I’d like to thank President Obama for reminding a boring, sober nation that the solution to a business impasse is very often a glass of something cold and frosty, with a head on it that messes up your own.

We now live in a world where if a guy has a drink over business, he or she has to be carted off to the sanitarium, or at least the Company’s Employee Assistance Program. The ruling assumption is that liquor and serious business do not mix. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, it may be possible that one cannot attend to serious affairs while completely sober. Neglect of this concept may be the reason why we’re all in such bad shape. The sober people are running the system. Let’s bring back the drunkards.

Rome ruled the world while intoxicated on wine. Grant beat Lee on a quart of whiskey a day. When people complained of Grant’s drinking, Lincoln asked them to find out what was his beverage of choice so he could give it to the rest of his generals. Churchill we already know about. And on a much smaller scale, the guys who ran my corporation’s sales department in the 80s were a total bunch of friendly rummys. Our top sales guy was a case in point. I used to smell the gin coming out of his pores in the elevator going up to our floor in the morning. Sales grew at about 12% that year.

Mr. Obama was faced with a serious problem that goes to the core of our nation’s concerns. He had himself admittedly done nothing to ease the tension, and in fact had made a comment that ratcheted the whole thing up a notch. In any prior Administration, there would have been statements and meetings and a lot of positioning and much sober thought. Instead, yesterday they all had beer. The President had Bud Light, which is owned by a foreign corporation now but does still have an all-American brand identity. There were also reportely peanuts and pretzels. Everybody concerned said it was a productive meeting and that they looked forward to more.

Naturally. Business and the right amount of booze equals productivity. The sooner we implement that equation, the sooner we’ll be back on the road to growth and recovery.

As usual in the internet space, nobody can do anything without being torn a new one. Example #1 for the week: Yahoo (YHOO) and Microsoft (MSFT) making nice. Lord, from the resulting bloggery you would think that Paris had just fallen to the Nazis. Jason Calacanis, founder of Mahalo and a webster guru par excellence, was perhaps the most dramatic, declaring that “Yahoo committed seppuku today,” and going on to say that, 

The once proud warrior of the internet space laid down its sword,  knelt at the feet of Microsoft and gutted itself today. There was no honor in this death, it was one brought by the shame of losing to  Google and a lack of faith in one’s ability to compete in the space they created. To be clear, Yahoo didn’t need to do this deal,  Microsoft did. Ultimately Yahoo will look back at this moment as the second — and perhaps fatal –mistake in their epic history.

Now, Jason may be wrong and he may be right. I do know that the coming together of YHOO and MSFT creates a search entity with about 30% market share. You know who has most of the other 70% (GOOG). So you can see a certain rationale to why the two upstart behemoths wanted to do it.

Still and again, you can’t belch in this particular business sector without people yelling at you. And after thinking about it, you know what? I agree with them. I think any attempt to build scale against the Goog is a misconception at best, and a dangerous misstep at worst.

Society is drifting in a very clear direction. We’re moving toward a day when most of our random thoughts, our videos, our music, our pictures of our vacations, graduations and holiday gatherings, our business plans, our poetry and our daily communications with each other — all will be in a gigantic cloud that floats like a giant group mind above and around us. We will be like one gigantic beehive, our collective consciousness gathered for our convenience in one centralized location, the cloud.

Who will own that cloud? You know who (GOOG).  I find that comforting, don’t you? Well? Don’t you?

Even as I was writing the last post, in which, as you recall, my poor blog was teetering on the verge of utter collapse, the forces of Goodness were hard at work dealing with the problem. And now, as you see, we are back in all our resplendent glory.

Thanks be to the powers above and below for their swift attention to this problem, which even I admit is a very small wattle on the pockmarked, festering surface of existence. 

Now let’s get back to the real issue of the day: How about the new Ben Bernanke? What a showman! Out and about and selling the new, friendlier Fed? I’m lovin’ it! How about you?

Just a short note to say that no, there’s nothing wrong with your computer. My blog seems to be kind of broken. The margins are weird. The headlines are reduced to little blue squibs dancing in a sea of confusion. The margins are messed up too.

I believe that somewhere there are stevedores rolling up their sleeves and digging into the bowels of the infrastructure to fix my blog. I hope so, at any rate. There are fewer and fewer stevedores around to handle all the freight that still flows in and out of the information harbor these days. My poor blog may just sit there for a while, tilting to one side, leaking oil and slimy residue until somebody comes along and takes it in hand. Until then, it is what it is.

Have you noticed people using that phrase more and more these days? “It is what it is,” they say. It seems to have replaced “There you go,” as a place-filler for times when nothing can be done and there’s nothing really left to say. Both phrases really annoy me. Now I think I know why. I hate it when things are out of my hands. I’m sure you do too.

If, on the other hand, this message is now being properly displayed in the usual bloggalicious splendor, then all I have to say is… never mind! And thanks, guys who have already fixed it!

I was at a party in Northern California over the weekend. It was a very good party. These folks are expert drinkers. They bend to the task year-in, year-out, weekend after weekend, regardless of the season. Fortunately, they’re merry drunks and like each other’s company. They’ve gone through it all together. Marriages. Divorces. Triumphs and troubles with kids. And most of all, the inflations and explosions of the various tech bubbles that have swept their world over the last 20 years or so.

Although you wouldn’t know it from all the good-natured laughter and noise, on Saturday night, at least 25% of the room is now unemployed. Some are journalists who have been laid off from their newpapers or magazines. Others were technology officers of companies that have expired in the current red tide. A pretty fair number were entrepreneurs who have been crunched by the temporary fall of venture capitalism.

Which brings me to a conclusion I’ve reached in this post MySpace, post YouTube, pre-Facebook and Twitter transactional universe. Forget the occasional Ponzi scheme. Venture capitalism may be the greatest scam going.

Not long ago I asked an investment banking friend of mine how many VC deals he knew of in the tech sector over the last ten years or so. A thousand, he said. And how many are still around and doing business? I inquired. Three? he replied. This may be just Darwin at work. But I don’t think so. It’s something baked into the DNA of the venture capitalism game. Look at the model:

• I have money, which I give to you to pursue your little idea.
• You develop your idea to the point where it can be sold to somebody who has none.
• During that time, I can do whatever I want with you to grow your bulb into a tulip I can sell.
• I then sell your pretty flower, take all my money back and then some. The guys who grew the thing get a little taste, but are for the most part left holding the bag.
• The tiny, wafer-thin notion wilts inside the big hothouse that acquired it, generating the requirement for a massive write-down.
• I’m still rich even though nobody else involved in this is.

This brings me to Matt, my pal who threw the party. He’s an entrepreneur. His business partner was there, too. They’re both unemployed. They had a very good little business going for a while, though. Something about brokering space to companies that require it. Whatever. Classic tasty concept. VCs came along. Snapped them up. They were rich for a while, on paper. But they had to work and couldn’t really monetize their supposed “wealth.”

After a while, of course, the inevitable happened. The VCs sold their company to a nice corporation that wanted to pair what they do with some software applications that they had also just acquired. Their VC walked away with the money. My friend stayed on. It was, in his mind at least, still his baby.

“The problem was that the software they made us use wasn’t scaleable,” he told me sadly over his sixteenth beer. To be fair, there was that pound of paella we each consumed to soak it up. “We had to use it… but it wasn’t… scaleable,” he repeatedly sadly. “And the whole thing  just… stopped working. Ah, well.”

I don’t have to tell you the only one who walked away with all the dough from that sad story. Whatever its current difficulties, let it never be said that capitalism is bad business for the guys holding the checkbook.

I always like to end the week with a laugh, and I got a good one out of a Reuters headline this morning. I don’t know if it’s really funny. But I found it hilarious for some reason. Here it is:

Business Users Force Twitter to Change Direction; Company Now Sees Way to Make Money

I have this image in my mind of the guys at Twitter sitting around and scratching their heads. “Boy,” says the first Twitter executive, “we’ve really got a great thing going on… it’s just that personally, I can’t see a way for us to make any money at it.”

“I know!” says Twitter #2. “I mean, we’ll all make a killing when we sell the place and retire at the age of 14, but in order to do that we have to produce a spreadsheet.”

“What’s a spreadsheet?” says Twitter #3.

“It’s, like, this thing that tells the giant corporation that will buy us and then lose their shirts why they won’t lose their shirts if they buy us.”

“Oh,” says Twitter #3. They all sit around for a while. And then it happens.

“I know!” says Twitter #1. “I know how we can make money!” Everybody gets very excited, of course. “We’re not going to be a social network anymore!”

“We’re not?” says everybody in the room except #1.

“No!” he replies. “We’re going to reposition ourselves as a communications network!”

“Oh!” they all cry. There’s a short pause. “And that will make money?” says a small voice that could be Twitter #3.

“Yes,” says #1.

And that was that. In one giant clap of conceptual thunder, Twitter goes from being an immensely popular social phenomenon that has no idea how to monetize itself into the next great profitable start up.

Not a bad way to end the week.

There’s an interesting article in The Economist this week. It’s called What Went Wrong With Economics. “In the public mind,” the editors write, “an arrogant profession has been humbled. Though economists are still at the centre of the policy debate… their pronouncements are viewed with more skepticism than before. The profession itself is suffering from guilt and rancour.”

You’ll have to excuse the cute misspellings. The Economist is headquartered in London.

The magazine then goes on to offer a spirited defense of the profession for which it is named. There are lengthy critiques of macro-economics and financial economics, with very salient suggestions as to how those disciplines can be rethought and re-established as credible enterprises.

This exercise, ironically, comes straight on the heels of the stunning discovery of an ancient manuscript now on display at the Barfinger Museum in Minneapolis. This document was unearthed during an archeological dig in what was once Crete, and it provides a unique perspective on how a civilization that formed the bedrock of our culture handled similar crises.

The artifact in question contains a rather lengthy discourse, on papyrus. It was written by ancient Cretins whose names are now shrouded in mystery (much as the unnamed editors of The Economist). The article — if one may call something so very old – is entitled, “The Future of Bird Entrails as a Predictive Tool.”  It seems to have been written after a particularly bad harvest that plunged the nation into a protracted famine.

Translation is difficult, since there are now few who speak the antique tongue, but the burden of the argument is clear, and summarized by one interesting passage. “If the study of bird entrails as a broad discipline deserves a robust defense,” it states, “so does the entire oracle paradigm.” It continues:

“Too many people, especially in Greece, Troy, Egypt and the surrounding lesser civilizations,  equate mistakes made by certain oracles with a failure of bird entrails as a predictive tool. Their logic seems to be that if oracles, seers and other supposed soothsayers got things wrong, then civil authorities can do better. That is a false — and dangerous — conclusion.”

The writer then goes on to look at the main types of entrails then in use and both critiques and supports the employment of each, from the macro-entrails of larger carrion birds to the smaller and slightly less messy entrails of doves, sparrows and even junk birds, like pigeons, the latter being most useful in determining the price of hog snouts, which were then in short supply due to the Pelopennesian War.

The article concludes with an evocative statement with which no one in the profession at that time would disagree, I think. “In the end, those who study bird entrails — just like astrologers and bone-casters –  are social scientists, trying to understand the real world. And the current crisis has changed that world.”

Study is now being done to ascertain how that profession faced this crisis in confidence so long ago, and what lessons might be gleaned by their counterparts today.

Today we offer a template that should be serviceable for all earnings-related stories, be they generated by a security analyst, reporter or blogger.

————————————————–

July/August __, 2009 

BARFINGER CORPORATION SHOWS IMPROVED EPS GROWTH; DISAPPOINTS STREET

By Hortense Wazoo, staff reporter (or 17-year old economics student hired by the investment bank to write scary things to befuddle adults for a while)

The Barfinger Corporation today reported earnings that, because they were better than expected, threw all the people whose job it is to predict such things into a complete tizzy, confusing everybody and leaving a nasty taste in our collective mouth. 

Revenue, earnings per share and cash flow were all essentially flat from year to year, a tremendous achievement in this economic climate, according to analysts, but one that might not be repeated unless it is, which would once again surprise people concerned about a dead cat bounce or green shoots that possibly could turn yellow overnight unless sufficiently watered. These  concerns have a majority of observers scratching their heads and other less savory areas of interest.

This aura of doubt could land Barfinger in the heavy rough, not the kind you find on American golf courses, but the real nasty stuff you encounter at, say, Turnberry. 

[NOTE to writers: The latter is a mere placeholder for the fictional Barfinger Corporation, which is in golfing supplies and horse collars. Look for a possible amusing twist on the actual entity's field of operations here, as in “finds itself in oily waters” for an energy company or “may be facing some serious static” for a media enterprise. A full list of approved cute references in this regard is available upon request.]

Even as Barfinger has been hurt by problems in its sector [again, a complete list of designated problems and their associated catchphrases may be downloaded; they include “plunging ad market,” “collapsing mortgage sector,” and “beleaguered banking institutions,” among others], it always could rely on hats, flags and beaverboard.  Those businesses, of course, are all showing increased signs of wear and tear (particularly if it’s a garment-related company; if it’s ice cream, it can be said to be “melting down” and so forth).

ACTUAL REPORTED NUMBERS GO HERE, I.E.: The Company produced $___ million of operating income on revenue of $__ billion, with a significant swing in Earnings Per Share. While this shows major improvement from the fourth quarter of 2008 and first quarter of 2009, everybody was looking for more while expecting less.

“They did pretty well given the total collapse of mercantile capitalism during the quarter,” said Charley Bluefin, an analyst with Dewey, Cheatham and Howe, the investment banking concern we always go to when we need our basic assumptions articulated by an ostensibly disinterested source. “But we’re going to downgrade them anyhow, since we have a sell rating out on them and really hate to look wrong.”

PLACE FOR UNSOURCED SPECULATION AND OPINION MASQUERADING AS ANALYSIS, I.E.: Rising financial distress in the associated sector/global economic situation/aroma of surrounding community is likely to damp demand for whatever it is they do. And a growing wave of bankruptcies could mean that existing long term assumptions might be possibly impacted, or could be, if they were. [N.B.: MAINTAIN CONDITIONAL TENSE.] In fact, deals with a number of Barfinger’s suppliers show that the economic downturn is placing all business related to its operations in mortal danger. Many are not expected to live, or if they do, to require a respirator for years to come.

Barfinger is by far the biggest supplier of ___________ to the entire world. Being a leader puts it in the greatest possible danger, and will, it is thought by some who will remain unnamed, bring the company to its knees by next ________ (pick day of the week). Those percentages will likely rise this year, as other undesignated stuff that bolsters our assumptions declines.

For some reason, Barfinger’s stock went down __% in early trading immediately following this report.

[STOCK SYMBOL; REPORTER CONTACT INFORMATION]

—————————————————-

As promised on Friday, here is a generic earnings release for use by every public company during this particular earnings season.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
JULY/AUGUST __, 2009

YOUR CORPORATION HERE POSTS SECOND QUARTER RESULTS

NEW YORK/LA/CHICAGO/PETALUMA –  Your Corporation Here  (STOCK SYMBOL) today reported results for the second quarter ended June 30, 2009.

BOILERPLATE QUOTE FROM TOP EXECUTIVE OFFICER: ”These are tough times,” said Bob Boberts, Chairman of Your Corporation Here. “But tough times call for tender chickens and ours are the most fat and juicy in what is, right now, a very lean and stringy sector. There’s no question that there will be winners and losers before the economy starts to shake and bake again. We’re planning on being among the winners and Ned, Ed and the rest of the operating team are in place to deliver on that promise.”

BOILERPLACE QUOTE FROM TOP OPERATING OFFICER: “We are pleased to report improvement from the first quarter in most key financial measures,” said Ned Nedwards, Chief Operating Officer. “While year-to-year comparisons are still extraordinarily gnarly, we are particularly pleased with the modest growth in EPS/cash flow/kidney beans that we achieved through a combination of cost containment and creative accounting. We remain convinced that we have seen the bottom of this downturn and, while the top of the upturn is still going sideways, the future of our industry is bright and shiny and our place in it secure.”
 

Second Quarter 2009 Results

Revenues for the second quarter of 2009 totaled $___ billion, down from/only slightly greater than the $___ billion for the same quarter last year. The decline/small increase was due to really lousy economic conditions suffered by everybody, you dummies.  The decline/sad little incline in revenue was partially offset by the elimination of complimentary non-dairy coffee creamer in all offices nationwide.

Earnings before intimidation, depression and aggravation (“EBITDA”) for the second quarter of 2009 was $____ million compared with $___ million for last year’s second quarter, a decline that was mirrored not only by other corporations in the Company’s business sector but in the entire meta-system that makes up the nexus of corporate capitalism worldwide.  Operating income was $____ million versus $___ million for the same quarter last year, for much the same reasons. In both cases, these results were were partially offset by cancellation of the Company’s annual “We’re Doing Great!” offsite in Sanibel Island.

Reported net earnings were $___ million, or $.__ per increasingly diluted share. While this compared somewhat disfavoably to the same period in 2008, the fact that there WERE earnings probably places the Company in a more advantageous position than many of the investment banks, newspapers and websites that today are reporting on this earnings announcement.  

First Half 2009 Results

N.B. You may put whatever you like in this space. Nobody either reads about or cares about the results of the first half, a fact that does not mitigate the need for stuff to fill this space. Possible selections include sections of Tom Peters and Robert Waterman’s In Search of Excellence, and the opening chapters of any book by Dickens.

Contact:  Your PR Person Here (c/o either the local tavern or mental institution), e-mail, phone, etc.

*   *   *   *   *

I’ll be back tomorrow with a similar template for reporters and analysts who are covering earnings.

It’s earnings season again, as you may have noticed, and we’re into the whole crazy song-and-dance, this time hopped up on a nice mix of optimism, desperation, greed and fear. In short, business as usual.

Those who look for improvement have reason to feel somewhat satisfied. The shorts have plenty to work with too.

So here you have today’s news, where Google (GOOG) reported an 18% increase in net income off a 3% rise in revenue — this during the worst economy since Rome salted the fields of Carthage. The reaction was, of course, muted. “Google earnings beat expectations,” wrote paidcontent.org, then added, “but revenue growth keeps slowing.”

Of course revenue growth is slowing. At this point, a company whose revenue is down 5% can tell its investors that it’s kicking the doors off the barn. Be that as it may. Everybody keeps writing about each individual earnings statement as if Company X should somehow have avoided living in the same atmosphere we all breathe.

When things turn around and the economy comes back, the coverage will shift, naturally. Then every headline will cite Company X’s amazing turnaround in revenues and earnings per share, and laud its senior management for the excellence of its vision and size of its boni.

It’s summer. Everybody wants to sit back and wait for things to change in some meaningful way or other, and in the meantime have a sandwich and a little snooze. So I thought I would offer a simple template for reporting companys, bloggers, financial journalists and analysts to use so we can all ignore the boring details — all of which are utterly driven by the marketplace, almost none of which are really anybody’s fault.

First I’ll provide a press release that, if altered with taste and discretion, may be suitable for printing by blogs, online news sources and wires verbatim. Then I’ll offer a short, subsequent article for those who report on such things in old-style print outlets, webzines, aggregators and online newsletters. Just plug in the numbers and there you’ll be, ready to hop on the phone and market yourself to CNBC or head out to McGonigle’s for a little liquid refreshment, not necessarily in that order.

Come to think of it, that sounds like a bit of work. I think I’ll get to it on Monday. Let’s take the rest of the day off.

There were no big deals. There weren’t even very many interesting conversations. The frustration of the media who cover the event was palpable. There was so little information and activity, in fact, that there wasn’t even much for them to make up. They hate that.

The two biggest items to emerge were that everybody liked to talk about Twitter but nobody could figure out whether it had a business model, including the guy who runs it… and that Warren Buffett looks terrific on the golf course, where he was paired with Bill Gates.

That’s what the business universe has come to at this point. Gates and Buffett playing golf. Nobody doing anything much else.

One final aspect of the conference is most intriguing, however. A pal of mine who was there made this observation: “You know,” he said, “about half of the people there were out of a job.”  He then rattled off the names of about half a dozen megalithic players who dominated the Jurrasic era before our current ice age descended. You know them. You read about them for decades. None of them are working. All of them were present just as if they were still masters of their various universes. 

I’m not going to mention their names because even in limbo they are more powerful than actual, working executives, far fewer of whom, it appears, now have the time to attend this particular once-seminal event.

I went to my favorite business restaurant this morning for breakfast. It was relatively full. “Business looks good,” I said to Steve, who runs the room.

“It’s weird,” he said. “Breakfast is good. Lunch is hanging in there okay. It’s hard to justify staying open for dinner when you get six people the whole night.”

I had a cup of coffee. Before long, my companion showed up. Then, after a while, our third guy, her colleague, materialized, too. The 7/8ths rule applied, as it always does at breakfast. Seven parts chitchat. One part business.  It went fine. Just because the recovery is in the flat part of the L doesn’t mean you can’t sell stuff.  It just has to be better, faster and a little bit cheaper right now is all.

The check came. We all looked at it sitting mutely in the middle of the table. “How’s your T&E going?” she said to her buddy across the linen divide, just by way of making conversation, you know. “I’m over,” he said.

“I came in under for the year, but only because I didn’t do anything between January and March for obvious reasons,” she added. Those months coincided with a massive reorganization of her company, a fact known to all of us around the table. ”The worst part of the whole thing is sitting there with somebody you’re taking out, and terrified that they may order an appetizer,” she said.

“I take all my people out to the Hamburger Shack,” he replied with great professional gravity. ”I just tell them, hey, if you want to have lunch, that’s where we’re going. I tried to move to the new panini place across the street for a little while but it kicked me up over the $40 limit.”

“Last week I went out with somebody and I figured what the hell, and we both had appetizers and everything,” she said rather wistfully.

Good Lord, I thought. I picked up the check. It wasn’t that much. Breakfast, you know. One course and you’re out.

You may have noticed that as our quality of technology improves, things work less. For instance, I have an LG phone that quite stupidly has no input for a headset. Perhaps it’s not stupidity or their part or mine. Perhaps it was just optimism and irrational belief in Bluetooth. Whatever. That faith was ill-founded in this case. The Bluetooth never really worked. The phone goes from two bars to dead in a matter of minutes. I’m getting a new one this week. So it goes.

I’m sure you have your own stories of crashes, intermittent meltdowns, inexplicable corruptions in underlying code, abrupt failures of exciting, leading-edge hardware over time. But you rarely run into a product that immediately, spectacularly, flamboyantly, doesn’t do what it was supposed to do right out of the box. You have to take your hat off to that kind of thing, really.  There’s something pure about it.

So yesterday morning I was in San Francisco airport. They have a very good store there called Techshowcase. It’s what you think it is. Headphones. Protective gear for IPods, IPhones, laptops. Cables up the yinyang. Nice sales people who always say, “No problem,” when you say, “Thank you.”

Last year I purchased a cable/plug thang for my Macbook Pro there, so that I could keep my battery charged in flight. It looked simple. Plug the unit into the cigarette-lighter outlet in the seat. Plug the regular Mac power cable into the unit. Presto. Worked for a while. Then it didn’t. Turns out that it wasn’t the proper voltage for a Mac. Okay, they should have told me when I bought it, but I think they didn’t know either and honestly, no harm, no foul, we tried. Time to try again.

This time I asked specifically: What do you have to power a Mac in flight? And there it was — the Cobra Microport. Elegant little leather carrying case. Mac compatibility promised on the packaging. Equally simple. Plug the Cobra into the seat, plug the Mac into the Cobra. What could go wrong?

I got to my seat with that wonderful sense of anticipation that precedes the first use of any new piece of technology, no matter how simple. We got to 10,000 feet. The little bell went off that signals the point where electrical items can be turned on. The Captain made the announcement to that effect.

I unwrapped my little Cobra Microport. How neat, I thought.  A cigarette-lighter style plug. A cable. A little box with two inputs, a USB port, and a fuse. I carefully plugged the cigarette lighter plug into the provided cable. I respectfully introduced the other end of the cable into the jack on the Cobra Microport. I then plugged the unit into the DC jack in the seat.  In short succession, the following things happened:

• There was a loud popping sound;
• There was a large puff of smoke;
• A dramatic blue light flashed from the Cobra Microport;
• An acrid scent of burning rubber and metal rose about me;
• The little box glowed with the intensity of the blaze that raged within it;
• The Power light, which had shone a friendly green for about two seconds, turned red.
• That was that.

I had a car once that lost its transmission on the Mass Pike. Just dropped right out of it. Vehicle had only 6000 miles on it. That was disappointing, not to mention dangerous. I’ve had milk that was sour right out of the carton. I even had a blender that threw Margarita mix all over my kitchen once. But I’ve never had an piece of electronics quite literally explode the moment I plugged it in. Once I realized that my seat was not going melt with me in it, I have to say it was kind of funny, actually.

Of course, my computer ran out somewhere over St. Louis and I had to watch the movie. Race to Witch Mountain. Not bad, especially with the sound off.

This morning I begin the next phase of this interesting tale. The documentation on the Cobra Microport says I should send the object in and wait four to six weeks while they repair it. I don’t think so. I mean, we’ll just see about that.

How about you? Got any similar tales to tell? If so, start your engines. That is, if they do start. These days you never know.

I’ll be honest with you. I have mixed feelings now about this whole Bing thing. David Pogue in the New York Times gives Bing The Search Engine a nice little writeup in the paper today, saying that “in many ways, Bing is better.”

A few months ago, that would have been about me. Now it’s not. It’s about this other guy. I’m happy for him and all that. But what good is that doing for all the other Bings who used to be the Bings that people thought about when they thought about Bings?

My friends have said that this whole hyper-awareness of anything Bing will be a positive thing for this particular Bing. And it’s true… there are more of you commenting on my thoughts here in this space. The only problem is, your comments aren’t about anything germane to any other subject than Bing The Search Engine, which from now on I think I’ll just call BingTSE, or perhaps Bingtsey, for short. Your comments tend to be things like, “I hate the threading,” or “there are certain aspects of its algorithm I like.”

That’s very interesting, I am sure. But not to me. I mean, what does it do for me personally? Like you, that’s essentially first, second and third on the list of what I care about.

Most depressing to me, the original Bing, is what’s happened on Google. I feared it would be this way, and those fears have been realized. Before Bingtsey came along, if you searched “Bing” it was all about me and Bing Crosby. There was also a Chinese doctor who got his share of hits, and when Steve Bing acted up in some way he was there too. Now the whole front page is about boring stuff pertaining to Bingtsey and his pals. I don’t mean it’s boring in itself, but since it doesn’t pertain to me, Bing, it is ipso facto less interesting than anything that does.

More importantly, it doesn’t help my brand one bit.

I am somewhat mollified by a couple of things. First, I remember that little paper clip that Microsoft (MSFT) tried to introduce into our Windows universe a few years ago. He died. What was his name? Bob? Ned? Fred? Ed? Nobody misses him, in any event. Second, I never bet against Google. True, they are right now showing lack of competitive acumen by allowing their Bing search results to be dominated by their rival. But in the end, will Bingtsey oust the Goog (GOOG)? In other words, I know that I’m going to be around until they drag me kicking and screaming onto the obit page. Can we say the same for Bingtsey?

It’s just possible, in short, that in the end I may well be the last Bing standing. Time will tell. Meanwhile, I’m ready for Chrome. Perhaps you are too. I wonder what the guys who make the real, shiny stuff are feeling about it right about now.

President Obamawent to Russia and did a lot of interesting things, none of which was covered by the Russian media. No TV. No Radio. No Obama for the Russkies.

The top company in the world is an oil company, Royal Dutch Shell (RDS.B). Also the #2 company. Also the #4 company. Also the #5 company. Wal-Mart (WMT) somehow managed to sandwich itself in there as #3, but it’s only a matter of time before all the top companies in the world are selling a product that will one day disappear. One analyst blithely tied the slightly decreasing price of oil to the uptick in unemployment, tacitly verifying my long-held belief that our entire economy is tied to a string whose other end is somewhere far away and very hot and sandy, and I’m not talking about Texas.

The market is very nervous because it feels like all the green shoots have fallen off and the whole fruit seems a little bumpier and less tender than it should. Just as it convinced itself that everything was getting better a month or two ago, it has now scared its little self into a tremblicious state and is now in the process of sticking its tiny head back into its shell until it can’t see it’s own shadow anymore.

Michael Jackson’s mother doesn’t like the fact that the estate is in the hands of two lawyers, neither of which are her. One of them is the guy who helped Michael squirrel away the Beatle’s music library from Paul McCartney. The problem for Mrs. Jackson is that there is reportedly a clause in the will that says if she challenges the document and loses, she must forfeit her bequest, which comes to 40% of whatever is left after the promoters, relatives, banks, agents and assorted advisors, doctors, parasites and other friends of Michael make their claim. There seems to be a fight brewing between those who want the Michael Jackson museum to be at Neverland (the corporation that owns half of it and recently tried to auction off his memorabilia) and the more convenient site for tourists of Las Vegas (the promotion company that mounted the 50-event London concert tour that arguably drove him to his death). On the bright side, as long as this nonsense goes on a significant chunk of the world population doesn’t have to think about what Wall Street is doing for minutes at a time.

The moguls are in Sun Valley again. It’s a little bit reduced in circumstances right now, because the debt and equity people are walking around in adult diapers should an actual deal materialize.

Google (GOOG) is going to launch an operating system next year to compete with Windows, following Microsoft’s (MSFT) majestic launch of Bing the Search Engine, which goes after Google. Competition in the software business! What next?

Seventy-one percent of all young people plan to look for a new job when the downturn is over. Let’s hope they’re not out of the demo by then.

And that seems to be that, unless you want to start talking about Afghanistan. This L-Shaped recovery is kind of a bore, don’tcha think?

First of all, I wasn’t on the mailing list. So I didn’t get the chance to go to the parking lot in downtown LA to get my wrist band. If you don’t have a wrist band, you’re not going to be able to get past the cordon near the Staples Center (SPLS). The tragic thing is that I am in LA right now, and could have been there if somebody had gotten me my wristband. But they didn’t.

I also don’t think that the $100,000 price tag for the ticket on EBay (EBAY) is that compelling. In better times, maybe. But the New York Times keeps running stories every day now about various things that are going to “threaten the recovery.” One day it’s this, next day it’s that. Oil prices. Unemployment. Every day something else is going to threaten the recovery. The green shoots are shot, apparently. So I don’t think I’m going to be splurging for something that costs $100,000, even something as worthwhile as the Jackson memorial concert.

Frankly, as exciting as the whole Death of Michael Jackson marketing event has been, I’m getting a little tired of it, and it hasn’t even been on the racks that long. They’re already rolling out old interviews with his mother, for instance. And how many “Jackson insiders” can there be? Not to mention his father, who is a real buzzkill as far as I’m concerned. I just feel sad about it, and not the kind of sad that makes me want to spend money.

Most critical, I think, to the entire strategic plan of the thing, is the fact that they may have timed the big event in the Staples Center one or two days too late. This may not have been the planning team’s fault, of course. They had to get all the big entertainers that loved Michael so much to clear their schedules and make it to LA in time to do some pre-publicity.

I’m not trying to be overly negative about the job they’re doing, though. In an event like this, nobody is really in charge. We all kind of contribute to play things out while a variety of parties stand by the action to see where the money is going to land. This one is delivering on its potential better than most, maybe because we have some great examples to work from. Elvis, for instance, timed his death perfectly, and is arguably more successful in death than he would have been in what was left of his sorry life. Contrariwise, back in 1980 Yoko completely blew the whole assassination of her husband John. I bet she didn’t make a nickel. All those mourners gathered near the apartment building where he died? How was that monetized?

The Jackson people are doing a whole lot better. He has all the top songs on the Billboard charts and this event should start off another great chapter in his career, one that’s significantly more profitable, in the end, than the upcoming 50 concerts in London would have been, and a lot less fatal to his image.

1. Don’t do too much.

2. Take it a little easy at first.

3. Don’t sweat the small stuff.

4. Don’t worry. Be happy.

5. Stay hydrated.

6. Only see people you don’t have to.

7. Put off for tomorrow what you should do today.

8. Have a nice piece of fruit.

9. Knock off early.

10.