New game, old rules.

I'm only 51 -- though "only" and that number in tandem seems an oxymoron -- but I fear I'm fast becoming an old fart (a card-carrying one, too, if only I'd accept that piece of pasteboard the AARP has been trying to foist on me since I turned 50).

You see, old fartdom relates not to age but a state of mind, one in which attitudes, perspective and, especially, tolerance of new ideas harden quicker than your arteries do. Its onslaught might explain those twinges of rather perverse pleasure I experienced last spring when dot-coms were getting run over on Wall Street.

I'm no Luddite. Technology has made my life better and my business more efficient. But some of those companies were nothing but golems of greed, animated by the cabalistic power of other people's money, crumbling into dust when it was gone. The bandwagon everybody was jumping on couldn't have been more dangerous had it been rolling on Firestone rejects. (OK, old man -- stop shaking that cane and mixing those metaphors and get back up on the porch and into your rocker.)

The New Economy might try to twist but eventually must bend to the Old Rules. That's a lesson many people had to learn the hard way. And it's one we'll be...