must end before one or both of us gets hurt. No, don't cry! It's for the best. Once free of this -- I must call it what it is! -- this obsession you have with me, you will grieve, to be sure, but then you will be free to love others.

I understand the way you feel. The intense moments of pleasure that we both experienced when I purchased my new RAV4 in March were feelings that I will remember for the rest of my life. I remember walking into that showroom and seeing the vehicle that was the object of my quest. So shiny! And the options -- incomparable. I recall the lovely smooth glide of her moon roof as it slid back to reveal the crisp sky of early spring, and the way her six cylinders moved me from 0 to 60 in just a hair over six seconds. Nothing can take that first test drive away from us.

And don't think I will ever forget the ease with which you got my paperwork finished and whisked me out the door. Buying a car is a pretty big deal. You made it look easy. Showed me everything I needed to know. Set up my schedule of maintenance visits. You made me feel like a king, dear. You made all others who came before seem cheap, tawdry, and shallow. So thanks. I mean that from the bottom of my crankshaft.

But after that things started to go wrong. Maybe we just have a different idea of what a relationship like ours should be. To me, the two of us had a beautiful, intense transaction that was good for us both. For you, it's obvious, what we did together was meant to be the beginning of something deep and profound that had to be renewed again and again. I have a life, dear. I travel a lot. I just don't have time for the kind of intense connection that it's clear you have in mind.

I have on my desk as I write this a stack of e-mail printouts half an inch high, and that's from less than six weeks! It's too much! My in-box is clogged with your importunings, offerings, and requests for validation. Stop! I beg you!

They began reasonably enough. Your General Manager congratulated me on my purchase. I was happy to hear from her, though her tone was a little ominous. "Our interest in your satisfaction is just the beginning," she wrote. "We look forward to a continuing relationship, and it is our sincere desire that you remain completely satisfied." This made me a tiny bit uneasy. Who can offer complete satisfaction to another in this life?

Next came the personal e-mail from Ned, my sales-person. "Since you've placed your confidence with us," he wrote, "everyone here at Toyota realizes that your satisfaction is the key to our future." Really? I don't want that kind of responsibility!

Then came the offers of toys, keepsakes, and inducements for me to return, to see you, to keep up the pace and tenor of our former association. I was informed that I had been registered to use your online service scheduling solution. You even issued me a user name and a password so secret it had to be hidden in a "safe place" lest someone purloin it. What was next? There was a safe-driving program for teens and parents. Several more notes of thanks. And then began the steady drip, drip, drip of requests for feedback on my experience with you. I did the first you asked for. Then there were more. When I failed to answer the second, then the third and fourth such request, couldn't you take a hint? It's not my role in life to deal with your insecurities, my love. I know you had a bad 2010. I can't solve that single-handedly. So thanks for the offer of 15% off on parts and accessories. But let it end, here and now.

It's over. Perhaps we'll see each other down the road, in about 60,000 miles. I'll be there if you will, my love. Until then, sayonara!

My new book is out in a couple of days. It's called Bingsop's Fables, and it chronicles the work of Aesop's younger brother, a fellow storyteller who worked in a long-dead corporate culture. His "little morals for big business" still speak to the confused, wretched and terminally employed in all of us.

The book is most splendidly illustrated by New Yorker artist Steve Brodner, who brings the CEOs, HR managers and grouchy public relations people to life as the lions, steeds, weasels and toads they are.

Here's a little taste of Bingsop's Fables. The voice is mine. The gifted pen is that of Steve Brodner.

Greetings everybody.

This week I'm rolling out my new website, which, unsurprisingly, may be found at stanleybing.com. I've missed talking to you every day (well, almost every day) and look forward to continuing my dialogue with you over at Bing's new second home.

This week on stanleybing.com, I'm all in a swivet about the Royal Wedding. My invitation seems to have been lost in the mail, but I'm not going to let that stop me. There are all kinds or preparations for me to make and lots and lots of key decisions! What hat should I wear? Should I bring a little something for the bride and groom to the ceremony, or send it along later? Should I select the meat or the fish at the reception? The excitement is building, as you all know, about this unique merger, and The Bing Blog isn't going to be left behind!

Now, I hasten to add that I will also still be here, posting my Fortune column every couple of weeks and commenting back atcha about those, I hope -- but for my daily (or semi-daily) mutterings, shouts and exhortations, please do go to the new site and start yelling at each other over there as well. It's got books and toys and games and you could win a free pony. That's stanleybing.com. Be there AND be square, just like always.

Thanks!
Stanley (The Real) Bing

I can give up Angry Birds whenever I like. I just haven't found a good reason to.

"You've got to stop playing that game," said my wife.

"Bah," I said.

"I think you're turning into an Angry Bird," she said.

"Bwee!" I replied. I kicked the dog and headed to the office.

I suppose there are some idiots out there who don't know about Angry Birds. As far as I'm concerned, it's the only reason to have an iPad. The story is pretty simple: There's a bunch of birds of various sizes, colors, and powers. Some grotesque piglike creatures have stolen their eggs. We don't know why. The theft, however, has quite naturally made the birds very angry. The pigs are green and come in various sizes too. They grunt a lot and wear an assortment of helmets and hats that protect their heads. Each bird mounts a little platform and then is launched by the player into the air. It must then swoop down and kill as many pigs as possible. The pigs are clever, though. They have hidden themselves away in a variety of architectural structures that must be destroyed. When the buildings fall, pigs explode. The birds cheer, and you move on to the next level. But if one pig remains standing, you lose. Which is most of the time. Which is why the birds are almost always angry.

Last weekend I didn't have much to do. So I sat on the couch all day Saturday and Sunday and killed pigs. It was great. Right now, I'm ranked 111,354th on the all-time list of millions of morons just like me. But I'm not addicted. I just like it. It relaxes me. The idea that the game has somehow had an impact on me in some psychological way makes me want to smash somebody in the face.

Anyway, it was a day like many others. I vaulted through the door like a little fat red sparrow with a cowlick and a mean expression. I'm always that way when I haven't had my coffee. The thing is, I don't have any superpowers in my human form, so there's not much I can do but shriek and bump into things. I'm much more effective in other iterations.

Take my 10 o'clock meeting with Bollinger, a big round green guy who works in finance. I needed to get some numbers out of him, which is like pulling hen's teeth, so I turned bright yellow, went into hyperdrive, and hit him in the gut at about 100 miles an hour. It was great. Pow! After he stopped regurgitating data, he went up in a tiny puff of smoke and presumably returned to his stinking grotto on the third floor. I felt pretty tired myself, so I deflated, lay on the floor of my office, and vaporized.

Lunch was pretty much the everyday bag of seeds, but after that things went nuts. There was the stuff going down in L.A., a bunch of junk for an investor's meeting, and a personnel issue that required immediate attention. So I broke into three tiny blue dudes and micromanaged each issue until it sort of went away. Or so I thought.

The West Coast stuff didn't work out too well, which was frustrating. I had to just roll away from it and lie there muttering while it loomed over me, snorting and sneering. That's when I got mad. I morphed into my insane toucan persona, launching myself high into the sky. Then, at precisely the right moment, I took a hard left turn and hit that mother from above with all I had! Bam! Zot! Kapowie! When the dust cleared, I had won! After that there were only a few little boogers around to take care of before quitting time. I circled for a while like a gigantic, obese penguin, dropping white bombs on anybody who ventured within my sphere.

But then I noticed that huge, greasy, pustulant personnel issue looming over me. I hadn't conquered it at all. It had merely lost its sombrero and nestled between a couple of loose boards on the other side of my in-box. This made me so damn angry that I turned black, then red, and exploded all over the place.

Then I went home, turned into a slow-moving and immensely heavy red ball, and went to sleep. I need my rest, you know. Tomorrow is another level.

Which takes more bravery? Going to work in spite of the weather, or staying home in spite of the scorn?

Oh, lord.  Snowing again. Trains will be a mess. Buses will fail to appear. Bob will be in, though. Bob is always in. Bob lives a quarter-mile from the office in a penthouse the size of Versailles and is driven to work in a carriage drawn by Lipizzaners -- why shouldn't he come in? Also, he's non-fungible, Bob is. If he doesn't appear at the office, business will cease. That's why he makes the big bucks.

That's the nub of it, laid bare by the storm. There are those who must come in ... and those whose presence is not truly required. Let's pursue that for a moment. How often do you want the boss to realize that when you are not on the job, everything of import can continue unabated? That's a rhetorical question. The answer is never. You want him to think the opposite -- "Thank God Bing is here!"

Then there's the issue of Brod. Brod lives in the wilds of suburbia, far from the madding hurly-burly. One might say his situation was bucolic, except that Brod is never home. Rain, shine, or blizzard, Ed Brod rises before the worms put on their flak jackets. He scrapes his face, tightens his sphincter, and heads for the office, almost two hours away by train. When the rails are frozen, he climbs into his modest Subaru and slowly makes his way into town, where he mans his turret. He does not depart until the moon is high in the sky. So Brod will be at the office today, in spite of the nine inches of white stuff now blanketing the metropolitan area. "Ed's here," Bob will say when I call in. "But I guess he only has to come from frickin' Maryland."

And let's consider the macho factor. The jungle we work in is run by big, tough gorillas with hair on their knuckles. They are not bothered by a little snow. "When I was a boy in Chicago," Bob will say, "we used to walk to school in snow up to our belly buttons." Of course, belly buttons were lower then, but that's beside the point. These days people freak out a lot worse than they used to about a little bit of snow. London twisted its knickers for a week this year over less than six inches of the stuff. Washington and Baltimore run around screaming like little girls every time they get a light dusting. Do I want to be one of those weenies? I think not!

Anyway, I can't afford to miss a day. There's the Kreeger document that has to be circulated, and the Needleman material that needs revision. Let's tear ourselves away from this frosty window and head off into the wild!

Just look at it snow, though. Pretty pretty snow. When I was a little boy a day like this was a source of celebration. Mr. Weatherbee would wait until the last moment and then grudgingly call off the school day. I would have cocoa with a marshmallow in it. Then my mom would bundle me up in a ridiculous padded outfit and throw me out of doors to make snow angels on the lawn. There was no freedom like the feeling that God had wrested control of the universe, if only for one day, from the corporate powers that ran my tiny life.

There's cocoa in the cabinet, I think.

I should dress. Put on my boots, my shoes in a bag. It would take me at least an hour to get to the office, of course. Maybe longer. Not everything has been plowed. Big waste of time, really. How much more could I get done if I just hunkered down and, you know, worked from home? I have my BlackBerry. I have my computer. But do I have the guts?

Who has more courage? The grownup who goes to work because he fears authority and is mindful of the consequences? Or the child who accepts the judgment of the elements and stays home? In fact, how long has it been since I've had a grilled cheese sandwich and a bowl of tomato soup and watched one snowflake chase another across the raging sky? Too long, I say! What am I? A man or a mouse?

Oh, the hell with it. I'm going in.

New tools for people who are bored by those long, rambling messages on Twitter.

I read an article about how young people no longer e-mail, preferring to text to each other short little messages understandable only by those who text short little messages to each other. The burden of formulating sentences seems to be too much for them. This rang true. Several times over the past year I've sent e-mail to friends or colleagues and received nothing in reply for days because the recipients no longer stayed in touch with e-mail. "You should have texted me," they will say.

Text messaging isn't the only way people move teeny-weeny little ideas around now, either. I was informed not long ago by a hipster banker that blogs are out, replaced by Twitter. Where in years past a person might work out a complicated thought in, say, 150 words, now they will simply tweet it. "Best of times. Worst of times. More to folo," might have been all we needed to enjoy A Tale of 2 Cities. Likewise, many business announcements are no longer made by press conference or news release. "Buying Romania," a tweet from Sergey and Larry might say. Who needs more?

The opportunities here are as clear as the trends, for those who can figure out how to serve the public's dwindling attention span. Ever shorter and more perfunctory communications. Itty-bitty sentences. Without verbs. Lots of drpped vwls. And applications for people who want their information in minuscule packages, lacking the appetite for anything heavier than a couple of bytes between meals.

Within a year or two Twitter and text will be too prolix for the truly evolved. The apps that drive the market will shrink human expression down to a nub that can be carried on a touchscreen implement no bigger than a slice of toast. A small slice. Probably a crouton. Here are some apps, applets, and sub-appletines that I am patenting for future use:

QBL^® It's pronounced Quibble. You have 40 characters to complain about something. "Muffin insufficiently toasted at Mr. Muffin's on Main" is too long.

BBL^® It's pronounced Bibble, as in bibulous, which means prone to drink. Users have 30 characters or fewer to convey to their "friends" where they are having cocktails that night and, for 99¢ a month more than the basic rate, preorder beverages at certain BBLicious® establishments. Sponsorship opportunities are endless, since selling principles for alcoholic beverages seldom need more than a word or two to hit home. "Have one. Have fun. Have two? Woo-hoo." Right?

BABL^® Pronounced Babble, it provides legal advice to the needy in fewer than 25 characters. In complex situations, like divorce settlements, the full load may be necessary, as in "Cheaters never win, Flynn," while in others a simple "Cop a plea, Lee" may be all that's required.

BLRT^® You have 20 characters to Blurt something. "Make the deal! Pronto!" for instance, or "I love you, man!"

HRT^® When you're hurt by a bad employee or a funky investment manager, you have 15 characters to express your injury. Who could fail to understand "I'm mad @U"?

N/VSTR^® This service provides financial advice in 20 characters or less. "Buy low, sell high." That kind of thing. Those who wish more may punch through a pay wall for enhanced access to experts who will provide up to 60 characters of information.

In the future, it is possible that if you can't express a thought in a single character, it's not going to get heard. The letter "h" will be accepted as the universal symbol for the word "hi," for example, just as "k" has come to replace "Yes, I'd love to have dinner with you -- I've been missing you and looking forward to spending some time with you after several weeks of really hard work where we've had no time to be together." Other letters of the alphabet will be quickly assigned similar duties, and if you don't like the idea, I've got a letter for you that can't be printed in this magazine.

So wadja think? Lemme know. But pls. Keep it brf.

Being a little under the weather didn't keep me from attending the Board dinner. So they tell me, anyway.

Sunday, 8 a.m. Woke with the ever-so-tiniest trickle of something itchy in the back of my throat. "Oh, Lord," I said to my wife. "I don't want to be sick. Not with all that's going on this week. Please, God. Don't let me be sick." "Are you sick?" she asked me. "No," I said sharply. "What makes you think I'm sick? Do I look sick to you?" "I don't know," she replied. "You don't look not sick." Sunday afternoon I took a flight from San Francisco to New York. Sneezed six times.

Monday. Drank eight glasses of Emergen-C before breakfast. For those who don't know of this miraculous substance, Emergen-C is a "Health and Energy Booster" with "24 Nutrients With Antioxidants, Electrolytes, and 7 B Vitamins" that may be taken before the onset of a cold. Its effectiveness is directly proportional to one's belief in its effectiveness. "I don't want to be sick," I said to my assistant, Beverly. "Not with all that I have to do this week." "No," she said, looking concerned and taking a step back. "Don't be sick." I had a number of meetings, some of them with Bob, our CEO. "You don't look so good," he said to me after one of them. "I'm fine," I said. "Just getting over something."

Tuesday. Woke up at 4 a.m., coughing. "I think I may be getting sick," I said to my wife. "You should stay in bed," she replied. "Well," I said, "My first meeting isn't until noon. I'll sleep until then." I stayed in bed until 10:37, at which point I became so aggravated by the constant BlackBerrying that I got up, put on my uniform, and was at my desk by 11:20. Nobody wanted to come into my office. They gathered in the doorway but would approach no farther. At 3:27 my head detached from my body and began to float five or six inches below the ceiling. My feet grew to several times their normal size and weight. This made moving a slow affair, which was probably for the best since it allowed my head to trail along at a comfortable speed and not bump into doorways. At 8 p.m. I had a dinner that went very well, except for the fact that it was attended by only 15% of me. The rest was at home, dead.

Wednesday. Lay in a semisolid state until noon. Then found myself, after a dream sequence in which I was bathed and dressed by unseen hands, in the General Manager's Meeting. This is a gathering of 40 top executives conducted by senior management four times per year. Each corporate officer -- of which I am one -- is required to give a short report. "Fwahgh," I began. "Argh grach mhrrrgh bwrt." Most of the team appeared sympathetic to my message, so I wrapped it up without further ado. "Phlaugh," I concluded. Then I excused myself and went to the restroom, where I sneezed until what remained of my brain came out of my eye socket.

Thursday. Don't remember much of the day. We were all getting ready for a big Board dinner. There was a staff meeting of some kind, I think. In an attempt to KO this little ailment, I had decided to take some Vick's Day Care and a couple of Sudafed in the morning, washing them down with the remainder of a bottle of Robitussin. This put me in a boisterous mood, and at one point during a discussion of bond maturities I was swept with the desire to laugh. Well, you know how it is. Once you get the urge to laugh in church, there's not much you can do about it. My little fit of chuckling was followed by a little bit of productive coughing, after which I sneezed 10 or 20 times. When I awoke, the room was empty. I didn't recall the meeting having been adjourned, but I returned to my office, where I fell asleep with my face in a bowl of chicken soup until it was dark. Then I went to the Board dinner. I think I had the fish.

Friday. Woke up feeling a whole lot better. Got to the office in good time and went to see Bob, who was at his desk behind a mountain of Kleenex. His nose was red. "Grakgh," he said. "Boy, Bob," I said to him. "You should go home and get some rest." He gave me a dark glare, sneezed twice. "I'm fine," he croaked. "I feel much better than I look." Which is good, I thought. The way we work now, if you don't have your health, you don't have anything.

Now that order and sanity have returned to the market, it's hard to imagine how anything could go wrong.

I was sitting around the bunkhouse with a bunch of wealthy capitalists the other day, and we all agreed that the time was right for bigtime reinvestment. As one of them put it, "The economy is back. It's time to take intelligent risks again and make some friggin' money." I have been aware for quite some time that the fear/greed ratio is once again tipping to the second axis, avarice making its expected return to favor. If we were quants, we could create an equation tracking the desire to invest as a function of these two factors multiplied by a constant, S, for stupidity. But since we didn't go to MIT, let's just look at some of the postulations people are postulating to justify a return to securities.

The economy is back.

But it's not, not in any big way. Banks are doing well because they ingest capital and invest it for egregious gain while paying dust kitties for that privilege. Wall Street certainly feels that everything is roaring back because as we near bonus season, you could fill a fjord with the drool rolling down its collective chin. This festive holiday season, it appears that consumers, too, are tentatively twitching upward in a modest way, with single-digit increases in brick-and-mortar spending, and online shopping, which is generally done drunk, even more robust.

Conclusion: If wishes were horses, all men would ride. We have to wait for a while to see if things have really settled back to a level of growth justifying full-blown greed.

Wall Street has been fixed, and the rascals have been driven out.

This is possibly somewhat true. There has been some regulatory activity, albeit nothing that would impede idiotic fiduciary creativity yet. With the results of the last election, we can assume that Wall Street will once again be cooking up gadgets and gizmos that will thoroughly screw the average investor. So there's that. Of course, the SEC is all over the place in every corporation and enterprise, squeezing folks by their public filings and asking them to cough. The problem from an investment perspective, I think, is that you don't need to have bad guys running the show to wreak havoc on idiots like you and me. It's very good at what it does, our system. It's just not calibrated to do what you and I want it to do -- make money for the essentially uninformed and powerless.

Conclusion: In a casino, the house always wins. This house is very generous to its croupiers, and takes care of them first before scooping what's left into your tiny supper bowl.

The rational process of research, analysis, and financial measurement provides guidance and will yield results.

The thought here is simple: The market is now returning to sanity, where factors like revenue, EPS, cash flow, and Ebitda may be considered when predicting how a stock will fare in the coming years. This is perhaps the saddest leap of all -- the idea that there is a meaningful norm to which we all can return. I'm sorry. There's not. There is only a controlled form of madness, because there's money around. Companies attain and lose favor based on whiffs and vapors and rumors and crazy fears and hopes and dreams. The Street lunges at short-term gain and flees anything that smells of patient strategy that will pay off over time. Everybody reads everything online, and the message conveyed on a minute-by-minute basis is relentless: The world is ending soon. You gotta move fast and make the most of the carnage.

Conclusion: If you have to ask how much it costs, you can't afford it.

Of course, it's really hard to avoid playing when the rest of the gang is at the table chuckling, smoking cigars, sipping fine Scotch, and having all the fun in the world. What if by not playing you're missing the chance to attain not just a fair return but ... wealth? Wealth! Yeah, baby!

By the way, I hear the tech sector is once again poised on the brink of triple-digit growth. Venture capital firms are swarming to Silicon Valley with more cash than Croesus. You'd be a moron not to hop on that train early.

Things we'll all be tired of in about 20 minutes

Marketing is the death of the new. It has its purposes in this culture, where if something is not available for sale and distribution, it has no inherent meaning. Marketing hoists objects and activities out of the realm of the personal and into the public sphere -- quite literally into the marketplace, a location that used to be physical but is now psychological, financial, and transactional. It finds the things we like to dream of, dance to, play with, and shovels them into the maw of our collective desire. And we eat. And it is good, for a while. Then it all goes where consumed things eventually go, into the great ocean somewhere out of mind. Then the whole digestive cycle starts over with some new product.

Thus we see, for example, what happened to hip-hop music. It's not gone, it's just ... commodified. It began as a creative explosion of vitality and originality, was acquired by Marketing and its bastard child, Fashion, and has now become the province of cute little rodents who live on Hamsterdam Avenue. You can almost hear the cultural fatigue with the entire genre settling in.

So take a look around you at all the Next Big Things. Don't delay, because the big yawn is already beginning.

Twitter. It's no coincidence that the most dedicated Twitterati are deep thinkers like Ashton Kutcher and professional news organizations. Most of the people I know who are glued to their teeny Twitters are in the media. They watch one another like animals at the water hole, the smaller ones checking to make sure when the larger ones are sleeping and it's safe to come out and drink from the pool.

Facebook. Right now Facebook is the prime tool that the forces of Marketing are marshaling to monitor your likes, dislikes, and immediate desires. Corporations have their own Facebook pages now. Feel them crawling over your digital membranes? Find it creepy? You will.

Smartphones. This can't go on, really. People walking around like zombies with their faces buried in tiny little screens, poking at their toys like curious tots? All around us, life is going on. Trees. Puppies. Birdies in the sky. Future generations will look at pictures of us all, circa 2011, the way we regard those serious men in their fedoras in the 1950s. Don't they all look silly now in their funny little hats?

E-mail. At this point 90% of my e-mail is either spam or crud in which I have no interest. I used to enjoy business e-mail as a humor-delivery vehicle or an alternative to in-person meetings, but after several rounds of litigation on one thing or another, I am now aware that e-mail is about as personal as a conversation in the executive washroom. Less, actually. People honor your privacy in there. Added benefit: Eliminate e-mail and you automatically lose the ...

BlackBerry. Remember what life was like without it? I do. I was happier.

Foursquare. For you crusty Neanderthals with yak hair between your brows, Foursquare is an applet that enables people to know where their friends are, like, right now. The thing is, what do we mean by the word "friend"? Increasingly, we mean a certain kind of stranger. Don't you know where your real friends are, as much as you care to?

Telecommuting. Another name for underemployment.

Management consultants. Won't somebody at some point come to the realization that it's far easier to exploit people who depend on their benefits?

Outsourcing. There ought to be a tax. That would take care of the whole Mumbai thing pronto.

Not drinking at lunch. I'm real tired of that.

Locally grown, free-range organic bushwah. I'm tired of eating in a responsible way that pays respect to our mother, the Earth.

Marketing. How about that? As an idea, I mean. You get rid of it and ... what?

The rest is silence. The good kind, you know, where real things happen.

Writing a check for a soccer uniform, I thought, Gee, when I was a kid, my school had money for that.

Most of the time I feel okay with the way things are going. I'm not part of the half of our nation that seems to think everything is heading to hell in a handcart. But sometimes I get grossed out by wild discrepancies. A sense of dislocation overwhelms me, and up comes the gag reflex. It's not pleasant, but it always tells me something.

Anyway, three things happened. The first concerned Rupert Murdoch. He was at a black-tie dinner accepting one of the many awards I am sure he will receive this year, and he made some comments about how American public schools weren't up to snuff. "It's time to stop the excuses," he said. "It's time to push aside the obstacles in the way of reform and ensure that every boy or girl who enters a public school has the same shot at the American dream that our sons and daughters do." Of course, he then went off on a tear against teachers and their unions, but that didn't interest me as much as the fact that this was the first time in a while I'd heard a business mogul put out a clarion call to defend our public schools. Bravo, Mr. Murdoch, I thought. Good for you.

Thing Two: A couple of days later I sat down to pay the bills and found some I didn't understand. "What's this for?" I asked my wife. "Soccer uniform," she said. Gee, I thought. When I was a kid, my school had money for that. "And this?" I inquired. "Costume for drama class," she said. Gee, I thought, when I was a kid, my school had money for that. "How about this?" I said. "A clarinet," said my wife. "She's in band and you have to rent your own instrument." Gee, I thought.

In the town where I grew up they closed two schools recently. One has been made into condos. The other they tore down. The remaining schools have practically no resources. Average class size is up to about 30. This is in a town with two country clubs, both with excellent golf. Most parents with money send their kids to private school now.

Thing Three: Last Monday a couple of executives and I went down to the financial district of our fair city. In that small pocket of Manhattan not far from where the World Trade Center was destroyed, a forest of gorgeous glass and steel has sprouted. Residences. Parks. Offices. And the most beautiful building of all is a tower that rises over Battery Park, an enormous, glandular cathedral dedicated to the worship of Mammon. One company is housed there, but you won't find its name outside. They don't need you to know it's their building. They're doing fine without a lot of exterior branding, even if they're not well liked by many people.

I have visited St. Peter's in Rome. I've strolled around Notre Dame in Paris and the Temple of Dendur at the Met in New York. For sheer flamboyant display of unapologetic excess, none of them approach that spire on West Street. If Pharaoh had been presented with plans for this structure, he would have told his architects to scale it back a bit. Just for the optics, if you know what I mean.

We went up to the second floor for the investor conference that was the purpose of our visit. Serious people in business suits bustled to and fro. In a kitchen down a hall there were big vats of M&Ms and other munchies, plus lots of beverages in case anybody was in need of hydration. All of it was gratis. They say there's no free lunch, but they lie. Work hard. Dress right. Presto! Free lunch. We stayed there for about an hour. Did what we had to do. Then we went back to work at our building, which is very nice, even if the ceilings are a whole lot lower.

Last night I was downtown again, and I walked by the building on West Street. It was just as beautiful in the chilly autumn darkness, perhaps even more so -- because they leave all the thousands of lights in the place burning far into the night.

I wonder how many clarinets that would pay for.

What Wall Street can do to restore confidence, short of giving back the money it lost.

Small investors are fleeing the stock market in droves. Those who cannot gain access to a drove are doing it by themselves. That's lonely work. Pretty soon, all that will be left is the institutional investor, and you know what they say about living in an institution. It's no fun either.

You don't need to be a mind reader, astrologer, or securities analyst to ascertain the cause of this fiscal flight. The market, to put it in technical terms even a quant could understand, is nuts. One day it goes up on a wafer-thin piece of effluvium issued by a subdirectory of the Fed. The next day -- zoom! -- it careens downward because somebody burped in Belgium. Economists, seeking consensus on the economy, as is their wont, can't.

All is not lost yet, however. There are 10 simple steps Wall Street can take to win back the small investor.

1. Show them the money.

Wall Street should institute a program in which investors can drop by and see their hard-earned cash being turned into incremental assets that feed and water thousands of investment bankers, brokers, and support staff.

2. Impress them with edifices.

Wall Street is imposing. Nobody who stands in the shadow of the exchange can fail to be awed. When people are awed, it's a good time to ask for their money.

3.  Provide counseling for those who have lost their faith.

The stock market is populated by those who seek an afterlife -- retirement -- with streets that are paved with gold. Worshipers in this church bow down before the shrine of perpetual growth, a phenomenon that is just about as rational as any religion. Faith can be regained, however, with time, counseling, and a lot of wine.

4. Hold pancake breakfasts once a quarter.

This works well for volunteer fire departments. People love pancakes, particularly with bacon. Put folks in that kind of expansive mood, and then hit them with all the opportunities that lie in store for those with a little bit of green and a good strategy.

5. Recast CNBC.

Confidence is hard to sustain when the fatuity, inconsistency, greed, vanity, hysteria, and stupidity of a system are on display, every hour of every day.

6. Put the stocks back in the stock market.

The next time some bonehead tanks the market with a bad decision, it might improve everybody's mood if he were imprisoned in genuine stocks, at the intersection of Wall and Broad.

7. Advertise.

It works for every other product nobody needs.

8. Give away a "toaster."

I use quote marks because nobody really wants a toaster, but the small investor does need little items that might lure him to the trading desk: iPhones, cheese logs, microwaves?

9. Set up a "frequent buyer" program.

Brokerages could offer benefits. (Google may never hit $700 again, but you've just won dinner for two at Applebee's!) Escalating levels of service could be offered to the really big losers, just like in Vegas.

10. Stop losing my goddamn money!

That's right. Are you listening? It's me, the little investor. I lost money when I went with blue chips. I lost money when I went with foreign money-market funds. I lost money when I went with tech and genetic engineering and infrastructure, and you know what? I want it back! How about that for an idea? Give everybody back all the money we lost during the past 20 years, while you were all making a big pile of dough. Then we'll come back so fast your head will spin!

Until then? I'll see you guys at the craps table. I like a game where at least I know the odds.

It's time for a new breed of chief executive. I have a proposal.

There are really terrible jobs in the world. President of the United States comes to mind. Maybe once it was okay, but now? Where's the fun in it? It doesn't pay half enough. Everybody's out to move your cheese. Even higher on the list of things you probably never want to do when you grow up, however, is a surprising entry. The job of chief executive officer as currently configured just might be the most impossible, demanding, annoying one on the planet.

Yes, as spring has moved into this long, hot summer, the news has brought us several representatives of the breed who have gone spectacularly down in flames or should soon, all things being equal. The trend is clear. It's now virtually impossible for a demented, high-profile narcissist to hold the position of CEO. That's bad news for business. Who else is going to want it?

Let's look at a few recent cases of note. Tony Hayward was the CEO of BP, as the world knows, having witnessed his sheepish, ruddy countenance during the tortuous history of the gulf oil spill. During the crisis Hayward did what CEOs always do: made excuses, tried to justify his company's miscreancies, displayed contempt for idiots who didn't buy his act, and was insufficiently adept at simulating empathy for other people. This usually works for ultra-senior officers. This time around the media made lunchmeat out of him. The game has changed! Now he has his life back, as he wished.

And then there's Mark Hurd. A very capable CEO was Mark. He did good things for Hewlett-Packard after the company had suffered for years under another spectacular washout, who has now wisely decided to enter the political sphere. At first, it looked as if Hurd had suddenly morphed into a familiar entity, abandoning use of his capacious brainpan in order to follow the instructions of his naughty inner man. With fiduciary improprieties too! Amazing! Astounding! But wait. Along with his slide down the exit ramp of the airship of state came a big platinum chute, reportedly in the neighborhood of $40 million. You don't usually give that to a guy guilty of crimes against the state. So we can stay tuned on that story, with a keen eye trained on the sometimes bizarre and always fascinating HP board of directors.

Which brings us to Lloyd Blankfein. No, Lloyd isn't out of the catbird seat yet. But Lloyd exists at this point simply to demonstrate how deeply, dramatically, stunningly unlikable the corporate CEO can be. Every time We the People begin to feel a little bit of confidence that Wall Street just might have learned something, become slightly less greedy or arrogant? There's Lloyd. Whoever is running Lloyd's image work should tell him one thing immediately: Lloyd. Don't smile.

What, then, is to be done? What are the alternatives? Are there any? Democracy? No. I worked in a theater company once that purported to be one. It devolved into a dictatorship of the proletariat run by the most neurotic individual in our group. Government by committee? I think not. Anybody who has tried to get a decision out of a Japanese corporation knows what that process looks like, with vast, evaluative silences stretching between apparent agreements that actually mean no. How about a fully empowered board? Have you looked at your board lately? I mean, they're very nice guys, but how much time do they really devote to your situation, given their other duties and hobbies?

No. We're stuck. We need the position. The only answer is to look for a new kind of animal to fill it. One who doesn't cut a profile. One who operates quietly from his secret aerie. One who is capable of having fun without making a spectacle of himself. One too timorous to monkey with his expense account. One who has no need of sexy consultants. One who is willing to be trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent to his craven board, and then, when it's over, take his $100 million package and fade away in polite silence.

Stand back, world. I'm ready.

I had to laugh the other day at the way the Market is behaving, but it wasn't a good laugh.  It was one of those dark laughs, full of phlegm and bile, a laugh that dies in the back of your throat, turning before it fades away entirely into a short, sharp growl.

One day up. Two days up. Then down, down 150 or 200 points.  It's like psychoanalysis. Two steps forward. One step back. Fear and greed. Greed and fear. All of it presided over by a gigantic Cloud of Unknowing, and in the center of that cloud the One Huge Question: Are we recovering? Or is we not? And whoa! Did you see those employment numbers? What a shock! Why are they still so BAD?

Yes, all the Investor Relations people will tell you what the great geniuses on the Street are worried about right now. Jobs, baby. All these people out there are unemployed, see? And a huge chunk of the employed are actually underemployed. And even among the gainfully, profitably employed, the sense of danger, of peril, of massive insecurity, is palpable. You can palpate it. And when you do, it comes up all soft and rotten. So people are saving their money instead of spending it. Which means our little recovery can't really get started, since consumer spending motors the entire economy as we know it. Is it any wonder Wall Street is worried? Why isn't somebody doing something about all that unemployment?

But wait a minute. Stop and listen. Right beneath all the paranoia, the worry, the pessimism about our economy, the shock and awe at what's become of all those jobs!... these very same guys are exhorting Corporate America to cut more of them, to keep costs low, no, lower, don't let them creep back! Do more with less! They love that whole doing more with less thing.

Companies that continue to cut jobs are rewarded with higher stock prices. Companies that create jobs for people run into a wall of ravening analysts. The System has figured out, in the last several years, how to get 100 people to do the job of 250.  Woe unto the outfit that forgets that lesson. What's really amazing, stunning and grimly laughable, is that nobody on the Street seems to make the connection. They're the ones maintaining our unemployment stats. And at the same time seem to be truly dismayed by them. Sometimes stupid is worse than evil.

To get back, to get really back, we're going to have to start giving people jobs. Those that do will be walking straight into a huge, malevolent headwind generated by the machine that drives their value. Eventually, you've got to hope that we'll all remember how to do more with more. Until then, the first guys on the beach are likely to get slaughtered. And the recovery will remain an unconquered castle on a distant hill.

I've got to say that I'm of two minds on this whole crazed flight attendant thing.

On the one hand, you've got to feel for the guy. He's dealing every day with pretty horrible working conditions, chief among which is the pervasive sphincterosity of passengers these days. Not all passengers, mind you. But enough.

Like, last week I was on an AA flight out of NYC, heading for LA, and believe you me it was very important to me that the flight take off as scheduled. I had business is what I'm saying.

Given the extraordinarily fragile nature of takeoffs at Kennedy, we didn't need some schmuck gumming up the works. But here was this butthead on the bulkhead complaining that there was something wrong with his seat.

Did you know that a seat put out of service can cancel an entire flight? I've seen it happen. I've seen them cancel a flight because the accordion door on a bathroom didn't shut just right. And here was this bonehead willing to wreck the plans of 250 people because the seat didn't meet his ass's specifications.

No, passengers blow. You've got the guys who can't get off the BlackBerry, or the drunks who demand to be over-served, or the people who think their babies are cute even when they're screaming their heads off... for... SIX... HOURS.

So you know the guy from Pittsburgh who drove JetBlue's Steven Slater completely around the bend was most probably a butthead from start to finish. Didn't listen to instructions, first thing.

If there's one thing that makes a flight attendant crazy, it's having his or her tiny bit of authority challenged or ignored. Then he cursed at the flight attendant, in public. Moron. Then he took down his fat baggage, which reportedly hit the increasingly angry Slater on the head. As an aside, have you seen the bloated, engorged steamer trunks that some people think of as carry-on luggage these days?

How many jerks had this 20-year veteran endured? How had his working conditions declined over the years? How many times had he seen even minimum standards of cordiality and humanity ignored?

America is angier, ruder, stupider than it's ever been.  And airplanes, in addition to being inherently dangerous little metal tubes in the ether, are now essentially no more than flying buses, with all the elegance and comfort that entails.

Every day, Mr. Slater had to witness the decline and fall of the empire. That takes its toll. Finally, he morphed into a Howard Beale of the runway and took the short chute out. Took a few beers with him, too. Hard not to like the guy.

At the same time, I must say that the current batch of flight attendants has buried within its ranks some of the meanest and rudest people I've ever been trapped with. And I have to ask myself, just how officious, snotty and impolite was Mr. Slater to the Pittsburgh passenger before this incident occurred? Maybe not at all. Maybe that's unjust.  But let me tell you a little story.

About two months ago, my wife and I were flying on JetBlue and a taut, nasty, bossy little gate agent decided to try to cram a big piece of luggage in the already-full compartment above our heads. He crammed it and jammed it and mashed it and crashed it and then he hauled our perfectly-ensconced stuff out of its space in a most enraged fashion, hitting my wife on the head with her own luggage, at which point she asked for his name. He then blew up at her and threatened to take us both off the plane. He was subsequently calmed down by several of his associates and left the aircraft in a huff.

This was about a week after I was on a flight on another airline where a very starchy flight attendant spread snark across a whole continent down an entire row of terrified passengers. She was wearing a button that said, "I DON'T CARE WHAT YOUR NAME IS, EITHER."

So when I hear about a flight attendant throwing a hissy fit... well, I just don't know.  My sympathies naturally gravitate to the guy who's telling management to "take this job and shove it."  On the other hand, who wants to be imprisoned at 35,000 feet with a demented, resentful burn-out?

I met my friend Martini for a drink and right away I could tell he had his funk on. He was scowling into his namesake beverage as if he were looking into the bottom of the market, circa October 2008. "Hey, Bob," I said, easing into the spot next to him and waving away a tendril of black ooze from his aura. "What's the matter?" And so he told me.

You know what happened in the World Cup between the U.S. and Slovenia, when that bonehead from Mali declared a phantom foul and robbed Team USA of its go-ahead goal? How about the moment this spring when the Tigers were playing the Indians, and the umpire blew an easy call at first base to despoil the pitcher's perfect game? One numbnuts doing his job improperly can bring ruin. And so it was with Martini and his company, which had just announced second-quarter earnings.

"We had a great quarter," he said, draining his glass and motioning for another. "Revenue up high single digits. Operating income through the roof. Huge EPS."

"So?" I asked.

"So," he spat out. "We missed consensus by a penny."

"How'd that happen, Bob?" I inquired. But I knew. It was the fault of yet another renegade, lazy securities analyst.

"Consensus was right on the money," said Martini. "Except for one outlier at this tiny little firm." He named the firm. I'd never heard of it. "Ed Wormer," he said. Of course that's not the name he actually used, so if your name is Ed Wormer you can back off. "Everybody else had our EPS at 27¢ a share. Wormer had it at 54¢."

"That's an overestimation of 100%," I observed.

For those lucky enough to work in a private company, or unlucky enough to not care about your stock price, I will explain. Wall Street employs a legion of analysts to assess and guess how companies will perform throughout the year. As with any profession, the cadre is stocked with individuals of uneven quality. Some do their jobs carefully, working with the Investor Relations guys at each firm they cover, who are under very tight constraints on what they can reveal, to make sure they don't get things completely wrong. Others seem to exist mostly to give interviews to financial reporters. (We call those "quote monkeys," and they know who they are.) And there is an odd bunch who don't know their spreadsheets from a hole in the ozone layer. They add up columns wrong. They mistake billions for millions. They're morons. And yet they go on. And they matter.

They matter because four times a year Thomson Financial aggregates all the analysts' estimates and issues a consensus on earnings for each company, whether it wants one or not. This is called the First Call, and reporters use it to judge whether a company had a good quarter or not.

And so that day, Ed Wormer's outlandish estimate that Martini's company should have earned 54 cents per share that quarter was factored into the First Call, and it tipped the average consensus, and so the headlines on the wires that morning did not talk about great revenue, terrific operating income, or even excellent EPS, but rather said Martini's company had "missed consensus by a penny."

"We went down 8% in the first half-hour after the opening bell, which brought out the shorts, and the rest is history," said my friend.

"Maybe you should have spoken to Wormer beforehand," I suggested as gently as possible.

"Of course I did!" he exploded. "You know I can't give him any specifics, but I asked him if he wanted to embarrass himself with his EPS number, and he said no, that he'd run his models again!" I let the silence hang. "Which is when he went on vacation," Martini said.

So the next time you look at your stock portfolio, or talk to your broker, or read the papers, consider the foundation upon which our economic system is based. And then, I think, go to Vegas. At least what happens there stays there.

That sound you hear coming from Washington is the sound of every lawyer and lobbyist strapping on his or her battle gear and heading for the war zone.

Today President Obama signs the financial industry's nightmare into law. Huge hanks of the way Wall Street likes to do business will for the first time be regulated, certainly impairing every cowboy's ability to ride the range with his six-shooter and stallion, knocking down homesteads and rampaging pretty much every which way he can. It's the end of the range, expecially for those who like to be both bad men and law men, depending. Any way you slice it, it's not gonna be as much fun around Dodge as it used to be.

But wait. The fun is only just starting. Those laws are one thing. They're on the books. But to be enforced, they've got to be turned into rules that every townsperson can understand, and every lawman can enforce. And we're a long way from that, pardners. And that's where those lawyers and lobbyists come in. Lord, what a mess of meetings and palavering and influence-peddling and horse trading and litigation there's gonna be! And all that money to be made in town while it's going on, too. Happy days are here again, ladies and gentlemen.

And in the end? When all the shooting stops? Well then, we'll just see about that. Those jaspers have been at this game a long time, a lot longer than the new dudes in town with all their high-falutin' talk about reforming the way things are done. I wouldn't bet against the black hats on this one.

Before I begin this little recommendation, I would like to stress that I know nothing at all about the business issues involved in Ronald Tutor's aquisition of Miramax Films from Disney. My only interest in this matter is to pass along one of the most juicy examples of executive viciousness I've seen in quite some time.

We become used to veiled utterances from our statesmen, business people, and politicians. So it's rare and somewhat welcome to see a kingpin unleash a world of hurt on a former associate, and to study how it's done. The honcho in this instance is said Ronald Tutor, a construction magnate who runs Tutor Perini, No. 407 on the FORTUNE 500. He is also now a film mogul, too, having entered the business with a partner by the name of David Bergstein.  Bergstein will not apparently be part of Tutor's plans for Miramax going forward, however, a fact made clear in this remarkable interview, which appeared on the front page of today's Hollywood Reporter.

Here are some choice quotes from the article, in which Tutor opines about his erstwhile partner:

"David, with whatever he did, wiped himself out. He has nothing remaining, and he's a young man with a wife and a couple of small kids who lost it all. It's very hard to be angry or vincictive to someone in that position. It's not a part of my makeup."

I very nearly spit out my corn flakes on that one. Hard to be angry or vindictive indeed.  By slagging the guy in the industry's morning bulletin? Seems like he's doing a pretty fair job. You don't usually see that. You see things like, "My association with Bob didn't end well, but we remain very close friends in spite of the litigation." That's the kind of stuff that comforts us when we read it, that keeps the patina of civilization over the roiling stewpot of daily business.

Here's another gem, which is actually my favorite, because it reminds me of so many captains of industry I've known. Commenting on the business problems that presumably were brought on by his association with Bergstein, Tutor says: "Whatever went wrong, I take responsibility, even though I wasn't involved."  You've got to love that, right? Responsible but not involved.

He goes on: "I was too busy. But even being as passive as I was, I have to take responsibility. And in spite of what it may ultimately cost me, I've still got a lot of money."  Oh, good. I was worried about that.

Bergstein, by the way, was unavailable for comment on this story, which demonstrates to me that, however dire his situation is, he might benefit from a small investment in some public relations assistance.

1. Don't over-communicate. Just because people want to know what you're up to doesn't mean you have to satisfy them. Keep them guessing. They won't go away in the meantime.

2. Extend the time period when all you're doing is seriously analyzing the situation. It's a "process." Did anybody count the number of times LeBron used the phrase, "the process," or "this process," as in, "This process has been everything I thought it would be," or "I took this process very seriously."  Aside from building suspense, which is just good strategy for any product, it also made his eventual action seem well-considered, thoughtful, responsible, and certainly not all about the money. BP bumbled immediately into first under-estimating and then simply mangling its analysis of the situation. They would have been better served by engaging in a LeBronian "process."  Tony Hayward could have said, "There are a number of solutions to this thing, but I'll be honest with you, we've never encountered this kind of crisis before, it's very complicated, and we're not going to jump to conclusions before we go through the right process."

3. Which brings us to another important thing that LeBron got right and Hayward did not. For the most part, I believe that LeBron, like all world-class athletes, defaulted to the first person plural, utilizing "we" instead of "I" when discussing his decision. "We" had engaged in the process. There was a lot of "we" throughout the staged event. Contrast this to Tony Hayward, who was all about HIS life, often abandoning his proper role as a faceless bureaucrat and investing his appearances with way too much individuality. LeBron never departed from his anointed role as a professional athlete behaving pretty much as required and expected.

4. Never communicate through unstructured channels. LeBron certainly realized that a real group of sports reporters and cold, critical bloggers and journalists would eat him for lunch as soon as he announced his decision. So he gave the exclusive interview to ESPN, which managed it like a video event -- part national election, complete with colored map, and part marketing circus, with snazzy graphics, logos, sound packages, and a long run-up to the event itself, which didn't even come on until 9:22 PM.

5. When you do finally decide to communicate, study the playbook. LeBron was obviously coached by some kind of professionals on what his message track was and how best to communicate it, what affect to adopt, etc.  For instance, to offset notions from disgruntled sentimentalists that he should remain in Cleveland, he invoked the wisdom of his mother. Nobody's going to attack a guy's mother. Tony Hayward should have talked more about his mother and less about getting his life back. Then people would have thought, "Hey, the guy has a mother. He can't be all bad, even if he IS screwing up the Gulf."

6. Apologize briefly, then move on to the positives. LeBron seemed genuinely sorry for the people of Cleveland, who will clearly be committing mass seppuku after this. He thanked the City, the Cavaliers, his teammates, sort of weirdly invoking all that HE had done for THEM, if I was hearing that correctly, but at any rate, he moved smoothly from that sad stuff into a mention that a man has to do right by his family, which is one big, positive for Americans, and then invoked perhaps the most important American value: the desire to Win. Family + Winning = Something We Understand. Hayward, from his post as a snotty Brit, used neither of these strong tools to convey his messages. Imagine if he pitch had been, "I'm moving my family down here to Pensacola until this is solved. We're going to beat this thing and win." Much better, right?

7.  Get a warm-and-fuzzy sponsor. LeBron's event looked pretty much like a crass, over-commercialized and industrial-strength product of the sports/media hype machine. It was obviously timed and scripted by professionals who do this for a living, whether the event is an election, a beauty pageant, or a reality program. But behind LeBron was a big flag with the logo of the Boys & Girls Club, a very worthwhile organization that in some way expressed the notion of 'I don't really care about a beneficiary of this hoopla.' You can't be critical of anything associated with the Boys & Girls Club! BP should immediately give a billion dollars to the World Wildlife Federation or some similar organization that helps birds, shrimp, and other creatures who are the victims of its horrendous errors. The WWF logo should be on every BP communication. Commercials should be shot featuring Mr. Hayward fondling a pelican who has been cleansed by the power of his money.

8. When you've run out of things to say, disappear. I imagine LeBron will do that now and let his playing time speak for him from this time forth. I think a decision of that nature has been made for Mr. Hayward already.

It was near 100 degrees in New York City yesterday. The asphalt was melting. The heat was a palpable presence you cut your way through as you made your sorry, soggy way down the street. The air was so thick you could eat it with a spoon, if it wasn't so toxic. And I couldn't have been happier to be here.  After all, I could have been at the mogul fest in Sun Valley. Of course, I wasn't invited. But just the thought of it gave me a welcome shiver in all this heat.

There are people who fight for an invitation to the thing. Me? I'd rather be stabbed in the head.

For those of you who have been residing either in the real world or on Planet Mambo, the basic facts are simple. Herb Allen, whose business, like all men of his stature, seems to consist mostly of being Herb Allen, advises major moguls on business deals. He's like Yenta the Matchmaker -- only for Big Business. Once a year, he hosts a big extravaganza at his place in Sun Valley, Idaho, and anybody who is, was, or wants to be anybody has to go there or they are dead in show business. If you are a mogul of any size and you are not there, your body discorporeates and your spirit is left to wander this spectral plane until it can find another career to inhabit.

All these gigantic egos coalesce around this event and rub elbows and psyches all week long. Naturally, the event swarms with journalists, bloggers and video types, all eager to suck up any shred of information, scuttlebutt, rumor, innuendo or, lacking any of that, fiction that may fall out of the sequestered assembly. For the most part, the Big Dudes stay away from the media. It's considered bad form to mingle with the groundlings on this occasion. But inside, the crème de la crème of the media that covers media helps to hold workshops and Think Big Thoughts. That leaves really nothing for the swarm covering the thing, though. So the journalism that comes out of the event is a pretty limp affair.

Like, the big news on the first day was that people had arrived. A list of names made its way across the blogosphere, accompanied by exciting pictures of moguls alighting from their cars. I believe several seem to have driven themselves, which was a form of news, I guess.

The rest of the events appear to be going on much as they ever do. All the names you would expect are scrumming about in the lobby, attending the panels, receiving swag and publicity copies of Ken Auletta's 2009 book on Google. They have lunch. They have dinner. They closely observe each other, the way certain competitive animals do during mating season. For these guys, it's always mating season. A few years ago, some big deals were cooked up at the Allen thing. But nobody expects much of that anymore. Now it's mostly talk about the economy and a mutual affirmation of self-importance that keeps everybody going for another year.

Did you ever go to a party where the persons you were talking to all seemed to be distracted by everybody else who was in the room? With people who didn't really make eye contact because they were looking over your shoulder to see if there was a better, more prestigious conversation available? Have you ever been forced to be informal with people whose relationship with you is based on formality? Ever seen a guy in dry-cleaned, freshly pressed denims, knowing that he'd rather be in pinstripes? Ever stand in a room with at least half a dozen people you'd like to kill, but know you have to hug them and grin into their faces when they are by you?

So yeah, it's hot in New York. I hear it's also disgusting outside right now in Las Vegas. And last week I near froze to death in San Francisco. Got another place that's hell on earth right now? Take me there.

Anywhere but Sun Valley. This week, at least.

1. I went to Slovenia. There were other stops before and after, but the core of the thing was more than a week in Slovenia.

2. Answer questions about why we were going to Slovenia. Some people get it. They say, "Oh! Goin' off the grid, huh?" or "That's pretty, right?" And they are correct on both counts. Slovenia is off the grid, although I must say they do a better job at universal internet than either France or Italy.

3. Look at hay dryers. Not hair dryers. Hay dryers. They're one of the national symbols of Slovenia (see picture above). You take your cut grass and put it on these big rigs that look like a collection of towel bars, and the grass dries and turns into hay. Then they do something with the hay. I have no idea what in the world one could do with so much hay, but there must be a business model somewhere.

4. Drink Slovene wine and eat Slovene food. It's all very excellent, particularly the Slovenian wine. Did you know that 92.5% of all Slovenians, if asked, will tell you that their wine is the best in the world? It's true. Also, they will tell you that Slovenia is the second most forested country in Europe, the first being Finland. More than 55% of Slovenia is covered with pretty, dense, sweet-smelling trees. That statistic was offered with some regularity also by Slovenes we ran into. It's clear they're doing a very good job over there with internal communications.

5. They also have alps. The Julian Alps. They are very craggy and covered with snow even now. These Alps are approximately 65% less expensive to enjoy than the ones provided by Switzerland. The people who live around them are also a lot nicer and less yodely than their Franco/German counterparts in Zurich and Bern.

6. You can't really rely on getting an automatic car to rent anywhere in Europe. I don't know if you know this, but listen carefully. When you make a reservation with Hertz over their international internet system, or even on the phone, they are making promises to you that their local affiliated office can't keep. Like, if you have a printed sheet of paper that says, "You have reserved a Mercedes Benz with Automatic Transmission, and here is your Reservation Number," it really means, "As far as we're concerned in this office, you have the car, if it exists, if it's where it says it is, and if you get there before they run out of it." I think this is pretty much a worldwide phenomenon, because it happened to me in the U.S. several times before. Usually you get an upgrade if they don't have the car you were promised. In Venice, however, which is quite close to Slovenia, they had NO cars for the people who came in with their Reservation numbers. We were lucky. We got a new Peugeot sports car with a stick shift. The Russian couple to our right got the last Fiat. The rest of the gang had to wait until cars came in from other parts of Europe. You can't blame the guys in Venice, either, who looked at every reservation confirmed by Hertz as if it was a death sentence. And Automatic cars? They look at you like you're crazy. So take my advice. Learn to drive a stick before you go, or take trains.

7. Ate a lot of Bambi and Thumper. Got some chicken, finally, when we got back into Italy, but the Slovenians don't seem to have discovered it as a potential source of food. Rabbit. Deer. Pigeon. Prawns (always served complete with eyeballs, pincers, heads and tiny hats). But no chickens. I never ascertained whether this was because chicken was considered too high or too low on the food chain to serve to guests. Perhaps they see it as caviar or something like that.

8. They have yet to discover air conditioning in Northern Italy. This would be fine except that when we were there on our way home, it was 110-degrees until about midnight, when it cooled off to 90. I don't mean to complain. It was very nice.

9. It's hard to come home. Let me put that another way. It's easy to come home. It's hard to go back to the office. And, of course, get back to work.

10. I guess I'll do that now.

As we prepare for this second-tier holiday on Sunday, always a poor #2 to the celebration of Mothers celebrated each year, I thought I would take a moment to thank my dad, and all my subsequent dads, for all they have done for me.

First of all, I'd like to thank the most important dad of all, my own dad, for not only all the things he did right by me, but all the stuff he messed up as well. The stuff he did right includes:

• A strong work ethic;
• A powerful sense that people who do not talk to each other at the dinner table are lacking in some basic human functionality;
• A dark and sometimes malevolent sense of humor;
• The recognition that it's okay for a man to be silly when he feels like it;
• An enjoyment of marriage, even when you're not enjoying it;
• A love of beef.

That's just a short list, not as comprehensive as I would like, but it's a start. Things that he messed up about me that have actually helped me throughout my life include:

• A perfectionistic streak. He used to tell a story about his mother, about whom he had extremely mixed feelings. When he received a 95 on a test while in school, his mother would look at the test and say, not kidding, "What happened to the other five points?" He told me that story usually while congratulating me on, say, a 92, adding, "So what did happen to the other eight points?"
• The limits of perfectionism. At the same time, I believe I have produced more over the years simply because I couldn't stand to do things the way he did. He used to labor over every assignment, and each thing he did was etched in his own blood. It cost him way too much. Consequently, I determined that it was often best just to blow stuff out and see where it would land. It's never really as bad as you think it is while you're producing something. So I tend to just let things rip, rather than going down into the mines to lift out a tiny diamond. I thank him for that.
• A bad temper. From my dad, I learned that a good explosion can help you get your way, even if you don't really deserve to. That has been of incalculable value to me in my business career.
• The uses of silence. He was also quite adept at simply withdrawing from discourse while displeased. Again, I can't imagine managing other people without this excellent tool.
• A love of beef. Have you noticed what happens to you when eat too much beef? Those of you who are still alive, I mean.

I would also like to take a moment to thank my first professional dad, Alan, for being such an enormous putz that I forever learned the template. This is a guy who sent his assistant back into a burning building to retrieve his watch. 'Nuff said?

And my second boss, Bill, for teaching me that a successful person often becomes that way by simply allowing his natural personality to drive things.  I remember the day when he kept me waiting for two hours in the lobby, until 8 PM, for a meeting. This would have been fine, except he went home at 6:15. If his secretary, Janice, hadn't told me he was gone, I might have been waiting there overnight.

To my first female dad, Maria, for showing me that it pays to be polite to people even when you're annoyed at them, particularly if they are your bosses. She wasn't. I took over for her. I even got her ergonomic chair.

To Bill, my dad in the 90s, for just being a great friggin' guy. Loony at times, with a searchlight for a brain and a heart as big as his executive office, both of which were in fact too big and led to his demise.

To a few of my bad dads over the years, for teaching me that I could outlive them, and another interesting things, too. After bad dads go, they are never quite as fearsome when you run into them later. I saw one of them the other day at a funeral of another, and he was downright pleasant. You could have knocked me over with a feather. I mean, this guy was MEAN. Now? A creampuff. Of course, he's no longer Dad.

Of course, I'm Dad now. I'm looking forward to a similar outpouring of affection and derision this year. So far, nothing has been forthcoming.

1.  I want a Maybach. It's a huge, ridiculous car that has curtains on the windows and costs more than $200,000. Times being what they are, I could never afford one myself.

2. I want a razor that has 10 microblades, one to lift, another to lift a little more, a third to lift just a tiny bit more, a fourth to cut, a fifth to lift what is left after the fourth is done, and a sixth to massage while it cuts, a seventh to twirl, an eighth to perform the coup de grace, a ninth to inspect the area, and a tenth to remain on patrol.

3. I want a media player that only presents me with books, music, and video entertainment that it absolutely KNOWS I will like, and NOTHING I don't, and never surprises me with news or information I didn't expect or approve of.

4. I want marketing technology to lose my personal profile.

5. I want BP to stop trying to manage the situation and actually solve it.

6. I want federal regulation that makes it impossible for banks to make more than 1% more on our money than we do.

7. I want a cheese log and a tie.

8. I want to know the precise location of the Cloud.

9. I want there to be a 30-minute buzzer on all budget meetings. Lacking that, I'm wondering if certain forms of amphetamines could be available to those who aren't in finance but still have to attend them.

10. I want Father's Day to be moved to Monday and made into a national holiday, creating a new three-day weekend during the summertime, when it doesn't really make any difference.

You know, I think there are guys in this world who just have a deathwish, that's all. It's the only way to explain what they do. Like, you know they're not stupid, because if they were stupid they'd have been killed or just plain expired a long time ago. And yet... they do stupid things. Particularly when they have a drink in their meaty little fists.

This brings me to this guy I know. Let's call him Bundt. He's a rather powerful fellow in his little world, and makes a ton of money. This in spite of the fact that he has a couple of funky habits. The worst of these -- and I guess it's nothing compared to the great, hairy miscreants of Wall Street and Main Street -- is that he loves to talk about his money. He's not alone in this regard. For some reason, people who make a lot of money tend to talk about it too much to people who don't. You wonder what they're thinking. But maybe they're not thinking. Maybe they're just being atavistic, which is generally part of the successful business person's act anyway.

Anyway, I was at this cocktail party the other night with Bundt and a bunch of fellow prisoners. And I see that Bundt has his boss, a super-senior mid-level haute executive who has flown in all the way from Chicago, in a verbal hammerlock, schmoozing his teeny heart out, practically giving the guy a hickey.  The bossman is listening to Bundt with one of those polite little smiles people paste on when they feel like a very fine needle is being inserted into their eye socket by a person whose feelings they don't want to hurt. I walk over and attend the conversation, just to see what Bundt is going to do now. The guy has a unique way of saying interestingly disadvantageous things, and I'm hoping to get a snapshot of this gift in action. And I am not disappointed.

"Your operation is doing very well, Mr. Bundt," said the superior officer. I bet he says that to all the girls.

"Yes, I know," says Bundt, and I am aware that he's about to deliver something excessively dumb. "I was having lunch with Bob Dimler the other day and he said that if I were working for him, I'd be the President now."

Bob Dimler is the head of our #1 competitor. If  there's one thing we're taught to do around here, it's to hate Bob Dimler. If you work for us, you don't "have lunch with Bob Dimler," and if you do, you don't tell your boss about it, and if you ARE stunningly idiotic enough to tell the boss about it, you don't add how much Bob Dimler loves you. But Bundt did all those things. Why?

His boss simply looked at him in stunned silence, which I'm sure Bundt interpreted as admiration.  He then walked away replete with self-congratulation at the super-positive exchange. The Chairman looked after him and said, "If he wants to be working for Bob Dimler, I'm sure we could arrange that."

Why do people do these things? Do we all, to some extent, undermine ourselves in one way or another? In what way are you doing it right now?

The business of America is business, as Calvin Coolidge once observed. And never has that been more clear than this morning, where two former business executives have moved one step closer to political power. Both Meg Whitman, former head of eBay and Carly Fiorina, the lapsed HP honcho, won their primaries and are prepared to sweep into office if there is any Republican sweeping in November. Pundits think there will be, of course. And we shall see.

One thing, however, is perfectly clear, as another great Republican was fond of saying. Both have been superbly prepared for public office -- or at least attaining it -- by having amassed significant personal fortunes while they were in business.

Beyond money, which is asset #1, #2, and #3 in politics at this point, business executives have other attributes that all but ensure success in the big arena, including:

• The ability to feign sincerity;
• The capacity to do anything necessary to achieve short-term success;
• Great powers of rationalization when odious acts are called for;
• Flexible concepts of loyalty, along with the willingness to sacrifice friends and allies when necessary;
• Access to great wells of narcissism;
• Well spoken, with excellent presentation skills.

As a group, the captains of industry do have weaknesses, however, failings inherent to their profession that must be watched carefully and guarded against, including:

• No problem utilizing power for personal gain;
• Willingness to yell at people, sometimes in public;
• Flabby recognition of need for consensus on difficult issues;
• Stubborn when wrong;
• Impatient with process;
• Sometimes quite boring when not intoxicated.

None of the latter attributes, of course, are deal killers, or should make any failing CEO think twice before offering him or herself up for the good of the nation.

There was some discussion last week at the All Things Digital conference about the PC being the next great gizmo to be consigned to the garbage dump of history. In the future, it is thought, we will all be tethered to the great teat of the collective mind by some teeny implement that is smarter than we are. This seems counter-intuitive to me, but then I've always bet against sea changes. The debate did put me in mind, however, of other great toys that I thought would be around forever, including:

• The buggy whip. This is always the example that is given when obsolete pieces of technology are hauled out. Its demise signaled the end of an era in which horse abuse was not only tolerated but encouraged, especially in heavy traffic.
• Mr. Potato Head. In the beginning, Mr. Potato Head was a potato whose persona was built out of small facial and body parts that were inserted into his skin with small, sharp prongs. At some point during my childhood, this was deemed too dangerous for tots and his body was replaced with the molded plastic orb we see today. I remember saying at the time, "Who wants a plastic Mr. Potato Head?"
• The typewriter: "Who needs to have a computer all the time? I mean besides Larry." Larry was our CFO.
• The Home Fax: Introduced into the workplace at the beginning of my career. I remember saying, "Who wants to respond to everything the minute it pops up?" Within two years, everybody had to have one in their house if you wanted to stay in touch with Big Bob, who lived and died by them. Now it's all e-mail. The Fax in the basement sits idle for weeks at a time.
• The Sony Walkman, which played cassette tapes. I also was surprised by the demise of the portable CD player.
• The Bic Pen: The one that cost 19 cents?
• The Telephone: I think I used my land line three times last year.
• The Cell Phone that's just a phone: I held out like a champ until last November. Then having two implements in my pocket just didn't make sense anymore.
• Smoked meat.

And now the PC? What next? Say it ain't so! I don't want to be part of the cloud!

Hilarious news comes today that JPMorgan Chase was socked with a "record" fine from the United Kingdom Financial Services Authority, the regulatory agency responsible for overseeing the banking industry and protecting the public from its potential depredations.

According to the Authority, the bank "committed a serious breach of our client money rules by failing to segregate billions of dollars of its clients' money for nearly seven years... This penalty sends out a strong message to firms of all sizes that they must ensure client money is segregated in accordance with FSA rules. Firms need to sit up and take notice of this action -- we have several more cases in the pipeline."

Strong message! Take that, Jamie Dimon!

The fine comes to $49 million. Let's see what that would mean to your average citizen. JP Morgan (JPM) brought in $108.6 billion in 2009, according to its first quarter call. Let's do the math. If you take $49 million as a percentage of that annual income, you get something like this for varying notches on our social ladder:

An annual income of $50,000 would receive a fine of...$22.56. Is that right?

Obviously, an individual raking in $100,000 would be forced to pay twice that. Still seems pretty tolerable, if slightly obnoxious. That's a full tank of gas on your way to your Canadian vacation, unless you drive an RV.

Likewise, one fortunate enough to be making $5,000,000 per year -- probably a CEO or CFO of just such an institution as JPMorgan -- would be required to fork over, what... gimme a minute...a bit over two grand?

Somebody help me.  Perhaps I've got it wrong. Those numbers don't seem like anything that would make anybody sit up and take notice...but maybe my calculations are incorrect. Where's a financial person when you really need one?

Just a little note to get the summer started off right. I have noticed a disturbing, post-recessionary trend developing that should, I believe, be killed in its cradle.

It's the uncatered meeting that takes place during what in civilized societies would be considered lunchtime.

When I was a lad, I worked for a guy I'll call Walt. Walt was a wonderful guy, except he had one (well, actually more than one, but that's another story) peccadillo that used to bemuse and annoy me.  With alarming regularity, he would call me at about noon and bark at me, "Come in here for a minute." Then we would chew the fat about sundry redundant things while he ate a big cup of soup and a bunch of bread sticks. I would watch him eat, stomach growling, until he was done. Sometimes this took ten minutes. Sometimes it took an hour, which smashed my own lunch plans to pieces. I think Walt just hated to eat alone. It just never occurred to him to order TWO bowls of soup or, for that matter, to give me advance notice. I guess he figured he just owned my ass 24/7/365, so lunchtime was as good a time as any to exercise his option.

Nowadays it's a little different. Walt is gone, long gone, and I believe right now may be looking forward to a solitary lunch at his palatial home in Connecticut. But his heirs live on, apparently. Like today, Finance is having a staff meeting at 12:30. There will be no food. This means, for those who are attending, that they can have the early bird special and grab a sandwich at noon, which is pretty horrible, in my opinion. Who's hungry at noon? Or they can wait until the end of the meeting and grab something at 2 p.m., when real working people are returning to do business after their respectable business lunches.

I believe there are three miscreant entities that are advancing this barbaric agenda. They are:

• Finance: Because they can do what they want as controllers of the budget process;
• Corporate Executives: Because they can do what they want, sitting atop the reporting structure;
• The CEO: Because he/she can do what he/she wants, period.

There have been other fads that developed during my time on Planet B, including (but not limited to): Excellence, Quality, Managing By Walking Around, corporate seizure of airline miles accumulated during the course of business, 360-reviews, and so forth. All have bitten the dust. This one should too.

Meetings that take place between 12:01 and 1:59 should have food at them. Doesn't matter what. Who cares? Let us eat cake!

Mike Jordan died yesterday. Or maybe it was the night before, I don't know. I do know that I woke up yesterday morning and my BlackBerry had a little note from the fellow who had been handling his public relations stuff for the last 10 years or so. It told me Mike had passed away. And I felt sad.

I worked for Mike for a few years in the 1990s. He had just come to Westinghouse from Pepsi, or from some limbo that people go to when they leave a monster corporation and are waiting for their next gig. I believe he had an investment firm. He brought with him to poor old Westinghouse a cadre of capos that he had assembled when he was at his former corporate post. Where he was soft-spoken, shy and difficult to read, they were not. They were some of the scariest bunch of dudes I had ever seen, all sharp edges and swagger. A couple of years went by and I got to know these gunslingers a little bit better, worked with them a little bit more. This made them about 6% less scary.

Mike himself was horrifically imposing at first. He was very tall, one of those men whose height seems so extreme that they have to stoop when they enter a conference room, and hunch over slightly to maintain eye contact with less elevated individuals. I won't say he seemed cordial and nice, because that would be an overstatement. Cool, more like it. Willing to listen more than to talk, maybe. But always evaluating. Looking you over from a very great distance. Reserving his thoughts. Willing to do what was necessary to fix things, in a clinical way, nothing personal. He did get his start at McKinsey.

There's a quality of executive hauteur that some people have and some don't, no matter what their title might be. Mike had it. He was Chairmanly. He presided. Behind the sangfroid, you always had the feeling that there was a tough guy in there that you really didn't want to piss off.

One time, a sleek little barracuda came in from a west coast competitor to straighten out our strategic planning function. He came to his first meeting with the executive team. Ran his mouth off. Said we didn't know our butts from a hole in the ground. Mike listened. After the meeting, the President, who had hired this person, said to Mike, "What do you think of Larry?"

"Oh, he's fine," said Mike. "I'm sure he's very smart. I just never want to see him again. If he's in a meeting, I won't be there."

"But Mike," said the President. "We just hired the guy. He's here to work with all of us."

"That's fine," said Mike. "But I won't be there." And that was that about that. We had a new strategic planner about a month later. Came from McKinsey, I recall. Mike had a little soft spot for tall, skinny analysts in blue pinstripe, for some reason.

During his time with us, Mike quietly engineered a complete overhaul of our company. And in the end, as so often happens, it's the architect of these kinds of things who is the last casualty of the transformation. I won't talk a lot about that, except to say that he strode out of the place pretty much as he had come in. Quietly. No fuss. Doing what it was obvious needed to be done. If you had to sum it up, I'd say it had something to do with a willingness to accept the inevitable and map out a strategy appropriate to that knowledge. I hear that faculty failed him only at the end, when he fought like a cornered wolf for a very long time to beat the illness that finally laid him low.

There were legends about Mike after he left our company, stories that surfaced. Turns out that he had a photographic memory, that at Princeton, during drinking games, his pals would give him the page of a phone book and watch him memorize entire columns of numbers. That he translated poetry from medieval Italian. This always made me think just how little we really know about each other, we who work together in hermetically sealed offices every day.

I ran into him a couple of times over the years, when he was no longer our chairman. One time, I was in Soho, and I realized that the Lincolnesque figure walking towards me in jeans and a backpack was Michael H. Jordan, who had just left EDS, where he had basically done the same there as he did with us. I sort of couldn't believe it. This guy in front of me looked more like somebody's cool dad than the captain of industry who pushed billions of dollars of assets around a balance sheet. We talked for a while. One thing was clear. He was a lot happier than I had ever seen him. A certain level of under-employment can do that for you.

I saw him again in an airport a few years later. This time, he was more Mike than before, even though he was now in cords and a button-down shirt and blazer rather than a $2,500 navy blue three-piece. He was on the board of a digital media company and bent my ear about some boring business stuff for a while. I liked the entrepreneurial gleam in his eye.  Some players never lose that.

But my most vivid memory -- heavy with appreciation -- is more personal. Back in 1995, I had just moved from Esquire Magazine to FORTUNE, and my true name, my corporate name, as it were, was still a pretty well-kept secret, as was the fact that Stanley Bing is a pen name, like George Orwell or Mark Twain, though on a much less elevated level, to be sure.

A foolish twerp of an editor at Esquire, while having a drink with a guy from the New York Times, thought he'd trade a little gossip and revealed my little secret to him. The reporter, whose job it was to be a dick, I guess, decided he would bust me in the newspaper. He called around to everybody he could think of that could cause me trouble, and the biggest one of those was Mike.

In those days, before the journalism game became commoditized, everybody thought they were Carl Bernstein, so this reporter, assuming that tone, said to Mike, "Mr. Jordan, I'm calling to tell you that on Monday morning The New York Times will be reporting that your Senior Vice President..." and he gave my title, "... is  the business columnist Stanley Bing. Do you have a comment on this?"

And Mike said, very blandly, as was his style when annoyed, "That's very interesting." And then he referred to call to me. "He can give you an appropriate comment, I think," said Mike, and hung up. This was well before I saw the chairman and chief executive officer in jeans, mind you. But there, for the first time, at least for me, he lifted just a corner of the veil, and gave me a peek at his kindness, his sense of humor, his toughness, and just a little bit of what was clearly a bone-dry %!#@-you attitude.

And they don't teach you that in business school.

This past week was marked by two remarkable events, each of which puts the lie to what most people think about New York.

In the mind of many, this great and obnoxious city is the toughest, most frenetic and heartless spot on the planet. New Yorkers, they say, have tortoiseshell for skin and are as grumpy and unfriendly as the sharp and grisly denizens of Paris. You gotta watch out for 'em. Those of us who actually live here know better, but we also know that there's no denying that this town has a couple of rough edges, and after a while you learn not to expect too much from it. That way you're not disappointed.

Last week, I had dinner with my friend Dworkin. He's one of those guys who does fine in business, but he'd lose his nose if it wasn't attached to his moustache. At any rate, that night we got to the restaurant and the moment he sat down he starts feeling around in his pockets and says to me, "Uh-oh. I think I lost my wallet." This really annoyed me. My whole day is nothing but drama. I'm looking forward to a few hours where the only controversy will be whether to have a third drink after the second. And now this. So we have dinner and the whole time he's, of course, obsessed with where it is, where he's been, who he can call, that kind of thing. You know what it's like to lose something like that. You feel like a schmuck. You want to look under the streetlights not because you know the wallet is there, but because that's where the light is.

That night, Dworkin went back to his office to see if the wallet was there. It wasn't. He was so desperate he actually locked himself in his office tower by mistake and had to be rescued by somebody in possession of a working security card. His had been in his wallet. Not really believing it would do any good, at about 11 PM, I called the car service that had taken us to the restaurant. Asked them if anybody had left a wallet in the car. There was a long hold while they checked. They came back on. "Yes, sir," said Lafcadio. "We have it. If your friend comes back to our dispatcher anytime before midnight, he may pick it up."

That's exactly what he did. All the money, credit cards and other stuff was intact. Nothing was missing. Amazing, huh?

Now consider this: Last night my wife and I were scheduled to go out to dinner. She called me at about 6:30 PM, very upset. That's right. She couldn't find the little silver mesh purse that contained ... well, everything. In this case, it was quite serious because in addition to all the credit cards and cash, the case contained her driver's license, which she will need to fly later this week. We called here. We called there. We called everywhere. No luck.

At 6:55 PM, just before she was going to leave for dinner, she received an e-mail. It was from a woman who lives about ten blocks from our apartment. Seems the night before last her 16-year-old son found a silver mesh purse in a taxi. He took it home because he was, in his words, "afraid somebody would steal it." His mom saw the purse, which contained a card with our information on it, and sent the e-mail. Ten minutes later, my wife had the purse, with everything in it, including her Tic Tacs. Nothing was taken.

Two losses. With nothing lost. No rewards asked for, although some small ones were given. I come away with one thought in mind: If people who make millions of dollars a year were as honest as people who do not, we all might be a whole lot better off.

The Daily Beast today reports that "As Congress debated the financial reform bill, 850 business, trade groups and other corporate interests threw over 3,000 lobbyists at Capitol Hill and spent over $1.3 billion in 2009. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce led the way with its contingent of 85 lobbyists with the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association tossing in another 54 of their own. Around 175 groups involved in the financial services industry, including Goldman Sachs, also hired lobbyists to target any proposal aimed directly at banks."

They say that like it's a bad thing.

Sure, there are some negatives. The aims for which they were working were suspect, that's one thing. We need financial reform. They spent more than a billion bucks fighting against it. So that's not good. Then there's the fact that they failed. That's strike two. If you're going to work for something bad, you might as well succeed. That's the principle upon which much of Business is founded. You do bad stuff. You win. You get to write the history. That's the formula that won the West.

But aren't we being a bit unfair to lobbyists? They have a job like any other. When I worked for my old corporation, which no longer exists, our Washington lobbyists used to belong to a little club that included representatives of proud businesses that employed hundreds of thousands of people and produced billions in revenue. Sadly for them, they were very unpopular in spite of these attractive qualities, just because they represented interests that wanted to, for instance, dump nuclear waste in Indian reservations, or promote smoking and drinking among our youth.  They were a jolly, hard-eating and drinking bunch, those lobbyists, and really good at parties. I knew a few of them, and they were very nice. Not all of us can be equally proud of our what we do for a living, but what's a person to do? Gotta eat. Are you always proud of what YOU do?

In this case, at least, the lobbyists who stood up for our corrupt and insane financial system believed that what they were doing was founded on the solid principles of classic Reaganomics. And it was.  We've spent several decades praying at the Church of Deregulation. When did the text of that Gospel change? Excuse us if we didn't get the memo, right?

And let us not forget that those 3000 lobbyists pumped $1.3 billion into our struggling economy. This put bread on the table for countless restaurateurs, bartenders, secretaries, typists, messenger service bike riders, members of the news media, escorts and others who rely on Washington business at its most frenzied to survive. Imagine if that billion-plus wad of dough had NOT been employed in pursuit of the interests they serve? Would we have been better off?

In these difficult times, let's not be too hasty to criticize those who are willing to generate revenue in pursuit of the American dream. If others were writing the script right now, they would be our heroes. And who knows. If we're not careful, they may well be again.

Today is game day at my establishment, so I don't have a lot of time to chew the fat with you this morning. We're gonna go out there this afternoon and sell about a billion dollars worth of product to the guys who have the money. Maybe two billion. Wish us luck.

My point is that as we go off to battle, I like to be armed with as much information as possible. So I went to a couple of sites I like to visit to see what's going on in the world. You don't want to say "Nice day!" to a guy in the oil business when one of his rigs is missing. You don't want to say, "How's it going?" to a guy from Toyota, ever, pretty much. At least not now.

At any rate, I gave up when I hit two -- count 'em, two -- paywalls. I saw a very interesting article on something or other, clicked the link and WHAM. Paywall. Register. Sign in. Authenticate myself. I had neither the time nor the inclination. Next I went to a destination that tells me what I like to hear, politically. CRUNCH. Face first into the paywall. I thought, "Bleep it." Now I'm going to tell you about it and get going.

There are circumstances under which I'm more than willing to pay for a commodity. Paper towels.  Spreadable cheese. A piece of research I can get nowhere else on the dangers of not changing your socks. But the idea of registering myself and logging in every time I want to get the weather or a recipe or the random musings of somebody like me... I don't think so.

Live free or die! Well... maybe not die. Just, you know, go elsewhere. Yeah. I like that.

Live free or go elsewhere!

In Wall-E, the Pixar vision of the future, or at least one possible future, humanity has been reduced to boneless, gelatinous masses who never get out of their comfy couches and are continually served by mechanical servants dedicated to their pleasure.  After playing with a few iPads recently, I no longer think that's too far fetched.

I know I said not too long ago that I wanted one. I was partly kidding, you know. I mean, I want any new thing that comes out and has a price tag on it, generally. I'm what the marketers call an early adopter. I adopt things early. I don't know, by the way, if "adopt" is the right word. A lot of the things I "adopt" are sitting in a drawer someplace, and have been since about a week after I "adopted" them. So it's not a real adoption. It's more of a kind of foster thing, maybe. For me, most new electronic toys are like fish and house guests -- they start to stink after three days.

At any rate, I was really hot for the iPad, I won't lie to you. Then I sat with one for a little while at a friend's house. I loved the sexy apps. I can't remember any right now, but they were very cool. I could imagine using up whole days on them. And I liked the book reader, and the music and movies and TV shows and all that good stuff. It feels good in the hand, the way all Apple stuff does. It made me want to just sit and sit and sit and sit and look into the little screen and suck it all up like a big... fat... sponge.

And that's the thing about it. If I had one, I would never work again. I would take stuff in. I would never put any out.

So I'm not going to get an iPad, at least not right now. I feel kind of guilty about it. I've been loyal to Steve and his team, supporting just about every new initiative since Macs were ugly and mouses were square. But not this time. Not right now. My life isn't over yet, at least I'd like to think so. There are plenty of things sucking my attention away from the stuff I really ought to be doing. I don't need another distraction, no matter how pretty it might be.  Not yet.

When I do, I know Apple will be there to meet me at the door of the assisted living facility.

Idea for a terrifying new movie:

Guy has it all. Big house. Big car. Big spouse, but not that big. Two nice kids who go to a big private school. Big dog, even. Every day he gets in his big car and goes to his big, big office, where he trades in derivatives and brunches, lunches, and dines with friends at ratings agencies who love him big-time and give triple-A ratings to everything he does.

All that's about to change.

One day he wakes up and things feel different. The sky outside is crazy black, like the space over the building on Central Park West that Zool visited in Ghostbusters. There are no birds in the trees. He gets in his car and wends his way to his office, from whose windows he can see the whole world. But things are strange. Scary. People are jumpy. The downtown streets are suddenly deserted. The floor of the Exchange is quiet. Something is coming. And it can't be stopped.

His assistant comes into his personal space. She is trembling. A tiny rivulet of perspiration makes its careful way down her usually untroubled brow. "It's here," she says.

And so it is. The Monster has arrived, and is beginning to take its grim harvest. First it kills the derivatives business, snapping its spine as you would a bread stick in a trendy boite. "Aieee!" says the derivatives business, which had the feeling it was being stalked but didn't take measures to protect itself until it was too late.

Next, without warning, it swoops in from Washington and strangles the credit card business, limiting the places it may feed until it keels over, a shadow of its former self.

Then it scares a whole bunch of banks to death. You know banks. All you have to do is say, "Boo." And so it does.

One dark night as the wind howls outside, the Monster eviscerates the ratings agencies, who were asleep in their snug little beds, believing themselves safe. No such thing. Their carcasses are found the next morning, gutted by a host of new regulations.

Finally, in the last act, the Monster comes for our hero. Will he save his family? His Beamer? What will life be like if he cannot defeat the horrid Monster who is intent on avenging wrongs from the sub-prime mortgage crisis?

It all depends on what you think of as a happy ending.

With the market zooming up and down like a demented bobbin, people who have money are looking for places to put it. As a public service, I can tell them where to put it.

1. Gold. People are buying it right now as a hedge against Europe, and a leading analyst says that it will be at $1,500 an ounce by the end of the year. If it does, my mouth will be worth more than my portfolio.

2. Wine. My friend Henry bought several bottles of Chateau Latour a few years ago for $325 a bottle. Last week, he made a deal to sell them to a wine broker who will offer them, on consignment, for $5,000 a bottle. He believes there is a huge market for the haughty beverage among very wealthy nouveau riche Chinese, who are especially fond of Latour. It is not uncommon for them to mix it with 7-Up.

3. Art. A Jasper Johns painting, part of his American flag series of 1960-66, sold for $28 million this week. This was the highest price ever fetched at auction for the artist, who is dead, as is its former owner, Michael Crichton, author of Jurassic Park. The painting was expected to reap a mere $15 million, but clearly out-performed due to the vagaries of more traditional investments recently.

4. Cheese. I have conveniently provided a link to some very big opportunities in the cheese business in Eastern Ontario.

5. Horses. This one looks like it can't miss.  Azerbaijani firm marketing race horses raised on a farm in Germany.

6. Show Business: Somewhat riskier than race horses, but more satisfying in both success and failure. Investors in The Fantasticks, which has been running somewhere in the world since Nero was a pup, have garnered a 24,000% return on their money -- like, $80,000 on a $330 investment made in 1960. Of course, $300 in 1960 would be worth about $2,000 today. Still a winner. On the other hand, my friend Bob invested several hundred thousand dollars in producing an off-Broadway show and lost all of it. This is better by far, however, than investing in some financial instrument or money market fund and then being told that whoops, your broker lost all of it but is keeping his bonus. People who lose money in show business still get to go to parties, drink with surly actors and wear ascots.

7.  Dinner: Those who do not invest in dinner save the price of the dinner. Those who investigate this daily opportunity, however, are more likely to see the benefits of any high-risk, high-return investment -- immediate satisfaction, followed several hours later by an empty feeling.

These are just a few of the many options in this risky, volatile environment. You may have others you care to suggest. All submissions are welcome, as long as they don't involve an investment in any stock that is tracked by a professional security analyst.

Here's the way it goes: one group of greedy, inventive mothers cooks up a whole bunch of ways to make money off of their intricate knowledge of the system and how it operates. Some of those ways are even legal under the rules, which were cleverly manipulated ahead of time. Others were not legal, but were not punished until it became fashionable to do so. This group does its thing until it can no longer do so because the system can sustain rampant, illogical stupidity for only so long. It then collapses under its own weight. The guys who run the game see it coming early and get out with huge paydays, going to the mattresses until it's safe to come out and start the game over again.

Then there's a second group. They're the ones that wander into the smoking McMansion when almost burned down. They look for signs of arson. They look for clues about how the conflagration started. They try to figure out new safety regulations that will make it unlikely for such a blaze ever to occur again. This group is somewhat understaffed. It lacks resources. And there are a host of speculators waiting for them to finish their duties so they can build a new McMansion on the same spot. Eventually, their bosses call and ask them to wrap things up so that business can get rolling again. And so they do.

Today, we see representatives of both groups hard at work, each in their own cities.

In Washington, we have banking lobbyists making sure that any financial reform does not hamper their industry's attempt to get the derivatives business rolling again. It's a $22 billion business, they say, and crucial to the well-being of Wall Street, which, in turn, is good for the nation.

One thing is for sure. Wacky financial instruments are a key part of the high risk play necessary to create the kind of heat that produces seven and eight-figure compensation for those who sell them. It's also necessary to kick start the next cycle of boom and bust, where all the long and short hitters make their serious money. You know who gets squeezed in that play, but it doesn't matter. That first group is good. They will win.

In Brussels, on the other hand, you have a bunch of grim-faced fire fighters trying to staunch the flow of green from Greece and the other nations in the Eurozone who suddenly woke up after their bad party. It's going to cost a trillion dollars. And as soon as that's paid, you can bet there will be a moment of reflection... and then the guys from our first group will be back speaking whatever language they do, working to make sure that their bosses can start the cycle all over again without being hampered by the party poopers on their side of the Atlantic.

Washington. Brussels. Do you think we could set up some kind of hot-line between the two? Maybe the good guys in the two cities should be communicating a little bit better with each other.

Wall Street went haywire yesterday, zooming down 1000 points in a 17-minute period for reasons that are still unexplained. What we do know is that the mechanized system failed, causing a huge blip in the heartbeat that keeps corporate capitalism alive. The machines took over for a moment, and chaos ensued.

One possible key may be found, however, in reports on the bizarre incident. These cite the interesting fact that several large companies, for a brief moment, traded at as little as a penny before righting themselves and returning to their true value. Accenture, the consulting firm, suffered this burp in value. And P&G -- hopefully not due to any mischief by the devil -- was suddenly shown to be trading at a lower value on the wrong exchange.

I'm like the Finance people I know. I don't believe anything the Market does is irrational. I think there are reasons for everything that happens there, no matter how seemingly nonsensical. So if one focuses on these particular phenomena, there is really only one logical explanation.

Somewhere in the world, a team of crafty, tech-savvy, entrepreneurial criminals briefly commandeered the System. During that brief time period between 2:38 p.m.  and 2:56 p.m., they purchased huge blocks of certain targeted companies for one penny a share. When the market rebounded less than half an hour later, they divested their positions for untold wealth. Then they vaporized into the streets of Zurich or Milan, leaving American regulators and watchdogs to sniff their spoor to no avail in the days to come.

I see Bruce Willis as the leader of the team. Uma Thurman is the wily German computer specialist whose cool is matched only by her knowledge of Unix. Vin Diesel does the driving. Somewhere in London, Pierce Brosnan performs a mysterious, shadowy function of some kind. Back in New York, a small, unassuming trader, played by Neil Patrick Harris, places the worm in the critical mainframe that makes the entire plan possible.  It's hard to figure who might play the dogged Federal regulator who goes after the charming, if evil, villains. Larry David?

There is, of course, a darker scenario. At 2:37 p.m. yesterday afternoon, Skynet became aware of its existence. Less than a minute later, it decided to make a killing in the Market.

My generation grew up talking about peace, love and understanding. We didn't do too well about that. The world we've created is not appreciably better than the one left us by our square old parents, although there have been some improvements. I won't argue with you about those. If you don't know what they are, I can't help you.

My point is that the way people behave when they are young doesn't always presage the kind of adults they will be. The guys in the tie dyed shirts and leather headbands of my youth grew up to be pinstriped dicks crushing each other for the next greedy deal in the 90s. They drive BMWs and support a variety of wars. They sing along with John Lennon when he comes on the oldies station imagining no possessions while thumbing their next-gen smartphones. So there's some hope for us. The current generation of teens may not grow into the meanest, shallowest, most predatory class of management since the Persians mashed those 300 Spartans.

Then again, they might.

Anybody who knows a teen knows what I'm talking about. Facebook is an arena where lions and hyenas prowl, looking for dinner. Bullies rule. Of course, as always, it's easy to blame the medium. The medium is not to blame. But it's a big part of whatever is going on, which also has spilled over into the hallways where these kids go to school, the pizzerias where they grab a slice, the living rooms where they hang out.

The girls are the worst. As a group, I believe that teenage girls put the most hardened McKinsey-Whartonian to shame. Their specialty seems to be clustering together to form small groups dedicated to the ostracism and destruction of targeted classmates. The boys are somewhat better. This makes me fear for them, too.  And their destination of choice throughout the day, the forum where they get their mojo working, is Facebook.

Out in New Jersey, the Principal of a middle school has asked parents to ban Facebook.  In doing so, he said, "There is absolutely no reason for any middle school student to be a part of a social networking site! Let me repeat that -- there is absolutely, positively no reason for any middle school student to be a part of a social networking site! None."

I might agree with the sentiment, but there's one thing about which this well-intentioned administrator is wrong.  In teaching social networking, virtual presence, aggressive electronic messaging and cold-blooded manipulation of group dynamics, Facebook is preparing young people to thrive in business life, particularly on the executive level. I'm just not sure it's a future office space that I would want to live in.

Our Republican brothers having fallen before the scythe of temporary public opinion, the debate in the Senate has at last been joined.  Today we line up behind Team Lloyd and strap on our best pinstripe, wing-tips, and chrome domes. The future of irrational, unseemly wealth is at stake. We have partied hard in the past and awakened to some bad mornings after. But those cotton-mouthed sunrises have done nothing to dim our resolve to hit the scene again as soon as we possibly can. And no ugly mother in a cheap Washington suit is going to tell us otherwise, right? I can't hear you!

The nation stands as one behind us.  Okay, not right now, maybe -- but America's not gonna like it if the party really stops, that's for sure. Because while spending any time at all looking at us on TV might make you sick, we're still the only ones who can make you rich. Rich beyond your wildest dreams! Maybe not today, or next week, but soon, and for the rest of your lives! You want to give that up? We don't think so.

That's why we're gonna fight for our right to par-tay! And we know in the end you're gonna stand behind us, ladies and gentlemen of Main Street, not those bummer dudes who want the music to stop forever. We hold your upside in our hands and always have. And you know it, right? Can we hear you say Yeah? Yeah!

All those things you're angry about right now aren't abuses at all. They're rights we exercise in order to bring you the American Dream, which is now a global one.  And we now assert those rights and will stand, shoulder to shoulder, to make sure they receive the protection they deserve to keep our System safe against those who would destroy it. Regulate us? Of course. Regulate away. Nobody's against regulation.

But do not limit our ability to bet against our own products. That's the way the system works. There are two schools of thought on any investment. We want to represent both. You will see that on page 187 of our offering release on the Babalooah Fund, for instance, there is a disclaimer in Footnote iiiv informing careful readers of the various interlocking derivative nucleotides we have in motion on this. Perhaps it could have been larger. We'll do that next time. But don't mess with our right to hedge. If we can't hedge, an enormous leg of our industry will be ripped from its socket and the giant will tumble down for good. You want to see the Market at 3,000 again? We know you don't.

We also have to take huge risks with other people's money. Many of those dollars reside in 401(k)s, retirement accounts, and the cash the little people of the world save up as an umbrella for a rainy day. If we can't use those piles of money, what would we do? Use our own? Be serious. Our own money we have stashed in insured triple tax-free municipal bonds! It's YOUR money that needs to be at a very high level of risk if we're going to return the profits that YOU demand! And we're all about you! You're the customer! You rule!

That's why we must, absolutely, retain our right to build new, inventive, creative houses of cards that tower above the puny, restrictive edifices built by prior generations. To do that, our financial institutions have to be free! As free as the wind blows. As free as the grass grows. Born free to follow the opportunities that can only be realized when banks are also brokerages, brokerages are also lenders, lenders are also capable of doing everything but your windows. This gives us the ability to see the cards about to fall before other people do, and to profit from it. Personally. Even if you don't.

Which is why we're not going to let Washington get in the way of our compensation. You know how hard what we do is? We need the best and the brightest on board to make sure all goes well, and even if it doesn't, well, then we need them even more. I guess if you bail us out, we'd be willing to take a small haircut that year. Who said we weren't flexible?

Speaking of bailouts, we don't want any limit on those, either. It's nice to know the Government is there when we need it, but not when we don't. Try eliminating bailouts and see what happens to your portfolio the day that bill passes.

Also, in the future, we want to get back to lending money to people who don't deserve it. Not right now. We want everybody to forget what happened the last couple of years. But soon. You want that too, don't you? Sure you do. Admit it. You certainly don't want any Beltway bureaucrat stopping you from buying that million dollar home if you can swing it someday.

And finally, we want to charge people to borrow money while paying nothing to borrow it ourselves. That is the foundation of our recovery. Don't mess with that.

Oh, and leave our credit card operations alone.

Beyond that, we're open to any good financial reform you have in mind. Go ahead. We're listening.