I ran into a famous man I used to know one day in the line at the Bangkok starbucks and he said to me "now is the winter of our discontent" but as I was boarding my Singapore Air first class flight home I was suddenly pounded by a lightning bolt of thought: "but discontent can happen in summer too", and then a second bolt struck in exactly the same place: Summer and "sumner" are only two letters apart! So if this can be our summer of economic discontent, maybe it can also be our Sumner of economic discontent! I whipped out my HP Pavilion tx2500z tablet, cleared my food tray of delicious Fanta drinks, and quickly scribbled this note to my good friend Salman Rushdie. I got an out of office auto-reply which is strange because I'm pretty sure he doesn't have an office but this happens to me all the time with Salman. He's such a joker. If you're reading this Salman, you still owe me that blurb!

In any case, when we look at the Market what you see are a series of flattened bubbles that are wired together by telecommunications. Things I like to call "flabubcoms". In the hot world of crowded warming, these flabubcoms become pressed together, making them both flatter and closer to each other, which reduces the length of the wires connecting their flat bubbles and so brings the global olive lexus more towards a pinnacle of electronic enlightenment. Of course, as any idiot would know, you can't simply flat-press a series of flabubcoms without taking it up with Mother NAture. And Mother Nature, despite being starved and beaten for years, remains our mother.

And this brings us up to today, and our SUMNER of economic discontent. Lawrence Sumner is a man who, while fully realizing the hyperinflation of flabubcoms, must also strive to mother our mother Mother Nature. Of course this is a tiring job, often resulting in Sumner staying up until three in the morning. I see him every so often when I play Halo 2 on Xbox live. Under the screen name "Sumnolicious". Larry, I urge you and the new administration to put down the Xbox controller and to pick up the Xbox controller of our economy. Because this recession needs to be struck with the plasma sword of economic stimulus, and that can't happen if you're falling asleep on the ball. Because that ball is round, and if you fall asleep on it, you'll fall off it. And onto the hot, flat, crowded, be-bubbled world of our discontent.

Stupidly yours,

Thomas Friedman

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The TNR anecdote:

"As at Harvard, Summers functions on exceedingly little

sleep. (A former student told me Summers once praised his dedication after noticing he'd run a computation at 4 a.m.; the student didn't have the heart to tell him he'd queued it up at six the night before.) To power through the day, Summers relies on a punishing Diet Coke regimen. The combination of fatigue and extreme caffeine intake can produce the occasional verbal and physical tic: Summers is a chronic foottapper and sometimes turns over words and clauses like an engine that won't start." (Noam Scheiber, "Free Larry Summers," TNR, 4/1/09)

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