What better way to market a new book about corporate weasels than to act, well, a bit weasely yourself?

Dilbert creator Scott Adams on Tuesday staged "National Weasel Day" in San Francisco, a spoof on Groundhog Day, to drum up sales of "Dilbert and the Way of the Weasel." If the live weasel popped inside its cubicle, the economy would rebound in 2003. If the weasel refused, the economy would continue to cast a long, gloomy shadow on long-tailed carnivorous cubicle dwellers everywhere. The sun never came out, but the weasel did forecast brighter times ahead.

Adams -- obviously quite a crafty character in his own right -- readily admitted that weaseling book sales from a live-mammal stunt was sinking pretty low. "I am basically convincing people to spend less time with their family and more time reading a Dilbert book," he said. "I can't say I feel too good about it. Still it's a job."

And quite a job at that. More than 20 million Dilbert books and calendars have been sold. Adams' comic strip appears in 2,000 newspapers in 65 countries and in 19 languages. His Web site, Dilbert.com, gets 1.4 million unique visitors a month.

Dilbert was a bit out of sorts in the go-go dot-com days. Now that the economy sucks again, Adams' in box is overflowing with disgruntled e-mails about bungling management, cubicle asphyxiation and corporate downsizing.

The timing just seemed right for a book about weasels -- the co-worker who stabs you in the back, the boss who manages to get ahead without doing any work. Corporate America, Adams says, is the weasel's natural habitat.

Dilbert is clearly back in his element.

Q: Did Dilbert take a hit during the dot-com boom?

A It was a tough time to be a Dilbert cartoonist. People weren't complaining during those times. Dilbert mirrored the feeling of the day, basically the feeling of invulnerability and "I'm smarter than you are because I'm getting rich." Dilbert became more sarcastic and insolent at work. Now the tide is turning.

Q: So the downturn is a boom time for Dilbert? Have you seen a rise on the workplace's disgruntled meter?

A The bitterness ratio is way high. People are angry. So wherever there are angry and bitter people, there are Dilbert readers.

Q: How has the comic strip changed in the downturn?

A I'm focusing of course on things that are more relevant like layoffs. One of the big trends is companies that still have a lot of floor space but don't have people in it. So they are trying to put lipstick on the pig when the customer comes (to visit). Companies are pretending people are in unoccupied cubicles. They are going as far as giving them names and family pictures and such. I did a cartoon about all these adopted cubes. The occupant's first name was Phil. The Cube was his last name.

Q: Is cynical cubicle humor definitely back in vogue again?

A Very much so yes. Now we have somebody to blame again.

Q: And there's more anti-corporate sentiment out there again?

A Yeah because now people are feeling a bit more like victims again. They are not feeling like they have control over their own fate. They feel they are at the mercy and whim of the boss who now has power again to fire people for doing a bad job whereas before you didn't want to fire anybody for anything.

Q: Have the corporate scandals provided a lot of good fodder for the strip?

A Yeah, when distrust is at its highest, that's when cartoons work the best. Before we were in a stock bubble during the dot-com era. Now there's a weasel bubble. You know you're in a stock bubble when your cab driver starts giving you stock tips. The way you know you're in a weasel bubble is when historians are discovered to have made up history, ice skating judges fix the Olympics, priests are having more sex than you are. So sure, now is boom time for weasels.

Q: How do you define weasels?

A A weasel is anybody trying to get away with something. There's this huge gray area between the stuff you know is perfectly acceptable and ethically correct and the stuff that might put you in jail. That huge gray area is called the weasel zone. It's pretty much where all of life happens.

Q: Did the dot-com boom or bust turn more people into weasels?

A Well, I think probably there were more weasels during the dot-com era when you had more people doing less useful things than at anytime in history. They just didn't know it.

Q: What kind of weasels do we have now?

A Anybody in what you call a leadership position is a weasel. Leadership is essentially like a fortune-teller scam. A fortune teller makes a bunch of guesses and hopes to get one right. In leadership, it's the same thing. You take over a big company, you reorganize it, merge a few things and then take credit for an upturn in the economy and say, "See what I did?" For some reason, that's legal.

Q: Are there any key differences between your rank-and-file, middle manager and executive weasels?

A There are definitely differences in effectiveness. But that might just be a time management thing. Making a personal phone call on the company phone and an executive fixing the books to make $10 million are morally equivalent. It's just that one is far more effective.

Q: Are corporate executive crooks the ultimate weasels? Or does the routine pillaging at other levels of the corporate ladder count just as much?

A The ultimate. Crime pays so well. All the most effective people are drawn to places where they can make the most money like moths to a flame.

Q: What are some of the best "only in corporate America" work stories you have heard lately?

A It is always the dream of corporations to give people things that seem like money to people without giving them any actual money. In the dot-com era, we had stock options. Now we don't have that option anymore. More and more companies are giving rocks. They are actually paperweights that say "quality" or have some other inspirational message. They are morale building mementos that by any other definition are in fact rocks. Companies are telling people they are not getting a raise and then are handing them a blunt object. I'm surprised there hasn't been more trouble.

Q: Do you feel like you perform a cathartic function for American workers in a recession?

A Yes catharsis. It's revenge a little bit. People get even through me without risking their own careers.