Macbeth said it. Act 5, Scene 5, I think. “It is a tale told by an idiot; full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Most people think he was talking about Life. We know better. He was obviously talking about e-mail.

Take today, for instance. It’s only 8 AM and here’s what I have:

Some vendor I don’t know is asking me to upgrade a program I don’t own. An industry trade is sending me its daily morning newsletter. A magazine I don’t read is featuring its monthly lineup. The New York Times is sending me Today’s Headlines. Allposters.com tells me that for 48 hours only I can get up to 30% off on some posters I don’t want. Who gets posters? I don’t. Maybe one day a while ago I bought a poster for my kid. Now every day I get an offer about posters. I thought I spammed that. I guess I’ll do it again. Friggin’ Reunion.com won’t get off my back! There’s some guy in the Yukon Territory, I’m not making this up, who keeps searching my name. I don’t know anybody there, but he keeps searching me. And they keep telling me about it. When I try to exit their site, I get an error message! What a pain! I’ll send them to junk mail, too, except haven’t I already done that? Why do they keep coming back? Telecharge is offering me low-priced tickets to a show I don’t want to see… two newsletters I signed up for that have interesting stuff I’m not interested in… another newsletter! And another! News stories from all over. Gossip sites with their daily blab. Sales numbers! Hm. God. It’s rough out there and I don’t need a spreadsheet to tell me. More sales numbers. More news stories. Sales numbers. Request for approval on something I’ve already approved. A chain about nothingness on which I’m cc’d. Another of those. A self-congratulatory note masquerading as an attaboy. A blog. Another blog. And another. An ad pimping for an upcoming conference. And another. Who can afford to go to all these conferences in this economic environment? Oh look. Here’s a conference on the technology of conference calls. It’s in Park City, Utah! Gotta go to that, right? An ad from JetBlue. An ad from Restoration Hardware.

Finally I see there’s a draft of a document I need to read. At last! Content! Real, honest-to-God content! Except you know what? The guy’s assistant just dropped the hard copy on my desk fifteen minutes ago. So the purpose of the e-mail is unclear. Do I need an electronic document? In fact, why is any of this here? As far as I’m concerned, twenty years into the medium, legitimate uses for e-mail are limited to:

• making plans for meals, meetings, meetings over meals
• transmission of jokes and funny videos
• news alerts signifying the end of the world, which clearly is at hand
• orders from the boss
• information about upcoming parties
• data

Beyond that, I have a suggestion: We’re clearly into an era of downsizing. How about extending that trend to electronic transactions? I mean, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in its petty pace, and all that. But does every last syllable of recorded time have to be documented?

This securities analyst, who himself works for a firm on the brink of ruin, took the opportunity the other day to bring down my entire sector. It wasn’t hard. He simply wrote up the absolutely worst, most pessimistic doomsday scenario for my industry, and then applied it to every company in it.

He was alone in his assessment of the situation, of course. There are dozens of others who don’t see things that way. But in the current climate, he hit publicity pay dirt. Put together depressed reporters on the verge of losing their jobs, nervous – hell, frightened – investors, and a banking industry that is taking the hose, and you have a scenario when any chicken little is immediately promoted to top rooster in the imploding henhouse of capital.

If you say things will be all right one day and here’s why, nobody is going to listen to you right now. If you say that Armageddon is at hand, everybody runs for the hills and tells the world what they just heard. It’s natural. We’re in that part of the cycle.

Dawn will break one day. It always does. But in the meantime, the red death holds sway over all.

In this interim between good cheer and sanity, I’d like to remind you of the following things that were certainly going to happen in my lifetime so far:

• A nuclear war was going to sweep across the Earth, ending life on the planet as we know it;
• The Russians were going to bury us;
• Overpopulation was going to end life on Earth as we know it;
• All of Southeast Asia was going to fall like a bunch of dominoes to the commies;
• We’re on the Eve of Destruction;
• Japan was going to take over the entire world economy and run everything;
• Y2K was going to melt down every computer on the planet, leading to the end of life on Earth as we know it;
• Microsoft (MSFT) was going to conquer everybody and end capitalism on earth as we know it;
• There will be no more honeybees;
• Global warming will end life on Earth as we know it.
• Nostradamus predicted that life on Earth as we know it will end in about six minutes;
• Life on Earth as we know it will end on 12/12/2012. I’m not sure why. Perhaps you can fill me in on that.
• China is the awakening giant and will run the world very soon;
• Robert Downey, Jr. is done in show business, can’t get insured and will never make another film.

And so forth. Why do we listen to this kind of stuff? Why do we always believe it? If we’re going to make stuff up to conform to our current view of the world, why do the lone, shrill voices of despair always grab the headlines?

And for the record, my business is not going away. We will live to see that security analyst thrust from the bosom of conventional wisdom, exiled to the job of writing and distributing his own newsletter.

The award goes to the communications executives for the oil industry both here and abroad, reeling from the common perception that their rapacious greed is destroying our way of life.

Nevertheless, there is a brilliant graphic in today’s USA TODAY Snapshots, which outlines the fact that oil is “cheaper than other liquids.”

Pictured in this marvel of positioning spin are milk, trading at just a bit above the cost of a barrel of light, sweet crude, Tropicana orange juice, even sweeter and lighter at $226 per barrel, and Jack Daniel’s whiskey, which would cost you nearly $75,000 if you filled up your SUV with it.

What a bargain, then, is our current barrel of oil! Let’s bid it up a couple dollars more where it belongs! And how fortunate are we to get it at its current price! Oh benevolent oil companies who still charge so little for it!

Good work, PR guys. Seriously. Nice to see some clean spin punch through the journalistic veil for a change.

Come to think of it, doesn’t it always?

I go to a lot of meetings with a lot of bullsh**ters. One of the main topics of such people in a host of different businesses is a twofold argument with which they amuse themselves and each other. Here are its two prongs:

• My business is coming up the ramp;
• Some other business is dead.

The other business that is dead is, unless you are speaking to a very depressed person, not the one he or she is in.

So it depends on who you are speaking to, or to whom you are speaking, depending on whether that grammar stuff matters to you.

Following are the businesses that are dead, if you hang around with enough bullsh**ters in a wide enough range of fields:

• The theater
• Movies in movie houses
• Public schools
• Radio, because of satellite radio,
• Satellite radio, because of Internet radio and ITunes
• Broadcast television, because of cable and Internet video
• Cable television, because of satellite TV and Internet video
• Satellite television, because of digital television conversion and Internet video
• Internet video, because of digital television conversion and downloading
• DVDs, because of downloading
• Downloading, because of the ubiquity of broadband streaming
• Personal computers with hard drive capacity, due to cloud computing
• Land-line telephones, because they’re so 20th Century
• Any internet company that is not Google (GOOG), for obvious reasons
• Google, because, well, how long can they keep THIS up?
• Books, of course
• Magazines, except the ones that we’re on the cover of, and…
• Newspapers

The only one that everybody agrees about right now, among the b.s.-ing class, is newspapers. Newspapers are dead. Dead dead dead. Yes, Rupert Murdoch doesn’t seem to believe so, but he is incorrect in this, or doesn’t see the truth right now, or whatever. Because you know newspapers? They’re dead.

This is not helped at all by the appearance of Sam Zell, who bought Tribune (TXA), and whose chief operating officer recently announced they would begin to judge the value of journalists by the column inches they produced in a year. This is sort of like saying that Chichi’s is the best restaurant in America because it serves the greatest weight in nachos.

That aside, however, everybody does agree: they’re dead. One day there will be no newspapers, because No Young People Read Newspapers. Is this true? My kids are of sentient age. They read newspapers. In fact, they’re both knee deep in Obamamania right now, and read everything they can get their hands on. I see people reading newspapers on the street, in parks, on subways and buses… when you get a bad story in the newspaper it still ruins your day…

But no. They’re dead. Know why? Because Advertising is Down in newspapers. Now of course, advertising is sort of down across the board, and actually MUCH more disappointing on all those social networks everybody loves so much… and newspapers still attract a HUGE proportion of total advertising…

But no. Newspapers are dead. And advertisers read that and, timid little lambkins that they are, cut their budgets even more, because after all who wants to advertise in a dead medium?

Finally, newspapers are, you know, dead because they Haven’t Changed With The Times and News Is A Commodity That You Can Get Just As Well Online.

Except guess what. It’s not. I’ll just say what I think and get out of here. As always, if you agree, lob something in.

• I like newspapers. I look at a few every day and even read some of each;
• I don’t believe everything I read in the paper, but I’m interested in what they think is interesting;
• Newspapers have been around a long time, from medieval days through the time of Horace Greeley (above) and beyond. Radio didn’t kill them. TV didn’t kill them. The internet will not kill them;
• If there were no newspapers, all we’d have is the Internet, whose capacity for the promulgating and dispensation of bulls**t is unparalleled;
• I am NOT interested in a PERSONAL, daily e-mail informing me only of the stuff I pre-select as of interest to me. What’s the pleasure in that?
• If we all had a euro for every article in some medium that declared another medium dead, we’d all be Europeans;
• Aggregators can only aggregate content if there is content to aggregate. No content, no aggregators;
• Contrary to popular belief, journalism is an actual profession that takes training, talent and skill, and one of the most rigorous and necessary places in which it’s pursued is in newspapers;
• 89% of all citizen-journalists are just full of it.

So let’s take a breath and just agree: newspapers aren’t any deader right now than any other coughing, wheezing business in this lousy environment. Lehman (LEH) is losing nearly $3 billion dollars this quarter. Nobody talks about investment banking being dead. Broadcast television just racked up more than $9.2 billion in its upfront sales season, in spite of analysts’ predictions that this year would be its last. And not one social network is really making a go of it yet.

Now you guys in newspapers could probably help a little, going forward. Why not stop writing pieces every day about how dead every other industry is? Just a thought, tough guys.

I’ve been in business for about 5,427 dog years and at no time during my career has there ever been a day when somebody wasn’t worried about what some security analyst was writing about us. This factoid stretches over six iterations of four separate companies, with enough corporate permutations to confuse a particle physicist.

“Bob Weasel of Finster-Koolaid says we’re off on our guidance and won’t make our EBITDA for the quarter!” the CFO will write while forwarding the latest analysis from Weasel, who long ago decided to take a negative turn on our stock because it differentiates him from the other analysts and gets him quotes in the Wall Street Journal.

“What are we going to do about it?” people will cry. And of course there’s nothing you can do about it. Weasel has every right to his take. Its can’t be corrected, either, even if he’s wrong, because Weasel’s opinion is based on a deep understanding of the marketplace, our business sector, and the economy.

Ha!

Weasel and his kind are, as I am sure you know, generally found to be employees of banking institutions. Real banks. Investment banks. Naturally, you know, the research side is (relatively recently) well-separated from the side that actually invests in stuff, but still. Who’s going to argue with Finster-Koolaid? It’s a division of Omnivorous Potentate, the largest investment bank in this brane of the cosmos!

A few years ago, the former CEO of a former form of a former corporate entity that morphed into one of my prior corporate entities appeared at a conference of these geniuses. Granted, Bob was a loser. He had bad affect. Still, the company had a lot going for it. But the security analysts didn’t like Bob’s style. So within 30 minutes of the close of his presentation, our stock went down like Eliot Spitzer. 

People went off to Froggies Tavern early that day, I can tell you. Because those guys ruled. And we drooled, for a long time afterwards. Then a new guy came in that people liked, for whatever reason. And our stock went up. Same company. Actually, slightly worse off, if I remember correctly. Go figure.

So now we look around us and the very same guys who were telling us why we sucked hose water, boy, are they drinking from the other side of the tap. All the great intellects who said people should divest this or that, or that such-and-such would never grow, or that management needed a kick in the kiester… they represent firms that are hawking up huge chunks of lung every day!

Where were these Einsteins when their companies were lending more money than they had to sub-prime borrowers? Were they any less shocked than the rest of us when the piper came to call?

In retrospect, who the hell were they to tell anybody what to invest in, or any corporation what they should or should not do? And why is anybody still listening to any of them?

I’ll tell you a funny story. Last night I went to one of those restaurants that feast on the egos of the rich and famous. The room is often filled with people who you would probably know if you saw their faces on the front page of some tabloid or business publication. It’s amazing that there’s enough air to breathe in there, let alone eat, with so many great narcissists sucking the oxygen out of the atmosphere. 

The place is rather small, with a bar in one small entry room and a bigger room past the portal of glory. People enter, remove their coats, and are then ushered at varying rates of speed to their thrones. I arrived at 7:30 to meet my friends for an 8:00 PM reservation. We were to be a group of three and only one of them was there, my pal Dworkin.

“I wonder if they could seat us a little early,” he said as we were finishing our drinks at about 7:45. I peered into the dining room, which was virtually empty. “Give it a try,” I said.  He returned from his chat with the maitre d’. “He says they’re still setting it up,” he said.

We ordered another drink. The bar was warm and cozy, filled with people drinking, eating at little tables that had no social cache, looking around to see if they could spot somebody famous going in to dine in the big room.

We waited. People began to arrive for dinner. I saw Vreeland, who I know from the corporation, come in with a few pals, doff his outerwear with flamboyance, hug a bunch of people at the door, and breeze into the castle keep. Then a great captain of industry appeared, was greeted with quiet, discreet cries of pleasure by the staff, and was all-but carried in a divan to his position of honor immediately. We continued to hang out at the bar. I was okay about it. It was a scene. I melded into it.

At 8:05, the dining room was still rather empty. I went to the maitre d’ and very politely asked if we could be seated now. He looked at me for a moment, making some inner calculation. I felt either under- or overdressed all of a sudden. “Your party is not complete yet,” he said.

“Yes,” I said very politely. I hate jerks in restaurants who make a scene about things. “But my friend Vreeland just went in there and there are still several empty seats at his table.”"Oh!” said the maitre d’. “Mr. Vreeland! Well…” And then he smiled at me indulgently, as if to say, “Come along, my friend. You and a man of Mr. Vreeland’s standing should not be mentioned in the same breath.” I felt a little tickle of annoyance scratch at the back of my amour-propre. “Besides,” he added, not unkindly, “we’re just setting your table now. It should be a few minutes.”

I thanked him humbly, backed off to the bar again, and stood there with my companion. There was nothing else to do. I generally don’t like to have six drinks before dinner so we just hung out. Glossy people continued to enter and receive a fine helmet-polishing followed by immediate conveyance to comfy seats in the sanctified enclosure within.

My tickle was now and itch. I approached the maitre d’ again. “How about it,” I said.

“Actually,” he replied, looking at his book carefully, “we’re still waiting for your table to finish dessert.” A little bolt of sulphuric acid shot from my stomach into the back of my throat. “I thought you were just finished setting it,” I said evenly. “Oh yes,” he said coldly. “We’re just finished setting it.”

“Look,” I said, trying to keep my voice even. “I’ve seen about two dozen people float by here and into the next room. It’s still half empty. I have just heard from our third party, who is stuck in a cab but will be here in minutes. Come on.”

“I’m sure they’ll be finished with their desserts very soon,” said the maitre d’.

At that point I uttered a short observation of no particular import, put on my hat and coat, and left the establishment. I was, in fact, simply too angry to stand there anymore. So I went outside and stood in the cold. It was nice out there. We’re all equal under that big black sky.

About two minutes later, the door to the restaurant opened and Dworkin popped his head out. “They’re seating us now,” he said. I went in, said nothing to the maitre d’, and took off my coat. We were then hustled in to a very fine table, right next to General Pinochet’s. Perhaps it was not him. I heard he died. So maybe it was somebody else. “What happened?” I asked Dworkin.

“The maitre d’ was very upset,” he said. “He said, ‘Is there a problem with the gentleman?” and I said, ‘Yeah, he’s not used to waiting for anything.’ And he said ‘Oh’ and told me to go get you.” Our other pal showed up a few minutes later and we had a very lovely dinner.

What was clear to me was that 1) If I had not thrown a tantrum, we would not have have been seated until early March and 2) If I had not distinguished myself as an angry, over-sensitive, egotistical wheezebag, we would not have gotten such a good table, either. It was by demonstrating all the pushy, aggressive, ill-tempered and self-aggrandizing portions of my personality that I showed my qualification for proper treatment in that establishment.

And that’s why jerks run the world.

The Wall Street Journal starts our week with one of its classic observational front page stories. This one notes the prevalence of a new metaphor that is now running like grain through a goose through the CEO community. It seems impossible to describe the current business environment without using the word “headwinds”. 

For instance, the paper quotes Rick Wagoner, CEO of General Motors, telling auto analysts on January 17: “As we look out, we’ve got to be realistic that we are facing some tough headwinds, particularly here in the U.S., with a relatively weak industry.”  Jerry Yang of Yahoo and G. Kennedy Thompson of Wachovia are also invoked, among others.

Business does this. I remember when I started out in business, you had to have excellence. Everybody had to have a (usually pristine and unread) copy of Tom Peters and Robert Waterman’s lengthy, repetitive, preachy tome on the subject, In Search of Excellence, on proud display on their desktop. No meeting was complete without a segment in which people talked about excellence, the drive to achieve excellence, and a lot of cheering and hand-clapping in recognition of those who had in some way quantified or demonstrated extreme excellence.

Not long after we all searched for and found excellence, we moved on to Quality. We had Quality circles and Quality focus groups and Quality meetings to achieve Productivity. For about three years we had so much Quality everywhere that we actually killed it. Now nobody can talk about Quality without getting a pretty good laugh at the mention of the word.

As I noted, Quality was often a screen for the process by which Productivity was achieved. In case you didn’t know, which I’m sure you do, Productivity was a euphemism for firing people and making other people do their jobs. When you have fewer people doing more, you ipso facto have more Productivity. That is why I have always hated Productivity. Speaking personally, when I am achieving maximum Productivity, I am usually exhausted.

Buzzwords function to mask the true meaning of things. That’s why the most prevalent ones at any time usually have to do with something nasty. In the case of Excellence, you had a bunch of middle managers patting each other on the back in an orgy of self-congratulation. Quality was an excuse to plunge an organization into what amounted to a Stalinist socialist re-education program, delivering the afflicted company to the doorstep of Productivity, which produced Re-Engineering that created Decruitment of Excess Personnel, then some Headcount Rationalizations and then everybody was looking for their Cheese, which apparently was moved. 

And now we have Headwinds. Oh Captain my Captain, your fearful ship boldly wends its way forth over the choppy waves! The headwinds are vicious — but it’s a good vessel, fitted to perfection and utterly rightsized! The crew is dedicated! Our uniforms are crisp and natty, their golden buttons glowing in the spume and sunshine! Yes, the Headwinds are brisk, but we can make it! If anyone can, we can! After all, don’t these Headwinds afflict us all? I mean, isn’t everybody using the same word to describe them? Onward! Headwinds be damned!

It was a decent metaphor, I’ll grant you that. But there’s one thing about buzzword like it. They’re all killed by overuse. And we’re pretty much there, I think.

Here are a few suggestions for replacements as the credit crisis deepens, the dollar hawks up phlegm and everybody growing increasingly squirrelly about 08:

• Heavy Lifting, as in “We’re going to have to do some heavy lifting to get the year off the ground, but we’re hopeful.”
• Monkey Meat, as in “The rest of the quarter looks like a lump of monkey meat.
• A Bag of Worms, as in “This is a fine bag of worms we’ve gotten ourselves into, but we see the later part of 08 still pretty solid.”
• A Deep and Muddy Swamp, as in “The continuing failure of our debt instruments is leading us further and further into a deep and muddy swamp from which there looks to be no escape at this time other than to live through it and try to come out the other side alive.”

Goodness. That doesn’t sound very euphemistic, does it? Why don’t we just say that business stinks and forget about it?

When I was a kid there was always a little goober around who bragged about his IQ. “I have a genius-level IQ,” the kid would say, having just returned from a Mensa test designed to stock the world with future members.

The thing is? The kid who had the big, triple-digit IQ was never the smartest one in the class. He was very often boring. And sure, he was usually smart enough, okay, but no smarter than half the kids I knew. As far as I was concerned, he looked the same as anybody else when he was picking his nose.

At that time, in fact, a lot of us were told we were “as smart as Einstein” because we had been tested in school and done fairly well on whatever it was they were doing to us. My mother wouldn’t tell me mine, because the information would supposedly rot my brain and make me an egotistical jerk. So I never learned my IQ. It didn’t work anyhow, as anyone who knows me will tell you only too quickly. 

But whatever my IQ may be, it didn’t stop me from having all kinds of trouble in math and particularly physics, with its men walking backward in trains and people running counter-clockwise on Merry-Go-Rounds. I also do lousy on those Mensa tests you can take in your in-flight magazines. Craps has been explained to me so many times I’m ashamed to ask about it again. And I stink at chess. But my IQ? Fabu.

All this is a roundabout way of saying that from a very early age I have believed that IQ was BS.  I believe it’s basically a test to find out how good you are at being tested. Possibly it may also test how much time your parents may have spent trying to make you a genius.

Now the nail, as far as I’m concerned, has been driven in the smarty-farty establishment by one of its very own experts, James R. Flynn. The article is in the current issue of Scientific American Mind, which I buy while I’m in airports and losing mine. Mr. Flynn is the discoverer of the “Flynn Effect,” which documents massive gains in IQ from one generation to another. This jump in tested intelligence has been demonstrated in research from some 30 nations — everywhere, actually, where IQ results over time have been studied. 

The editor of the magazine observes, “To express it another way, if we put the score of today’s average American at 100, then the Americans of 1900 had a mean IQ of 50 to 70, signaling an obviously implausible plague of mental retardation among our progenitors.” These, you may recall, are the folks to built our cities, split the Atom, invented the car and the airplane. Now Mr. Flynn tells us why. 

Conversely, the data reveal that young people of today are, like, 30 IQ points higher than their grandparents, and that the trend is continuing. People are getting smarter and smarter and smarter, at least according to the IQ industry.

Now, that would be really encouraging news, if it didn’t seem like the exact opposite is the case. I believe any empirical study of our society would reveal that people are actually getting stupider all the time. I know I am. This situation is ameliorated by the fact that everybody around me is dumber than they used to be as well. It’s not like all the old guys are losing it and the younger X’s, Y’s and Zeros are coming up the ramp, either. For every Chad Hurley or Sergei Brin there’s a couple of K-Fed’s and two or three Miss South Carolinas.

Beyond that, the general level of discourse, particularly among the young, while no stupider than, say, your average conversation on a street in rural France in 1680, is by no means any more elevated. Back then, they said “Zut!” when they bumped into each other. Now they say “Dude!”

There’s a massive amount of complex scientific bushwah attending Flynn’s rationale for the ongoing bump in measured brainpower. You can read it. The question is important to him, because the data seem to contradict a) common sense and b) the value of IQ testing, which would be a disaster for a whole group of lab-coated people who make their livings on it.

After reading as much as I could of the stuff, I think it basically boils down to one thing: kids trained to take tests do well on tests; people prepared for certain kinds of challenges do better than those who are not. For the most part, better babies notwithstanding, we’re all pretty average.

It’s the guys with the high Killer Quotient who do best where I work.

Just a short link to brighten your Saturday morning as we kick off a long and hopefully uneventful weekend. In case you didn’t see it, a second individual has turned up who attended Stanford University — birthplace of the great geek movement that now runs our ecosystem — without actually, you know, being admitted to the institution. Spent quite a while just soaking things up, hanging around, and pretending to be a bona fide member of the Stanford graduate physics program.

Woody Allen once said 80% of success is showing up. In some places, that number can be raised by potentially another fifteen points and, in the case of certain positions in Research, New Media, and Academia, even more. A place like Stanford is so august, so rich with self-regard and superbity, that it confers authenticity on virtually anyone who meanders about within its aura dressed appropriately.

The same can be said of your average corporation. Put on a suit. Walk around with the appearance that you know what you’re doing, particularly with coffee. You can probably fool people into thinking you’re a vice president after a while, if you find the right empty office (which is not that difficult these days).

I occupied my first job at my company for a full nine months before they really hired me. I had done a short free-lance assignment. They gave me a small office in which to do it. After it was done, I simply kept coming in. After a while, everybody assumed I was part of the department. One day I informed my superior that I had never really been hired. She looked at me quizzically and, since I was knee deep in a bunch of stuff she would rather not have done, she put my papers through. I ran into a little trouble with HR for a while, but before long that was solved too. In other words, being an impostor is not an a priori barrier to entry in a large institution.

Obviously, it didn’t hurt that this young scamster found her way to the Physics department. “I thought she was just another grad student,” a legitimate Stanford physics student observed when told of the situation, “but then you talk to her and you realize that perhaps she doesn’t really know what’s going on.” As opposed to what? Other physicists?

Today I stumbled across a deep thinker down in Australia who has found our discussion of the bulls**t arts, been moved by it, and set up a colloquy for himself and his readers. Look at how many comments the mere introduction of the question has garnered. Thanks, mate! Now all you have to do is please make sure that as you trade insights with your fellow bulls**tters, you let them know that the definitive book on the subject is now available in both hard cover AND luxurious paper. Beyond that, good luck! Stay in touch! Let me know if your brand is any different than the one we toss about over here! Then throw another chunk on the barbie!

I’m looking at the 20 Best Bulls**t Jobs area of this site, which features all the stuff that you’ve been sending in about your terms of employment, and all I can say is Wow. People attacking their own jobs! People defending them! People attacking other people’s jobs! Passionate rebuttals! From all over the world, readers are weighing with their comments, thoughts, impressions. Bulls**t? I think not! But you be the judge. Go look, in other words.

I have always believed that any discussion of bulls**t inevitably ends with deep thoughts about what is NOT bulls**t, what really matters, what is worth defending and fighting for. A debate on bulls**t, therefore, is in many ways a colloquy on the nature of truth.

Every now and then, I’ve been commenting on your comments, since some of them require a response of one sort or another. And in the days to come, I’ll be writing a bit more about the incredibly active and contentious back-and-forth that’s going on here. But today? The sun is shining in Northern California, and there’s just a soupcon of spring tang in the air, and I’m going to power down this computer now and head for someplace where I can see water. If you’re reading this over the weekend, I’d suggest you do the same. Why are we thinking about our jobs on such a day as this?

I’m proud of you guys. I called and you answered. Are, in fact, still answering in droves. May such wonders never cease.

For about a week now, I’ve presented a gallery of bulls**t jobs for your enjoyment and, more importantly, your inspiration. My humble gallery of 50 BS Jobs, which may be found elsewhere on this site, has always been nothing more than a conversation opener, just as my book on the subject 100 Bulls**t Jobs And How To Get Them, was also intended to spark thought on what most experts now believe to be an inexhaustible subject.

It certainly has been with you guys, as a total plethora of submissions has come down the broadband pipe to us since that very first day we started asking for them. In the days to come, we will offer a gallery of your very own bulls**t jobs, the ones that you, dear interactive readers, have offered in humility, rage and pride. They’re still rolling in, and if you want to have yours considered I’d suggest you drop all that other bulls**t you’re up to and focus on this for a little while.

You can then join the Problem Manager and the Technical Analyst for State Government and the Base Fitness Advisor for the U.S. Air Force and the Academic Advisor for Student Athletes and Etiquette Consultant and Team Leader at Discovery Card and the Country Club Restaurant Matrade (a new spelling of maitre d’, right?) and all the other wonderful bulls**t artists who are proudly pursuing their professions with the tremendous skills the Lord gave them. My hat is off to you all! See?

We will also be offering in the days to come a little quiz that you can take to determine the BQ — the Bulls**t Quotient of your job.  There is a mathematical calculation that can be found in the beginning of my book, 100 Bulls**t Jobs and How To Get Them, that I have used in the past to determine my BQ, which of course is very high indeed.  You can utilize the tool if you wish. You’ll need the book, of course.

In any event, I will personally be heartbroken if we move to publish our Gallery of Bulls**t Achievement and you are not at least considered by the dedicated jury of artists now adjudicating the subject. So please. Get with the program. There’s no time like the present. And there is no I in Team.

That last little bit there has nothing to do with what we were talking about. But I felt like I needed to end on something appropriate to the subject.

That’s right. The colloquy has begun in earnest. Thousands and thousands of you (however many it takes to assemble millions and millions of page views) have gathered to begin a crucial discourse on what just might be the most important question of our time.

Okay, maybe it’s not. But there is something about the entire question that engages, delights and torments people in all walks of life. That’s pretty clear. Many of you have already written in about your jobs, and we’re getting ready to publish a nice selection in the days to come. I will also be thinking out loud on the subject and answering any questions that you might have. I’ve been a bulls**tter all my life, and I think I have a lot to bring to the table on this issue. I know there are many of you out there who are equally practiced and seasoned, not to say steeped, in the subject.

I thought, before I move on to other things today, that I would just make a salient point that is in no way bulls**t at all, and that is this: Just because you’ve read the 50 BS Jobs on this site, and thought about your own, and even written in about the material in question, DOES NOT REPLACE THE ACTUAL EXPERIENCE OF PURCHASING THE BOOK ITSELF. That’s right. Even if you choose not to use the link I’ve just provided, the button is conveniently close to you right now, right on this very site, and you could get the job done with just a click of your mouse. Why not do that right this very minute?

The book is chock-a-block with great info, extended discussion, a plethora of examples, and a welter of strategies on how you too can acheive the pinnacle of success in our culture and get a high-paying, high-prestige, low-activity BS job of your very own.

Go ahead! Make my day!

Well, to start out with, there are those two asterisks. They pretty much embody the thing itself.

Beyond that, for purposes of our future work together, let us ask: What is it?

It’s like the weather. Everybody talks about it; nobody can do anything about it.

It’s like pornography. You know it when you see it.

It’s like potato chips. You can’t eat just one.

Today, we begin an ongoing discussion of bulls**t. So…

Tell me your bulls**t jobs tell me your bulls**t duties tell me all that happens to you that you would consider to be bulls**t. I will post it to the world! Together, we will begin perhaps the greatest discussion of the subject in the history of the planet!

And if you believe that, you’re perfect for this exercise.

Now let’s get going!