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 The food was rubbish the yogurt was out of date.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."


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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.