It's been a while: I can explain. My wife, Diane, doesn't let me blog during September because she's afraid I'll spill too many secrets from a month of Fashion Weeks, no matter how many times I try to convince her that I couldn't give a rat's ass about any of it except those bespoke Italian leather loafers, and you don't see those on the runway anyway.

And I'm not allowed to blog during October because IAC/InterActiveCorp's board knows well that the only thing I'd want to do is share photos of my Halloween costumes from over the years (ooh, how I love October!) and they're concerned about its potential impact on shareholder confidence.  We're sailing right into a dang-blasted recession and they think I'll spook my shareholders with my Slutty Horatio Hornblower outfit?  If they're that lily-livered, they shouldn't be handling pieces of my company anyway.

Which brings me to this.  On November 5th, you know, two days from now, I have to to address IAC's shareholders and a bunch of those twats known as "analysts" and "reporters" in our quarterly earnings call.  All I have to do is read some words off a piece of paper, and then produce a curmudgeonly grunt or two when anybody asks a question (they're all used to this from me), and last week so I asked my CFO, Tom McInerney, to hire the usual speech-writing agency or whatever he does.  But Tom tells me, "We're cutting costs. We're not going to hire you a speechwriter." 

What?!

So I told Tom, "Excuse me. I'm going to retreat to the captain's quarters of the Eos (yes, that's right, I'm not selling my yacht!) and drink Dom Perignon and wear fluffy slippers and sulk." And that's exactly what I did.

But then I had a brilliant idea. I picked up the phone called up dear, sweet, nubile Ricky Van Veen and asked him to commission some of his CollegeHumor boys to write me a quarterly earnings rundown!  He had a speech for me -- bless his tender young heart -- within three days!  Recession be damned, this is going to be a real zinger.  Especially at the part where I'm talking about EBIDTA (that's "earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization" for the amateurs out there) and then I pause for a moment mid-sentence and start shouting, "We're going streeeeeeeaking!  Through the quad to the gymnasium!  We're going streeeeeeeeeeaking!"

And they told us CollegeHumor was a bad investment. Bah.