Hi, Kirstin!

Completely, utterly randomly (or the next best thing), I ended up sitting next to this guy at dinner on Sunday who is a venture capitalist who'd wanted to invest in imeem! When he found out I went to Stanford, he started quizzing me about what the deal was with symbolic systems. He'd met Dalton, and was thoroughly confused about his educational background. He then expressed his grave disappointment that some other VC firm beat him to imeem. Itsby bitsy planet, my friend!

The backstory is that a group of about ten of us had met for Afghan food to plan a bid for a 49% stake in the state-owned Uzbek Airways (it's for sale). Given how little any of us knew about a) finance and b) Uzbekistan, the imeem VC guy was about as investment-savvy as we were going to get. Some choice nuggets from Uzbek Airway's user reviews:

- "The London to Tashkent flight was ok, however the seats on the aircraft were broken. The food was rubbish the yogurt was out of date. Service very poor and shoddy. Cabin crew, ladies were ok but the men are typical Russians. Tashkent airport is worse than Amritsar, the toilets, sorry shall i say what toilets."

- "I have flown with this airline a few times and am always intrigued by the two male flight attendents or flight crew members who laze around in business or first class for the entire journey. I only see them opening and closing the doors. What do they do?"

- "Very uncomfortable landings as it appears these former Russian pilots are not fully trained to fly the Boeing aircraft."

- "the plane was carrying a huge spare aircraft tire in the passenger cabin. The jet had it's auxillary power engine turned on, which is located under the fuselage, so when we ran from the terminal to the jet it was absolutely deafeningly loud - I mean so loud I had to stop running and cover my ears. But the plane didn't crash, so that's a positive aspect."

- "Didn't serve vegetarian food. Plane was dirty and unpleasant foul smell (urine) throughout the flight."

- "I love how the staff use their cell phones during the flight - very reassuring."


***
On a separate note:
With the beginning of Scooter Libby's trial, I have one thing to mention. Doesn't it seem odd that there's all this fuss about exposing a CIA operative whose codename was her maiden name? Come on, not exactly deep cover here! I know, I know, the deal is whether or not he lied, and exposing an operative is never good, but I fail to grasp how this was such a travesty in the first place. If you're some secret intelligence cell out there and you can't figure out who this Valerie Plame person might be, y'aren't exactly trying.

we don't pop collars, we pop dollars

I'm watching The Wire and yeah, it's as good as everyone says. One drug-dealing kid explains to two like-minded guys the rules of chess. "And what about those ball-headed bitches?" "Those? Those are pawns." Rad! I bet that's a linguistic first. Two other fun quotes gleaned from the written world:

"NOAA looked at the Air Force and said, 'Huh, goose-stepping fascists.' And the Air Force looked at NOAA and said, 'Fish-kissing tree huggers.'"

Yeah!

One more: "Condoms don't belong in school, and neither does Al Gore."

So I wrote this story about flying cars. A negative one, saying how they're just clunky and messy and kind of a bad idea. I picked on one particular engineering team, and for that I feel guilty. But the interesting part has been the fallout. The first response was a turbocharged tirade about how I'm totally wrong about everything, and I need to be peer-reviewed and possibly fired. That letter was written by some guy who spent his whole life designing flying cars for Ford. Awesome Ford, good investment there.

The next letter went something like this: "You're so right! Thanks for taking down those fraudy engineers. There's no science behind their fancy animations, not a prototype in sight! My flying car, however, is AMAZING! It's already almost really here! Check it out, you'll be blown away!!"

The next three were all in the same vein: Thank you for writing this story, I am a flying car designer, tell me what you think of my model. wtf?

Who knew there were all these closeted--but opinionated--flying car designers out there. I thought I'd interviewed them all.

I got nuthin else to report this week. I spent one whole day drawing some dude's right hand holding a door knob, badly, and two days writing and taping my radio thing on the native american canadian indians, or whatever you call native americans not living in "america" who carry around little cards that say they're officially "indian." The rest of the week was lost to a foggy haze of brain. current reading: still "angle of repose" by wallace stegner, and the collected works of IEEE Internet Computing.

Now I'm watching Weeds. Best show EVER.

hey there, 2007

from a conversation this morning:

SU: say, there's a christmas tree on top of the bookcase.
HS: yeah, you put it there.
SU: who puts a christmas tree on top of a bookcase??
HS: you do.
SU: why??
HS: it seemed like a good idea? it looked lonely on the sidewalk? you were drunk.

I'd have to say the best part of New Year's Eve, despite all the weird and fun episodes of the night, was the barely sentient pizza-eating at 5am on Houston. If not for that, Monday would have been far worse... at least I was capable of walking today. [another artifact of the evening--i shouldn't post this publicly, but it's just too odd. if someone who's asked you out a million times but also thinks you're a schizophrenic lesbian tries to set you up with their (male) friend, what does that mean? is it a test or an olive branch? and if it is a test, how do you "prove" you're not a lesbian? not that I'd want to, it all seems too devious for my taste. I much prefer the peace offering theory, that it was all a bygones-be-bygones kind of thing.]

I was hoping to do a 2006 top-ten songs and albums, but it's looking less likely as January rolls along. However, Nelly Furtado, if you're reading this, please for the love of god stick with Timbaland! Nothing better could have happened to your career. I even admitted I liked "Promiscuous" and "Maneater" in front of my snobby music-clubbing friends. Our year-end meeting was a big one for revelations. Some members admitted their fondness of the Dixie Chicks, others derided them. The one guy who always plays long math-rock anthems played long math-rock anthems that everyone else hated. All agreed we liked this year's Camera Obscura album.

Also, my vote for person of the year goes to Justin Timberlake. Between "My Love" and "Dick in a Box," the man provided more legitimate entertainment than any celebrity since Garth Brooks brushed his bangs and became the lite-rockin' Chris Gaines. (Honorable mentions for '06 antics go to Britney Spears and Mel Gibson.)

Today's playlist: Josh Ritter, Emily Haines, Malajube, The Knife. Not that those make any sense together...