Several years ago (1996 actually) I offered for your delectation the Gibbs Institute's First Thanksgiving Golden Turkey Award. Having skipped this event for the last eight years, it is time, once again, to roll out the red carpet, polish the manacles and oil up the whips.

Back then I noted that our industry has a novel combination of hype, hyperbole, misrepresentation, obfuscation, innuendo and silliness hanging on to the coattails of the most important business and cultural transformation in the history of business.

So the Gibbs Institute's Thanksgiving Golden Turkey is a way to spotlight the individuals, companies or entities that don't, won't or can't come to grips with reality, maturity, ethical behavior or social responsibility because of their blindness, self-imposed ignorance, thinly veiled political agenda or blatant desire to return us to the Dark Ages.

Contender 1: The SCO Group. Will it never go away? Frequent readers of this column will know my take on SCO's business practices and ethics.

Contender 2: The FCC. Forget the crazy $500,000 fine for Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction." Following the pathetic ABC lead-in segment to Monday Night Football last week, the FCC chairman said on CNBC that "the networks seem determined to 'keep it hot and steamy' for financial returns." If the FCC has so much time to burn that it can worry about sillinesses such as Jackson's wardrobe and ABC's trailers we need to ask why it exists (see www.gibbs.com/stuff/)

Contender 3: Everyone who has a mail server that sends non-delivery notifications. Please, please, please switch that feature off. Some spammer is using my server details to forge e-mail headers and I'm receiving 100 bounces or more each day.

Contendor 4: CompUSA. As ever, good selection and prices along with poorly trained, inconsiderate staff. Remind me to tell you just why it took them an hour to sort out why my brand-new motherboard box didn't contain a brand-new motherboard.

Contender 5: AT&T Wireless (now Cingular). Its patchy cell service is annoying but what the company thinks is customer service takes anger to a whole new dimension. It took me 85 minutes last week to get my son's cell phone replaced.

Contender 6: The The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). The MPAA has recently gone down the same litigious path that the RIAA took. Get a grip guys. You need a different business model more than you need a fleet of lawyers.