Keep telling yourself that Lyle would never maul us or steal our picnic chicken just to warm his cold blood. Thanks also to Pieter of PeakTalk and fabulous Karol of Alarming News for listing this dwarf along with the brighter clusters at the OSM cocktail hang. So, right back atcha linkwise. Karol actually lives in the hood (UES signify ya'll!), and since I enjoyed meeting them so much, I am exploring both their fine blogs to cherry pick stuff to steal, I mean, highlight entries of special interest and claim the ideas for my own.
1) This'll be my last post on OSM for the moment. Maybe it's because I've been a part of ventures, some flops but also some tremendous successes, and I know how harum-scarum things can be at the start. Even in the middle. I also have many friends with their own businesses, and you have to lean out over your skis if you want to land well. I'm going to wait and see with OSM, and I do have my own ideas that I think would make the portal more lively and usable. We'll see if they e-mail me for suggestions. However, I have to say when Althouse- a day after I did, thanks kindly- makes the underpants gnomes reference, I suspected she might be diguising herself by reading my blog through a relay site I associate with my mother, or the other five or six of you.
Actually, the comparison is not such a reach that I didn't expect someone else might make it, but where some see it as a negative, perhaps believing new ventures spring perfected into being as if from Zeus' head, I see it as the normal state of affairs at this stage. And it's not as if OSM has to retool a factory, retrain employees, or recall train cars of freight from Omaha to make changes. Some of the greatest developments in science and industry have been made by people collecting the underpants without being sure what to do with them. Entrepreneurial experimentalism can be tough to live through, and it's understandable why some people didn't want to ride on a haywagon that could be barreling toward catastrophe. Okay- not catastrophe, but professional embarrassment and potential lost revenue for participants and lost funds for the VC.
But to hear so many people making cracks as if concerned for the plight of the allegedly deluded VCs? Since when does everyone care so much that a venture capital firm might lose money on one part of its risk-adjusted portfolio? No children of VCs are going to have to pawn their Big Wheels, so relax.
Synchronistically, I just got a call from an old friend who's helped found a couple successful businesses and now does planning and development for an established firm. He Amen'd the opinions above, and told me he used the underpants illustration in his own company's presentation about their future strategies. Ha! For people who are natively entrepreneurial, the underpants stage is expected, exciting, and sometimes the most fun. Things will happen. I'll stand back and let them.
2) UComics feeds a selected pile to the Yahoo comics section. I won't lie. It's a daily destination. However, I was recently shocked and distraut to find that the Joe Martin strips, Mr. Boffo and Willy and Ethel, were dropped without preamble or explanation. I like the off-center cut of Martin's comedic jib, and for a guy drawing the epically lazy Willy, my personal idol, I must admire his Guiness placement as the Most Prolific Comic Strip Artist. He creates over 1300 strips a year with as many golden nuggets of delight among them as I find anywhere. Now I must read him at his own page and shake my finger at Ucomics.
3) This is a story about one guy finding one company with one highly efficient product and coordinating with one charity to get amazing high-tech blankets to earthquake victims in wintery Pakistan.
"Because the situation is so enormous, do not necessarily conclude that you can have no effect. The question is, how do you make it small enough, how do you make it simple enough… The question is whether you can find your own part."
4) So earnest today, so outraged, you may be thinking. Well, let's leaven it with croc talk, alligatalk even.
- A 135 million year-old crocodile found in Argentina has the head of a dinosaur with the tail of a fish. Dakosaurus andiniensis is nicknamed Godzilla.
- Scrolling down these reports from Gainesville, you'll learn that alligators can't resist Zaxby's spicy chicken. I see a new ad campaign where the bored Tastebuds in their pink body suits fight alligators for possession.
- If you give your cartoon crocodile a name that rhymes with a powerful cleric's, you get jailed in Iran.
- Though a Thai woman committed suicide by jumping into a croc pit, a 60-year old Australian saved her fellow camper by jumping on an attacking croc's back.
- Concerning this pack of dogs versus a crocodile, I must repeat the gruesome image warning. Oh don't be such a weenie. Look already.
HAPPY WEEKEND!
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