Tom's speaking fees fall; mustache in peril?

"To explain how dire the economic situation is right now, one could mention General Motors, or bring up General Electric, or, hey, there's always the latest jobs report.

The following tidbit of information, however, suggests how serious things really are:

• Based on data obtained from dinner chit-chat painstakingly gathered throughout the day, it appears that Thomas Friedman's speaking fees have recently fallen by 25%.

Of course, this could be because his speaker profile is a bit out of date."

From Dan Drezner's blog.

Get your mustache on

By David Rees.

Tom shrugged

Please, stop eating, please.

Tom does his bit:

So, I have a confession and a suggestion. The confession: I go into restaurants these days, look around at the tables often still crowded with young people, and I have this urge to go from table to table and say: “You don’t know me, but I have to tell you that you shouldn’t be here. You should be saving your money. You should be home eating tuna fish. This financial crisis is so far from over. We are just at the end of the beginning. Please, wrap up that steak in a doggy bag and go home.”

We would do well to follow his example. Not just in terms of interrupting other people's meals, though that would be a start, but in the earnestness with which we should try to save this interdependent and precariously balanced world. "Please". Imagine what his eyes looked like, the sadness. How poignant must his pleading have been. And note the modesty - how could anyone not be aware of The Mustache??

Testimonial to the Mustachioed maestro

I am always grateful to see that Tom's talent does not go unappreciated in this digital age of ours. I am also comforted to see that it is now widely recognized that Tom's mustache is the fount and wellspring of his counter-intuitive and earth-shattering visions of contemporary life in a connected age of roaring trade within the electronic jungle.

"Amazing. Tom Friedman is a God. No, not a God so much as a moustachioed force of nature, pumped up on the steroids of globalization, a canary in the coalmine of an interconnected era whose tentacles are spreading over the face of a New Economy savannah where old lions are left standing at their waterholes, unaware that the young Turks—and Indians—have both hands on the wheel of fortune favors the brave face the music to their ears to the, uh, ground."

Kieran Healey, Crooked Timber

The origins of the mustache: Episode I: "He who wears it understands"