I recently wrote about my latest plan for averting financial disaster by selling one of the two vital organs currently processing urine and regulating electrolytes and homeostatic function on each side of my abdomen. After all, in these times, we all need to find ways to cut back. Of course, I wasn't entirely serious about the idea, although by the end of my conversation with Dr. Sally Satel, herself the recipient of a donated kidney and a leading expert on the flaws in the country's organ donor system, I was definitely giving the idea more thought. Satel and I surmised from several recent news events that many more white-collar unemployed might be feeling the same way, if they hadn't hocked a kidney already.

Well, we're no longer surmising. Despite the five-year prison sentence that such a transaction could carry should the authorities catch wind of it, more than two dozen readers wrote in brazenly offering a spare kidney for sale. Prices ranged from $250,000 down to one offer of "$65,000.00 cash! plus all expenses -- I'd hop on the table so fast."

In my last installment, I entertained the notion of opening a medical marijuana store in the New York City suburb my wife and I call home. This week, while we wait for the New Jersey legislature to finalize the legality of that option and as I begin year two in what is now semi-officially the direst U.S. job market since the Great Depression, I'd like to move on to the next previously taboo plan for recapitalizing our household.

I'm considering selling one of my kidneys.

For months now my job coach has been encouraging me to redirect my search from the sclerotic fields of publishing and media to a "growth" industry. I think I've finally found it.

Actually, it was my mother-in-law who came up with the idea. Last week she was talking to her daughter on the phone and, as she's wont to do, asked, "So, has your husband found a job yet?" When my wife emitted her usual "Noooo," her mother responded with uncharacteristic cheerfulness, "Then I've got the perfect job for him. And he can make $20 million a year."

"What is it, drug dealing?"

"Well, yeah."

You know things are bad in advertising when the out-of-work creative directors are thinking about switching careers into magazines.

At first, I thought it was a joke, but then the creative director in question assured me that, no, it was one of the options he'd seriously considered as he cast around for what to do next, now that the field he's spent the last 23 years ascending has essentially disappeared out from under him. "I figured, What do I do? I write. I come up with creative ways of communicating ideas. What about magazines?"

If you need a job, you could do far worse than look in Oklahoma. At a time when the national employment picture remains stubbornly bleak, the state where the wind comes sweepin' down the plains has become a hotbed for wind power, compressed natural gas, health care and all sorts of other growth industries in the sweet spot of the federal stimulus package.

Although the state unemployment rate has doubled in the past year, it still stands at just 6.8 percent, tied for eighth lowest in the nation. The capital, Oklahoma City, a bustling burg of 550,000 with a new NBA franchise and tour boats circling downtown on the new "canal" (actually, it's more of a moat), was recently ranked by the Brookings Institute as the second-most recession-proof city in America, after San Antonio.

If ever a business should be suffering right now, it's Classic Car Club Manhattan. It's one of those concepts that only could have been dreamed up during the vroom-vroom years of the past decade.

For an annual fee of $10,000 to $20,000 or more, bond traders, real estate developers, the occasional celebrity and other big shots in the most car-unfriendly city in America get to drive 47 of the world's most insanely fast and ridiculously expensive automobiles whenever and wherever they want. One weekend it could be tooling down to the Jersey shore in a reproduction 1965 Shelby Cobra, the next, rumbling out to Montauk in a $235,000 Ferrari F430. Because you never know when 490 base horsepower will come in handy in the bumper-to-bumper traffic on the Long Island Expressway.

Amid all the Financial Crisis anniversary coverage, many of us will be trying to recall what we were doing this time last year on the week the world broke. I remember exactly what I was doing. I was talking my wife into booking a vacation to California.

When we'd first come up with the idea, the timing had seemed perfect. She'd never been west of the Mississippi and we hadn't taken a real vacation in three years. Besides, I had to go for work anyway -- to help organize a wine-and-private-jets festival my magazine was hosting the weekend before in Napa Valley, and to supervise our Christmas "Gift Guide" photo shoot featuring such stocking stuffers as a $100,000 motorcycle and a private submarine in the shape of a dolphin. "I don't know, maybe we shouldn't go," she said over the phone. "If one or both of us loses our jobs, we'll wish we still had the money."

I'm getting the impression that America would prefer that the 14.5 million of us who are unemployed would just disappear. Most people from the Fed on down apparently have decided that nothing much can be done to improve the unemployment picture in the foreseeable future, so why depress everyone further by spending too much time talking, blogging or commenting on camera about it?

Oh sure, every month when the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics issues the latest update of its grim count (as it will tomorrow), my fellow jobless and I rise to the top of the news cycle for 24 hours or so, but then pretty quickly it's back to the screaming over health care, happy buyers cashing in their incentives on new cars and first homes and the latest fashion faux paw of Bo the Obama family puppy.

Investors who are furiously trying to divine the future of the economy in the stock and bond markets, the commodities market, the jobs market, the housing and commercial real estate markets may want to read the cabbage leaves in another market: the Rowayton Farmers' Market.

I first got tipped off to its import by a friend who lives in this impossibly cute former fishing village in the heart of southwestern Connecticut's "Gold Coast." Located just 45 miles north of Wall Street, Rowayton has been hit hard by the financial crisis (though perhaps not as hard as neighboring Darien). All along the wooded lanes and footpaths that wind toward the commuter rail station, For Sale and For Rent signs loom in front of new $2 million cedar-shingled mansions. Nowadays, passengers have little trouble finding a seat on the 6:15 A.M. into Grand Central; on the other hand, snagging a choice table in front of the deli down by the docks can require some serious maneuvering with out-of-work i-bankers and ad execs. Unless it's Friday, when everyone just heads to the newly re-branded, repositioned and reinvigorated farmers' market.

Last week, I dug out the phone numbers for some old contacts at Cessna, the large Wichita-based private airplane and jet manufacturer. Since Private Air, the magazine I edited, folded six months ago, I hadn't had much occasion to call out to Wichita. I was curious to hear how the people I knew at the Textron (TXT) subsidiary were faring during what has shaped up as the worst downturn in the general aviation industry in 30 years. It didn't long to get my answer.

"You have reached a number that is disconnected ..."

".... If you feel you have reached this number in error, please redial .... "

".... or that is no longer in service. If you feel you have reached ...."

"... please redial the number and try the call again."