“No You Didn’t!” A Manager Advises People How to Keep Their Jobs

By guest author Richard Laermer You’re doomed and so am I.  We are all reeling. The money just is not coming in like it used to. Damn.   These are the times when you got to stop whining and do something. And I’m sorry to say you are going to have to change habits—that’s the

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Being Gay: Another Media Hook

By Richard Laermer,  Guest Author According to Clay (“Don’t Touch Me!”) Aiken, it is a big gay world out there. And that’s what the press wants you to believe. From my viewpoint, as a fuchsia card-carrying gay alpha male, every few years there’s a boondoggle in gay stories in America: the Supreme Court said OK

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Carefully Folded Business Plan: What We Can Learn From Gap’s Failures

By Richard Laermer, Guest Author I was watching an old TV show from last year –gosh, my TiVo has so much stored it could have been from two years ago– and found myself gawking at a super-colorful Sarah J Parker dancing and carousing to “I Just Love Being a Girl” in a really horrible ad

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The State of Taboo, 2008

By Richard Laermer, Guest Author I just spent two years studying trends in the near future for “2011: Trendspotting,” my new book from McGraw-Hill (www.Laermer.com). Taboos are changing. There are not as many of them—and the ones existing will surprise you, make you think twice before going down certain roads.

Life Personality Balance: Future @ Work

By Richard Laermer, Guest Author In her book Am*Bitch*ous, Dr. Debra Condren says that career-oriented women have to fight in order to get any work-life balance. Women, she exclaimed, are constantly fighting between maintaining their personal lives and maintaining their professional ones. Women feel that there has to be a sweet spot. You can give

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Cutting and Pasting of America!

By Richard Laermer, Guest Author Boy were our parents wrong. They said “Don’t use the calculator,” feeling it’ll hurt our multiplication abilities. Shit – look at how much we (mostly people who know better) use the Net to cheat. It’s uncanny. And that burns me up. I just spent a full two weeks at my

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Keep Secrets/Kill Image

By Richard Laermer, Guest Author When the search engine god Google was asked by the Justice Department to hand over search data in an effort to revive the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), it quickly refused. That was special. The question reared its head: “What does Google have to hide?” Could it be S-E-X? Cynics

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Hello, News!

By Richard Laermer, Guest Author It’s a cool world when people can talk to each other with some semblance of knowledge. Every now and then (never at cocktail parties) I find myself in a semi-cultured conversation about, no, not the latest Seinfeld-cursed-TV gig (poor Julia isn’t even on the schedule, some “big hit,” huh?), but

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