Space Invaders

Extra Lulav and Etrog - Taken

Update: They've been claimed. Chag sameach!

We ordered a set for the semi-obscure Jewish holiday of Sukkot online from a Judaica store in New York. They sent two by accident, so I'd be glad to give a set away to someone who wants one.

How does one find an online lulav seller? I did a search on Boston.com for lulav etrog, and didn't find exactly what I wanted - but the Google Ads were spot on, with competing lulav merchants.

Rabbit, Run redux

I recently finished re-reading Rabbit, Run by John Updike, which I first read at age 20 or so (after interviewing Updike, I felt I really should read some of his books, which was probably the opposite of how I should have done it).

So now that I'm a lot older, and it struck me how young Rabbit was, and how young Updike was. The prose is a lot flashier, the sex a lot more euphemistic and flashier too. I found Rabbit even more unsympathetic: perhaps because now, I could understand his choice about family, and realize what a shmuck he was about it. But it was a compelling portrait of a young man coming to grips with the reality of growing up. Is he redeemed? Perhaps. Rabbit, Redux may tell me.

SE Spam Mystery

Well, I was following up to see why I got a site referral on the query "the abrahms that do infomercials" (now I'll do really well on that query, although I still don't know who that might be, and obviously a search engine is auto-correcting my name), when I saw that the results were filled with odd Chinese pages filled with words and no content.

I thought it might be search engine spamming, but I don't understand how - because there are no links from the page. Nor even a title tag. So there's no way that PageRank can be gained or distributed, that I can see. It's puzzling me.

Startups in Boston?

Scott Kirsner writes in the Globe today about how Boston can't keep companies like Facebook from heading to Silicon Valley, with an argument that basically says that local VC's aren't daring enough to fund them (with an added measure that Silicon Valley is attractive in and of itself.

It was interesting to read this article in tandem with today's NYTBR article on how Alfred A. Knopf rejected many famous books over the years. If renowned editors trying to evaluate something relatively cut-and-dried like the quality of a history book are often wrong, it's not surprising that VC's are often wrong on something as tenuous as evaluating a brand-new Web 2.0 company.

The difference between Boston and the Valley may be simply the depth of the bench. In the publishing world, "The Diary of Anne Frank" could be shopped around to 15 publishers before one took the risk. In the Valley VC world, that could happen to. In Boston, you'd run out of options before then.

Fun Correction

From today's Boston Globe:

Because of a reporting error, a Page One story in some editions yesterday about the TV series "Curious George" misidentified Arthur, the main character of another PBS show. Arthur is an aardvark, not a mouse.

I'll have to report it to Regret the Error, the correction blog.