Today I am writing my last blog entry for a little while. I’m going to take off for parts unknown for about 10 days, maybe two weeks. It’s possible that during that time I’ll lob in a few thoughts now and then, but I don’t know. My brain feels like one of those static electricity balls that shoots off sparks and bolts all over the place to no particular good effect a lot of the time. I need to get grounded.

Before I go, however, I thought I would like to unload a few of the things that are on my mind, stuff I’m nervous about, excited about, wondering about.

I’m thinking a lot these days about cloud computing. Google (GOOG) is talking about it a lot. You probably know more about it than I do. It’s a movement away from local storage of personal information, all the things we have normally come to expect on our own dedicated hard drives and servers, including applications and data. It feels very Terminator to me. Like, I think about Skynet going self-aware and destroying the future.

I also wonder in my own mind whether we are constructing what is, in effect, the Library at Alexandria. All the knowledge of the ancient world was located there, back when men wore skirts. Then it burned. Now we have a handful of plays from Sophocles where there might have been dozens for all we know. What happens if the cloud gets a massive wedgie?

As always, I believe that Microsoft (MSFT) is taking the rear-guard action and developing ever-more evolved servers for home use. I admit to feeling more comfortable with all my intellectual property tucked right next to my desk. It just doesn’t seem to be the way things are going. We are all melding slowly into a collective mind that connects via innumerable electronic nerves with Mother. But I wish the geeks at Microsoft well.

I also send out big hugs, in spite of what some of you may think, to all the good folks at Apple (AAPL), not so much for what they’ve done for us this year, but for all the good things they’re cooking up right now. I don’t even know what they are. But I want whatever it is they’ve got on their minds already. And that makes me feel very hopeful about this future of ours.

I’m also thinking about what kind of year 2008 will be, of course. There seems to be a lot of negativity around, some of which I admit, in my own small way, I grouchily contribute to. I’m sorry if now and then I bum some of you out. I’ll try to be more upbeat in the year to come. If, you know, the airplanes run on time, among, you know, other things.

Now I’m going to take a leap here, skip the Happy Holidays thing and just say Merry Christmas to all of you, not in a hostile, mean-spirited, contentious, divisive Lou Dobbs way, but just because it is, after all, a real holiday, not a merged and transformed national event like President’s Day. And even though I do not believe in Santa I’m glad he’s around. And when it snows on December 25th, I feel like childhood. So Merry Christmas to us all, each and every one.

I wish you a terrific 2008 as well. May your securities go up. May your loans not be adjusted. May the Fed time its actions to help your portfolio. May your work be as pleasant as possible, and not interrupted by any forces outside your ken or power, either majeur or otherwise. And may you make more money in 2008 than you did in 2007, without trying quite as hard to do so.

Finally, I just want to say thanks for being here, for your crazy boss stories, for your thoughts about your bulls**t jobs, for yelling at me when I annoy you and rallying to my side when the Humor Police occasionally comes knocking at my door.

Shakespeare said that many a truth is spoken in jest. I hope to aim for that and occasionally hit it in the year to come.

Until then? Hasta la vista, baby. But just for now. As Arnold said on more than one occasion…

I’ll be back.

Hi there. Today we answer a few of your questions you’ve been kind enough to Ask Bing. Today’s batch includes a question that is without doubt the most disgustingly amusing I have seen during my time here on this digital planet. You may want to check it out. It’s the kind of thing that makes you see your problems in a whole new perspective.

Oh and by the way. We’re working on getting the technology in place so that you can comment on these Ask Bings in situ, but until then, why not use this space? Operators are standing by.

Elsewhere on this site, there are two related matters of interest. The first is a huge endeavor whipped up by the Editors of Fortune Magazine, entitled The 101 Dumbest Moments in Business, 2007. Just about anybody who pulled something dumb during the year just past is included, from the toy makers of China to the makers of M&Ms and Snickers, who were planning, until persuaded otherwise, to use animal products in their candies, to Hugo Chavez, who may not be as dumb as he sometimes behaves.

Paris Hilton is in there, for her efforts to trademark her slogan — “That’s hot,” as is Southwest Airlines (LUV), for refusing to allow a Hooters waitress in a perfectly appropriate denim mini-skirt and sweater to board a plane in San Diego, thereby becoming the first airline to punish a passenger for what a gate agent had on his mind. There is more, and then some.

My personal favorite of the year is Keith Richards, who seems to have snorted the cremains of his dad. He’s just one of the millionaires that are discovered in the act of terminal dumbness, many of whom got big severance checks for theirs. Check it out.

Reading the act, it occurred to me that, you know, there but for the grace of God goeth yours truly. This generated the second revelatory item that might be of interest to you. It’s my own 10 Dumbest Moments of 2007, which I believe is posted close-by. Most of mine are the everyday idiocies one gets into during a year on the job. Others are slightly more personal.

I didn’t include the really small stuff. Like, last month I went to an ATM and got $300 because I was going on a trip and needed cab fare, airport reading material, and so forth. It’s amazing how fast $300 can go nowadays. This particular $300 went especially fast, in fact, because $200 of it was in $50 bills, a fact I didn’t notice until I had paid a cab driver what I thought were two $20s and then observed that I had exactly $60 less than I thought. Boy, did I feel like a moron. But I didn’t write about that this time, because mere clerical errors aren’t as interesting as errors of judgment or plain, blind dumbness that results in humiliation or other punishment of some kind.

Anyhow, I put them on display today for all of you to see if you care to. And, as it often happens around here a lot of the time, my next thought is to wonder what you, dear browser, might have up your collective sleeve. Do anything unalterably dumb this year? Get caught and spanked after having done so? Or… not? Want to share it with the rest of us?

Come on. You’ll feel better after you do. I know WE will.

Well, we had our Holiday party last night and it was the best one ever. There are several metrics one can use to measure such things, including the number of pigs-in-a-blanket consumed (875, not counting 3 that were dropped on the floor and found afterwards), empty bottles of booze collected (still being counted), the number of phone calls and e-mails afterwards (increase of 48.6% over last year), the guest count (flat to sightly up over prior year), among others.

A great party is designated by several qualities:

• Density: the gathering must clot properly and be difficult to negotiate at a certain point not too distant from its inception;
• Volume: it must become incredibly difficult to hear anything substantive. This leads to increased flow as people get tired of trying to conduct “real” conversation and move themselves to new locations;
• Implosion: last night at 7 PM, an hour after the official commencement, those aware of this phenomenon could hear the deep, virtually inaudible sound of the party exploding inward, the sign that it had truly commenced in earnest;
• Stickiness: A party that gets hot but only stays hot for a short time is not a really successful one. The great festivals implode and stay alight for hours, as people complain about the noise, the discomfort, the difficulty of getting to the bar, but still remain on location, sucking up fun, rubbing elbows and other things.
• Length: Perhaps the ultimate measurement of success. This year’s event clocked in at 3.1 hours, which left me as limp afterwards as a wet noodle, and was fully .6 hours more lengthy than that of the year before.

All these metrics improve upon those of 2006, which was itself a record year in all regards. I would now insert a number of amusing graphs, but don’t know how to do so technically in this format. Efforts are now continuing to get that job done in 2008. In the meantime, you can watch my holiday party advice video here.

So this assassin masquerading as an opinion columnist calls me from a very large newswire that would be well known to you. I’m not going to say what it is because the person in question has no responsibility whatsoever to the truth and is picked up on all the aggregators.

“Hello,” he says, “This is Harvey Brayer,” which of course is not his name, although it might be, “and I’d like to know if your company has a comment on the new acquisition you made recently of Barfinger Industries,” which of course is not the question he asked, but you get the picture.

“New acquisition?” I say to the guy. The first thing I notice is the way he says his name, like he’s very impressed with it and I should be too. I’ve heard his name. I’m not impressed. “We made the acquisition of Barfinger in September. That’s not really what I would call new.”

“Well,” says Brayer, “it’s new to me and I’m just getting around to it, so I’d like a comment.” Then he proceeds to lay out a question that is clearly based on a horrendous set of assumptions that we would fiercely contest.

“I’ll get back to you with something rather formal on that,” I tell the guy. “Do you have any other questions for me about the deal?”

“Nothing I need to ask YOU about,” he sort of snarls, “Perhaps you don’t know me, but I’m leading expert on this sort of thing,” he adds.

“I know who you are,” I reply. “I’ll get back to you in a couple of hours.”

The thing about people in business is that we’re businesslike. Somebody like this guy asks us a question and we actually try to give him an honest answer in real time. So a few of us get together, including our General Counsel, and give him a lengthy, detailed and truthful response, not necessarily one he would agree with, coming at it with a formed opinion loaded with animus, but one that should probably be taken seriously, since he asked for it.

I’m going to cut to the chase here. Yesterday the piece appeared online, at the site I will not disclose but whose name is widely trusted among sober and discerning web cruisers. It is not only horrendously hostile, it is also wrong in perhaps a dozen places, and our response, which took a few hours of everybody’s time to formulate, is reduced to half a sentence, tossed away at the end of a paragraph somewhere in the middle.

Now, it is true that the column of this wheezebag in question is clearly labeled as Opinion on the site. There is even a disclaimer. But that kind of stuff means very little on the web. We were lucky. By the end of the day only one major aggregator had picked it up and run it somewhere on a crowded front page. But lies and truth live cheek by jowl on the Internet. There is no filter for the facts. There is no editor to complain to. No corrections are issued. And contrary to what you might think, given the strange, garbled nature of information in the digital realm, everybody sort of believes everything they read. Why not? It’s not manipulated the way it is in the analog world! It’s out there where the truth can get to you unfettered and free! Except, you know… so can lies.

This week I got an email from an old friend/adversary of mine who has worked for his newspaper for about a generation. The man was a terror. When he got onto something, he was like a junkyard pooch, wouldn’t let it go, dug around it, pulled it out of the earth, trotted around with it like a trophy. Besieged his poor targets with incessant phone calls and requests for clarification and comment. What a pain he was. He’s taking a buyout at the end of the year. And boy, am I going to miss him.

He will be replaced by one more citizen journalist, online bloviator or professional aggregator with a funny hat who kind of gets things the way they sort of think they might be or wish they were in order to stick it to somebody. My only wish is that I’m out of this game by the time the whole thing, like the tower of Babel long ago, comes to its inevitable destination.

Then I can just do this full time and finally and completely become one of them. What a relief that will be!

Yesterday Wall Street threw a hissy fit when the Fed only cut the federal funds rate by a quarter of a point. The market took a header. People were disappointed that money wasn’t quite cheap enough to kick start the deal machine. Deals are how lawyers and investment bankers and security analysts and brokers and the entire gangling financial mega-organism of mercantile capitalism gets paid and keeps things interesting. So everybody was very disappointed. The specter of recession looms. Loans are too hard to get. We need to loan money, whether the recipient can really pay it back or not! No, wait. That’s what got us into this situation in the first place. Still, what a bunch of party poopers at the Fed! We wanted the jumbo cut. And we got the weenie.

Some analysts wonder about the wisdom of any interest rate decrease at all. “I think the Fed is prescribing aspirin for a cancer patient,” one told the New York Post, which in case you don’t know it now owns the Wall Street Journal so it’s time to stop making fun of it’s credibility, probity and wit. “In particular,” the analyst said in regards to even a small rate cut such as this one, “it causes the dollar to decline in value and contributes to rising oil prices, which fuel inflation.”

I’m not an economist, but I can speak with similar lack of precision and certitude. I believe that inflation, where every dollar we make is worth less and less, is worse than recession, even though recession is very bad indeed. The failed economies of the world, however, are the ones where money is worthless and people start trading in vodka or meat, no one can afford to drive their cars to the stores they can’t afford to shop in. 

Now, nobody is pumping for a recession. That would be terrible, too, of course, in different ways. But one can certainly understand why the Fed would move with caution to try to balance these two dangers with some feeling of care and trepidation.

Wall Street, for its part, wants what it wants when it wants it, and what it wanted was a nice greasing, to help more money flow down the pipeline. More in the pipeline means more cash for each individual at every limb of the gigantic money tree. Certainly, that would be good for Wall Street. But would it be good for us? And by us, I mean We?

I know the impact that being a publicly traded stock has on a company. A few years ago, my former corporation was in the grip of a bunch of greedy, liver-spotted executives who were worried about the value of their stock options. It came to their attention that the enterprise would be rewarded by Wall Street, short term, for selling one of its most valuable assets, one that produced excellent cash flow but little in the way of bottom line earnings. They sold the asset and each made a bundle, as did all the chattering the monkeys in the money tree. Within a couple of years, it became clear, however, that the firm was actually dead in the water without that high-margin, cash flow engine. One quarter, the 100 year old firm, a famous name in American business, almost didn’t make payroll. And it’s gone now.

But Wall Street was happy with the transaction, and many more the Company made just like it. And for a time, certain individuals did get a righteous, leafy payout.

Wall Street has certain demands: growth, buzz, action. Organizations, even great ones, sometimes thrive on stability and stasis, churning out products and profits reliably if not spectacularly. Wall Street drives the decision-making process at every company listed on its exchanges. It rewards those every day who heed its agendas, and punishes the offenders.

Would a huge rate cut be good for you and me? Maybe. Maybe not. One thing’s for sure. Down there in the shadow of George Washington, they’ve already made up their minds.

For a few years now, I have rented a small shack down by a harbor not far from New York City. I keep stuff there. It’s a relic of a time past when I was sort of crashing on my own. At the end of the driveway there’s one of those collections of mailboxes you see by the marinas of the world, a bunch of tin containers with the little metal flags the mailman puts up when he’s left something inside. 

For a long time now, though, my life has taken me in other directions, and I don’t spend a lot of time in my little one-room studio/shack by the water. Two years ago, I informed all of the vendors and merchants and friends and others who might send me snail mail that I had a new, primary address.

There was no way I could get to everybody though. So when I do get out there every few weeks, or months, actually, I find my mailbox stuffed with junk. There’s the occasional item of actual interest, but 99% of the contents are from entities that are soliciting me in one form or another. Catalogs. Missives from Chrysler, from whom I purchased a vehicle three years ago and who wants me to be its love slave. Continual pleadings from organizations that want to save one thing or another. And solicitations from Chase. And solicitations from Chase. And solicitations from Chase. And…

JP Morgan Chase (JPM) is a banking institution, as you know. I used to have an account there, but for one reason or another I moved on to another institution. It’s no better or worse. It’s just nearer to my office by about eight yards. So I go there.

Selling people credit cards must be one of Chase’s high-margin businesses, because once they get your address they never let go. At the beginning, perhaps 1500 mailings ago, I found it kind of amusing. I’d go to the mailbox and there would be my catalog from Frontgate, and my multiple entreaties from the World Wildlife Federation, and about eight envelopes from Chase. Zero percent financing! Important financial information enclosed! Some had return addresses announcing who the junk mail had come from. Others were more clever and showed no leg on the outside. I would rip them up and toss them. I don’t need any more credit cards. Isn’t it the rampant, indiscriminate granting of credit that’s gotten the financial institutions of the world into so much trouble, anyhow? After all this time, wasn’t it clear that I had no interest in their stupid credit cards?

And still they came, like water bugs through a rotten floorboard, again and again, promising all the good things life has to offer with a big 0% on just about every one. And I would rip them up. And still they came.

Which of us understands the inner workings of our own soul? I know that I, like Hamlet, have always but incompletely known myself. So I’m at a loss to explain to you why the constant influx of mailings from Chase works on me the way it does. The truth is, at this point in time, what feels like thousands and thousands of wasted intrusions later, they really and truly enrage me. I have gone from bemusement to annoyance and then way, way past that. I see red. I fling them across the room. I curse the organization that cannot comprehend that five years of silence means that if I am interested in getting a credit card from Chase, or opening and account at Chase, or taking out a loan from Chase, that I will friggin’ GO TO A CHASE BANK!

I guess the final straw for me was this past week. I am moving out of that little shack because I want my stuff closer by than it is now, and I have very little use for a getaway to which I cannot get away. I am also moving to get away from Chase. So far they haven’t found my new address. I am hoping that continues.

Perhaps the last mailing I will receive, if God is in heaven and smiling upon me, is the one I just dealt with. It was one of those bogus checks that shady merchants send to entice you into a paying relationship with them. It was made out to me at my old address, dated November 20, 2007, in the amount of $9.25. That’s nine dollars and twenty-five cents. After all the years we’ve spent together? That’s all?

At any rate, I’m not too proud to cash a check for $9.25, particularly one I receive from an old business acquaintance for doing nothing. Curious, I turned the check over and read the message on the back. It said:

“By cashing this check, I agree to a Trial Offer in Hot-Line and understand that the $59.99 semi-annual fee will automatically be charged to my Chase credit card account unless I cancel my membership by calling 1-877-658-8950 before the end of the Trial Offer period. I understand that I will also be charged every six months at the then-current fee and must cancel to avoid future fees and receive any applicable refund.”

A negative option. Have you ever tried to cancel anything with a large institution? It’s like trying to quit the CIA. That’s beside the point. A check for $9.25 to entice you to enlist in a service that costs $120 a year. I don’t know about you, but I don’t pay yearly fees for my credit cards. So the generous offer of nine bucks now sits torn to shreds in my wastepaper basket. It felt good to tear it up. The pleasure was momentary, though. Because down in the depths of my heart, wherever that may be, I know one thing for certain. No matter where I live… no matter what I do…

They’ll be back.

A few really interesting questions today, one in particular that takes me off my usual turf and into a more emotional subject for most people, a crucial, transformative business issue often confused with a personal matter: divorce. There’s an old saying that a person who represents him or herself in court has a fool for a client. In this situation, that goes double, I think. See if you agree.

Tomorrow I will discuss the feeling of being stalked by a large financial institution. By then, I should have received at least one and perhaps two additional solicitations in the mail. It’s an interesting feeling, like being held in the grip of a fate that you cannot change or avoid. I don’t like it. But I will enjoy telling you about it.

See you then.

Regard the headline above. It is an example of a form of speech that is ubitquitous and amusing. It’s called the Complisult. It is also referred to in some venues as the Insompliment, but that seems less elegant to me.

As one would guess, the Complisult is an insult masked as a compliment. “I am truly impressed by how intelligent you sounded in your presentation,” is a good example. The recipient often fails to recognize the underlying dig until well after he or she has actually thanked the complisulter.

While existence of the complisult has been known for several years, it does not register in any significant manner on Google (GOOG), with most references of import dating back several years. Many believe it was invented in Los Angeles, where the distinction between beloved friend and hated competitor is often wafer thin, and people often say exactly what they don’t mean for a living.

I believe it may be time to consider the complisult as a major tool in corporate communication. ”You’re doing a great job as CEO, Jack,” one might say to the new chief executive. “People used to under-estimate you, but now they just fear you.” 

Obvious applications exist in the political realm as well. “It’s incredible how you stand tall with so many people who disrespect you, sir,” might be the kind of thing that would make Mr. Bush feel good for a while… but not really.  

In addition to being useful, complisults are fun. The trick, I think, to being a great complisulter lies in the ability to befuddle. Masters of the genre can actually complisult someone in a manner that doesn’t truly register for hours afterward. The complisultee knows something is slightly awry about the statement that has been made to him, and worries away at it the way that a dog will gnaw on a wounded paw until, after some time, the insult beneath the compliment emerges.

That is the art at its highest level, of course. Most are far less adroit. “Have you lost weight?” to a person extruding out of his or her jeans is a blunt instrument that’s hard to dodge. But “You’re not as evil as everybody says!” might take a McKinsey consultant days to decipher.

I offer this in full humility as a tool for all of us to consider as we move forward down the road to success and power. I know you guys will appreciate it. A lot of you are not as dumb as you look.