Sex beats stocks

About a month ago, I contacted one of the founders of Kickstarter about using it to raise funds for a due diligence trip to Alloy Steel International's headquarters in Perth. I wrote,

I know from the Kickstarter site that you're currently only accepting projects through invitations, but I think mine is probably a little different than your typical request, so perhaps you'll make an exception (or connect me with someone who has an invitation to share?). Here's the idea.

I went on to explain that everyone who donated at least $100 to the trip would get a detailed report (one that didn't offer any financial advice and complied with all relevant securities regulations). Those who donated more (say, $300) would get the report along with a conference call with me where they could ask me additional questions, etc. The Kickstarter founder I contacted thought it was an interesting idea referred me to his staff members who review ideas for inclusion on the site.

One of those staff members sent me a rejection note a few days later. She wrote that "projects must also engage the community and offer tangible rewards".

I hadn't thought about that much in recent weeks. I've had my hands full with the launch of Portfolio Armor and a few other things, plus after my conversation with Alloy Steel exec Greg Muller followed by the company's revenue release earlier this month, I feel less of an immediate need to go to Perth. But I was reminded of this by an e-mail from a fellow AYSI shareholder yesterday. So I went to Kickstarter's website to copy its URL to paste in my e-mail reply and saw on the homepage this project, that did pass muster with the staff (and has raised more than double its goal in donations so far):

Coming & Crying: real stories about sex from the other side of the bed

About this project

Meaghan and Melissa (or,¹ "we") met because of the internet and writing, and writing about sex (and blogging about writing about sex). Almost since then, we've been talking about how we need to do a book like this: a collection of stories (and photographs) from the messy, awkward, hilarious, painful, and ultimately true side of sex.

As part of this project, all of the money we raise together will go towards producing the book and to paying its contributors. The more we bring in, the more we can put out -- a prettier book, bigger take-home for our writers and photographers, and fancier packages for all those who pledge.

There's a ~2 minute video at the link above that gives you a better idea of what these two gals are working on.

I feel like a knucklehead now. I could have proposed as a project a documentary about sex in Perth, with its own alliterative title -- "Sexual Perversion in Perth" (betting that none of the Gen Yers on the Kickstarter staff would be familiar with Mamet play that title rips off) -- and then if I got accepted and funded, did my due diligence on Alloy Steel surreptitiously while I was down there.

¹That's a "comma of apposition" for you aspiring grammarians out there.

Traveling without moving

Thursday afternoon, while working on my laptop at a local Starbucks, I ended up having a conversation with a couple nearby. It turned out they were from Paris, in the U.S. on vacation. Nothing too odd about that, but this particular Starbucks was tucked into a stretch of U.S. Route 46 chockablock with hubcap shops, fast food restaurants, hourly-rate motels, used car lots, a couple of BYO strip clubs, and a recently-demolished massage parlor. I go to that Starbucks sometimes because it gets a lot of late afternoon sunlight, but it's not somewhere I'd think of taking friends from out of town. Not exactly a tourist hotspot.

The couple explained that they had taken a year off to travel around the U.S., and had bought a used minivan (for $3k) at a used car lot near that Starbucks last spring. Now they were back after circling round the country and taking a detour into Mexico. They were planning to drive up to Canada for a couple of weeks to renew their tourist visas, but first they wanted to take their new American friend -- the guy who sold them the minivan -- out for a nice French dinner.

They asked if I knew any good French restaurants and I gave them a few ideas, and then let them borrow my laptop to book a hotel for the night. The husband gave me his business card: back in Paris he's a rédacteur en chef of a magazine. His wife was an editor too. The night before, I had been arguing with Trumwill on his blog that the class distinctions he and one of his guest bloggers frequently make are mostly pointless, partly because the demarcations they try to draw are so porous. And here, as if to underline my point, were two Parisian journalists befriending an American used car dealer.

Recently, on the 4HWW forums, someone mentioned CouchSurfer.org, a site built to connect couch surfers with hosts willing to let them sleep on their couches. In one of the testimonials on that site, a host said that hosting a foreign couch surfer was like "traveling without moving". Meeting that French couple in the Little Ferry Starbucks reminded me of that line, which in turn reminded me of where I'd first heard it: in Dune. Embedding is disabled for this one, but click the link and see 1:47-1:57 of the clip.

Dune: Folding Space

A paradox of atheism

Ben Stein's documentary Expelled, about the censuring of scientists who speculate about intelligent design, was on cable this weekend. I had it on while I was doing some work on my laptop. Toward the end of the film, Stein interviewed the famous atheist Richard Dawkins, and asked him how life began. Dawkins conceded that no one knew, but said it was possible that some advanced civilization elsewhere in the universe had initially seeded life here on Earth¹. Stein was too satisfied with this admission of the possibility of some form of intelligent design by Dawkins to ask the more interesting follow up questions. For example, if some alien civilization seeded life here, who seeded life there -- or is it turtles all the way down²?

¹This idea was dramatized, in Epcot Center fashion, in one of the favorite movies of occasional commenter Y./The Rivers.

²You could raise the same objection about theistic or deistic explanations, as Bertrand Russell did in his quote on that Wikipedia page, but the point -- and the paradox -- is that atheists still end up faced with incredible stories to explain enduring mysteries. How fun can Flying Spaghetti Monster mockery be when your alternative explanation is space aliens?

High-end chef adapts to new economy

Hat tip to Cheryl for this article from NJ.com about how Craig Shelton, the chef/owner¹ of what was once New Jersey's most expensive (and one of its best reviewed²) restaurants, The Ryland Inn, is now working in a diner. About nine years ago occasional commenter Y./TheRivers, who had won a $150-off coupon to the restaurant, treated me to dinner there for my birthday. If memory serves, he ended up paying $350+ out of pocket, even after getting the $150 off -- and we had ordered the less expensive of the two wine pairings offered for the tasting menu. We did get a couple of free cigars from the chef though, when he found out that Y. and him belonged to the same secret society/fraternal organization. From the NJ.com article,

The Skylark Fine Diner and Lounge on Route 1, with its 60s airport lounge-meets-the-Jetsons interior — flying saucer-shaped lights, retro tables and chairs, and clocks showing the time in Tokyo, Moscow, Paris, London and elsewhere — is one of the more striking diners in a state that boasts more than any other.

But still, a top chef in a Jersey diner? What’s he going to do, offer $25 patty melts?

Far from it.

Shelton, the Skylark’s guest chef, has added dozens of eclectic, globe-spanning, reasonably-priced dishes to the diner’s menu since early September. Constantine Katsifis, the Skylark’s owner, says he and Shelton are "inventing a new category of diner."

"The restaurant business across America is a horror show — down 60 percent, down 40 percent," Shelton said.

The thought of working in a diner makes Shelton laugh heartily.

"But it’s a good idea for any chef ... to have a more diversified portfolio."

After a water line break shut down the Ryland Inn in early 2007, Shelton was working on his high-end coffee line and ideas for food-related TV projects when Katsifis invited him to a restaurant trade show in Chicago.

I remember Shelton's high-end coffee line, from articles about it a couple of years ago. He was offering two types of coffee, actually: one allegedly blended and roasted for enjoyment on yachts and the other for stables. $20 per lb. for each, I believe. Back to the article,

Over dinner, Katsifis outlined a plan for the Skylark that was still evolving in his own mind.

"(There are) 20 chefs as accomplished as he is in the country," Katsifis said. "We came back from that meeting and decided to take the Skylark to the next level."

A commenter on at NJ.com wrote,

This is a welcome change. The French have bistros, the Italians trattorie and we have - diners.

NJ diners prove that anyone with a deep fryer, a can opener and a griddle can go into the business.

Well, not exactly. The most successful diners have loyal clientele who will only eat mediocre food from their favorite diner's deep fryer.

Edison is a little bit of a haul from here, but we'll have to head down there and check out the new Skylark diner.


¹A commenter on NJ.com writes that Shelton is no longer the owner of the Ryland Inn, having lost it to bankruptcy. I don't know if that's the case or not.

²From that link to the New York Times review:

Did I say words fail me? I seem to have gone on for five paragraphs about a tomato salad -- a dish you probably won't get to eat, by the way, for 9 or 10 months, the season having passed. But this is what it's like to eat at the Ryland Inn. You lose yourself in this food -- its colors, its textures, the way it works with the wine and the way the flavors seem to change and broaden with each mouthful.

[...]

Amid such riches it's easy to forget your surroundings. The 200-year-old inn, once a stagecoach stop on the road from New Brunswick to Easton, Pa., is a fine white clapboard building with Gothic touches and a green awning. The garden, open for strolling, occupies 2 of the inn's 50 acres; the rest is rolling pasture shaded by ancient trees. On a clear weekend afternoon in the fall, watching hot-air balloons drift over the forested hills of Hunterdon County, you can imagine yourself in France.

Hunterdon County is old money horse country (unlike hardscrabble Sussex County, where this pony lives).

New Mexico soccer brawler speaks

Yahoo! Sports reports that Elizabeth Lambert, star of the clip in this post, "Girl's soccer gets rough", was interviewed by the New York Times about her exploits during that game against BYU: Vilified New Mexico soccer player breaks her silence. Excerpt:

The junior was deluged with calls and letters after the video went viral. Some of those were threats, but others came from men who wanted to ask her out. She was disgusted by both.

The screen cap above, of Lampert drilling a BYU player in the back, accompanied the Yahoo! article. If memory serves though, that shot at least was in retaliation for an elbow strike. That video featured more blatant stuff by Lambert than that.

Coates and Co. on The White City

There's a spirited discussion on Ta-Nehisi Coates's Atlantic blog about Aaron Renn's essay The White City, and Renn himself stops by to join in the conversation. In his essay, Renn noted that many cities such as Portland and Seattle that are praised for their progressiveness have something in common: few African Americans. One objection Coates raised to Renn's argument was that Renn excluded large cities such as New York that do have significant African American populations and of course also attract young progressives. In response, I noted that many of the soi dissant young progressives in New York end up congregating in trendy neighborhoods that are far less diverse than the city as a whole.

I made a similar comment in the comment thread following Renn's essay and linked to a post of mine from earlier this year that included the photo above, from a New York Times article on the burgeoning culinary entrepreneurship movement in Brooklyn. I noted that the photo gave a sense of the sort of diversity one might find in some of the trendier neighborhoods in New York City.

Pure Genius

Star Trek II condensed into a 90 second Italian opera, via Robot Chicken.

Incidentally, the first time I searched for this, I couldn't find it (I forgot the title was in Italian). This was the error message.

Star

A comment on Fred Wilson's blog about Jim Carroll's recent passing reminded me of the Cult song that was featured on the film version of Carroll's The Basketball Diaries. I didn't know there was a video for the song, but here it is, via YouTube. The silver-clad model is supposed to evoke the Lady Liberty, I suppose, but she reminds me a little of the robot from Metropolis.

The Ear Inn

We met family friends for dinner last night at a historic dive in SoHo called The Ear Inn (pictured above¹). Last week, I had seen a Guardian article on the "50 best things to eat in the world"; number three on that list was the burger at a New York City restaurant called Little Owl. George, an old friend of my parents, enjoys a good burger, so I invited him to join us. It turned out that Little Owl doesn't offer burgers for dinner, so George suggested the Ear Inn. An old man, he enjoys visiting old places. His son Jimmy joined us.

The family loves meat: Jimmy mentioned he was taking a charcuterie class at the French Culinary Institute in town. He wants to learn how to age his own steaks. He made an interesting point about burgers -- an obvious one, in hindsight, but an interesting one nonetheless: places that cook all their burgers well done (e.g., Five Guys, In-and-Out Burger, etc.) ought to be considered in a separate category from restaurants where you can get burgers cooked to order. That's a distinction Matt and I didn't make when we listed our top five burger places². Jimmy also noted how difficult it is for restaurants to do something seemingly so simple: consistently cook a burger to order. I mentioned that celebrity chef Bobby Flay's Burger Palace doesn't seem to be able to do this. His stated M.O. is to cook the burgers medium but you have good odds of getting your burger bloody or overcooked instead. The Ear Inn cooked our medium burgers the way we ordered them. Good burger, but no fries: there's no fryer in the cramped kitchen.

¹The writing on the wall in the photo, next to the arrow, says that the blue line represents the water's edge of the island as it was in 1766.

²Matt's been too busy to post regularly on his eating blog, thanks in part to Launching Innovation, but if he reads this post, he'll have another two burger places to check out when the dust settles.

Alive in Jo'Berg

Hat tip to a commenter on Ta-Nehisi Coates's Atlantic blog for bringing this to my attention. Here's the six minute short Neil Blomkamp made in 2005, four years before the release of District 9:

District 9

We saw this movie earlier tonight and I highly recommend it. It was the best movie I've seen in a while. I was going to post a trailer for the film below, but the trailers I saw give away too many plot points, in my opinion (and the one that features interviews with the principals is more tendentious than the movie). I'm glad I didn't see them before I saw the movie, and I'd recommend you don't see them first either.

One nice thing about the movie, incidentally (don't worry, no spoilers follow) is that I didn't recognize any of the actors, who I assume are all South Africans. That enhanced the movie's documentary style. If the Peter Jackson (or whoever produces the inevitable sequel) is smart, he'll resist the temptation to stock the sequel with marquee name actors (I bet Charlize Theron's agent is already making calls). I doubt it though.

Three Books for Entrepreneurs

From venture capitalist Fred Wilson's blog:

Books For Entrepreneurs

Last week an entrepreneur named Stephen who reads this blog regularly asked me for recommendations that budding entrepreneurs should read. I gave him a list and then forwarded it to my friends Brad Feld and Jerry Colonna who I knew would appreciate the list.

That led to this post by Brad where he lists his top three book suggestions for entrepreneurs. Go read that post. It's great.

As I was reading Brad's post, I realized that I should have shared my list with everyone, not just Stephen.

So here it is:

Kavalier and Clay

Atlas Shrugged


The Prince (Machiavelli)

any and all of shakespeare's tragedies and histories

Brad's suggestion of Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance is a great one and I'll include that in the future when asked this question.

The point of this list is that there is way more insight to be gained from stories than from business books. And these are some amazing stories.

I was surprised to see Michael Chabon's novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay recommended in this context, but I thought it was an impressive novel. About two thirds of the way through, Chabon throws in a brilliant twist that sends the narrative in an unexpected, and ultimately quite moving, direction for the next forty pages or so. Worth reading.

I have been too harsh

I have been too harsh in a few recent posts. Specifically:

- "How to Promote an Online Business": I was a little too sharp with this PR man. He did raise some good questions in our phone conversation last week, and although the services he subsequently offered me weren't what I was looking for, our conversation did spur me to do some more research on topics he brought up. Also, I should remember that most business services vendors are geared toward big corporate clients instead of entrepreneurs, and for good reason. Entrepreneurs tend to be more results-oriented and tight-fisted, and less likely to be in business a few months from now. All good reasons to focus on selling to big corporate clients instead. Sorry, M.

- "Get Mad You Sons of Bitches" and "A Critique of Pointless Blogging". In both cases, I could have shared my criticisms and suggestions via e-mail first, or, just kept them to myself, I guess. There's an old saying about the folly of offering advice: wise men don't need it and fools won't head it. That saying is probably right about the folly of giving advice, but perhaps not precise enough in the reasons why offering advice is often folly. Neither of the subjects of those two posts were fools: Stearns has an MBA from a top-20 school (Georgetown) and Persky has a degree from MIT. Being intelligent, though, doesn't necessarily make you receptive to advice or criticism. You have to be ready to hear it. This I know from experience. I've had friends who meant well give me good advice in the past, and watch me ignore it because I simply wasn't ready to hear it. So it shouldn't be a surprise to me that Persky deleted my comments on his blog, and continues to paste in filler text without offering any of his own insight or other commentary, or links to the original sources.

Being unemployed and looking for work, as Persky and Stearns are, is, in a sense, a form of purgatory. A quote from a film comes to mind here [consider this a half-assed spoiler alert: the film, Jacob's Ladder, is nearly 20 years old, but if you haven't seen it by now stop reading here]. Before I get to that quote, take a minute and three quarters to watch the original trailer for the movie, to set the table for it:



OK, now here's the quote, from a character named Louis (played by Danny Aiello) who is the protagonist's (played by Tim Robbins) chiropractor/friend/guardian angel:

Louis: Eckhart saw Hell too. He said: The only thing that burns in Hell is the part of you that won't let go of life, your memories, your attachments. They burn them all away. But they're not punishing you, he said. They're freeing your soul. So, if you're frightened of dying and... and you're holding on, you'll see devils tearing your life away. But if you've made your peace, then the devils are really angels, freeing you from the earth.

Similarly, in a non-eschatological sense, sometimes the trappings and pretensions of your old life need to burn away before you can move on.

More Robot Chicken: Not for the Easily Offended

In the previous post I mentioned the show Robot Chicken. These are two of the funnier clips I've seen on the show. Don't watch if you are offended by scatalogical humor or cartoon violence.

John Hussman, Kool-Aid, Jonestown, Robot Chicken

In his market commentary today, Dr. Hussman mentions he has re-established his "anti-hedge" of index call options comprising 1% of his equity fund's assets. He then offers this comment:

Frankly, our call option allocation here is something of a paean to a notion – a sustained economic recovery and new bull market – that I have no belief in whatsoever. But at this point, the broad strength in the major indices, even lacking volume sponsorship or favorable valuation, requires that we allow for the possibility of additional investor speculation.

[...]

[E]stablishing investment exposure here with anything but call options amounts to a game of trying to “ride” the market higher and to get out before it returns to or below current levels. With the market strenuously overbought already, that game strikes me as exquisitely difficult to get right. Hence the use of a modest allocation to call options only, without closing our downside hedges.

Call me skeptical. But if you look carefully at the economic data that shows improvement, and correct for the impact of government outlays, it is difficult to find anything but continued deterioration in private demand and investment. What we do see is a government that has run what is now a trillion dollar deficit year-to-date, representing some 7% of GDP. That sort of tab will undoubtedly buy some amount of Cool-Aid, but it has been something of a disappointment to watch how eagerly investors have guzzled it down. It is not at all clear that short-term, deficit-financed improvement necessarily implies sustained growth in the context of a deleveraging cycle. This is like somebody borrowing money from their Uncle and then celebrating that their income has gone up.

Dr. Hussman, who I assume didn't grow up drinking Kool-Aid¹, misspells the name of the drink. For those who are unfamiliar with this beverage, here's a Kool-Aid commercial from the 1970s:



And here are few spoofs of those Kool-Aid spots by the guys at Robot Chicken². You Tube only had this Russian-dubbed version, but you don't need to understand Russian to get the joke (though it does help to know that, in the middle skit, the characters have just survived a nuclear war in a fallout shelter); you just have to have seen one of the original commercials:




¹The phrase "drinking the Kool-Aid" of course comes from the mass suicide at Jonestown, but according to Wikipedia, the cult members drank poisoned Flavor Aid, not Kool-Aid.

²I just discovered this show recently, which is often funny and original. It includes a lot of parodies that will resonate with Gen-Xers.

Weird NJ

Last week, fishermen found the body of a two year old infant in a plastic bag in the Passaic River. It turns out that this body was disinterred from its grave in Connecticut. Who would dig up the body of an infant girl in Connecticut and dump it in a river in North Jersey? Apparently, practitioners of "Palo Mayombe". According to the Record ("Police: 'Miracle baby' might have been stolen from grave as part of ritual"):

STAMFORD, Conn. – The body of a child ripped from her grave in Connecticut and found floating in the Passaic River may have been stolen for use in a ritual by practitioners of an obscure religion who prized the “miracle” girl.

[...]

“We’re seeing this as a ritualistic type of theft of the body,” said Capt. Richard Conklin of the Stamford Police Department.

Imani was born in 2004 with semilobar holoprosencephaly, a rare condition that kept her brain from fully developing. She wasn’t expected to live; the condition often causes babies to die before birth or shortly after.

Yet she survived two and a half years. Doctors hailed her as a miracle baby, and her short life was chronicled by the Stamford Advocate newspaper.

“We think that’s the hook,” Conklin said. “That the people practicing these beliefs sought that power, that mystic nature of this child.”

Conklin cited Palo Mayombe, a belief system that originated in Central Africa in which sticks and human bones and skulls are used to summon spirits. Palo Mayombe is sometimes referred to as the dark cousin of Santeria, a Caribbean blend of West African beliefs and ancient Catholicism often connected with animal sacrifices.

The Record quotes a local professor who worries that people might demonize Palo Mayombe:

Peter Savastano, a professor at Seton Hall University, cautioned that there is a tendency in Western Christian-oriented cultures to demonize African-diasporic religious traditions.

“I’m immediately suspicious that [people] are kind of demonizing of these traditions that are not easily understood by mainstream Americans,” he said.

To his credit, Record columnist Mike Kelly rejects Prof. Savastano's appeal to cultural relativism. In his column ("Who steals the body of a child?"), Kelly writes,

[I]n a nation that cherishes freedom of religion, what do we make of this? Is there a place in our diverse and open society to allow the theft of a baby's body as a form of religious expression? Or can we call this what it really is – barbaric?

Reworking a Classic

Cheryl picked this up from Barnes & Noble today:



Clever idea by this Grahame-Smith fellow. I bet it's much easier to add zombies and ninjas to a classic novel no longer protected by copyright than it is to write a book from scratch. Why work harder than you have to? From the back of the book:

Complete with romance, heartbreak, swordfights, cannibalism, and thousands of rotting corpses, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies transforms a masterpiece of world literature into something you'd actually want to read.

JANE AUSTEN is the author of Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion, Mansfield Park, and other masterpieces of English literature. SETH GRAHAME-SMITH once took a class in English literature. He lives in Los Angeles

The book includes a "Reader's Discussion Guide" for book clubs, which includes the following question:

6. Some critics have suggested that the zombies represent the authors' views toward marriage -- an endless curse that sucks the life out of you and just won't die. Do you agree, or do you have another opinion about the symbolism of the unmentionables?

A Colombian Tradition Comes to NJ

An article earlier this week in the Record of Northern NJ ("Stupidity on Wheels") mentioned that Bergen County police pulled over a multicolored bus after they saw debris being thrown out the windows of the bus, causing drivers of other cars to swerve. The bus, it turned out, was outfitted with a dance floor, deejay booth, and bar, and was full of high school students for Morristown partying after their prom. A Record column today by Mike Kelly explains the origin of this tradition:

The bus, owned by La Chiva Way, is a “chiva” – a term that describes rolling party buses that are common in rural Columbia. The firm’s website advertises itself as the “best party on wheels.”

Kelly also notes an immigration angle to this story:

A few hours later, the phone range at the home of Diana Mejia, a Morristown-based immigration advocate. The caller was one of the students on the bus – and here the story takes an intriguing turn.

Mejia says the student – and others who called later — were not so much concerned about the penalty for underage drinking, though Mejia adds that the students said they did not drink. Rather, Mejia said the students worried that the attention from the prom bus might lead police to discover that some of their relatives in Morristown were illegal immigrants.

Many of the students, were from Morristown’s burgeoning Latino community, said Mejia, who works the American Friends Service Committee and the Wind of the Spirit immigration group.

“Some of the kids may be documented,” said Mejia, using a term that refers to a person’s immigration status. “But their parents may not be. Remember, these are mixed families.”

The photo above, of disc jockey Ricardo Silva, left, of Jackson Heights, N.Y., and party bus promoter Jean Balcazar of College Point, N.Y., waiting to be called in municipal court in Hackensack, accompanied Mike Kelly's column online and is credited to Elizabeth Lara of the Record. The two men were smiling in the photo of them that accompanied Kelly's column in the dead tree edition of the paper today.

How to Borrow Money and Network at the Same Time

The Styles section of Sunday's New York Times featured an article about Unithrive, an organization founded by the three Harvard alumni pictured above to connect students seeking small loans with alumni lenders, "I’m Going to Harvard. Will You Sponsor Me?". The maximum dollar amount of the loans is fairly small: $2,000 -- an amount a college student could accumulate with a part-time job, or put on his credit card, if need be. Money isn't the main issue here; bonding with alumni is. As the article notes,

The appeal of direct donor-to-student loans, Unithrive’s founders say, is that alumni will have a personal connection to current students: those requesting loans list hometowns, majors and classes they have taken. Alumni can lend to students with whom they feel a bond. They are promised updates three times a year from students they support — not unlike the letters that sponsors of poor children in Africa receive through the Christian Children’s Fund.

This is a clever idea, based on an old, counter-intuitive principal of human nature: the quickest way to make someone your friend is not to do him a favor, but to ask him to do a favor for you. That this was the brainchild of Harvard alumni isn't surprising considering that Harvard seems to have the most effective alumni network of any elite school. Perhaps that's because it attracts students who are savvier and more aggressive about networking than those who attend other schools. Other elite schools may have similar academic prestige (e.g., MIT) or a similar Ivy League pedigree (e.g., Penn), but their alumni don't seem to have a network in the same league. If they did, then, presumably, an MIT alumnus wouldn't have had to resort to wearing a sandwich board in Midtown Manhattan to get a new job, and Atlantic blogger and Penn (and University of Chicago GSB) alumna Megan McCardle wouldn't have recently posted her latest lamentation about how she couldn't afford to go out with her friends while she was unemployed after earning her MBA.

As smart as this idea is, Unithrive co-founder Joshua Kushner, whom the article describes as "a scion of a wealthy real estate family", may get some heat from some New York Times letter writers for his apparent disdain for the sort of jobs many college students work part time for extra cash:

Mr. Kushner noted that the college still asks scholarship students to contribute a few thousand dollars a year from summer and school-term jobs.

“I have friends who would spend 10 hours a week when they are not in class working at a coffee shop or in the dorms,” said Mr. Kushner, 24, referring to time that he considered wasteful. “I think the most special thing about college is not just what you do in class, but what you do out of class.”

I doubt Mr. Kushner will be troubled by any opprobrium from lumpen letter-writers though, and he may be right not to be troubled by it: working a mundane part-time job might teach a college student humility, but what Harvard student needs humility when he can get the money interest free for 5 years and build a bond with potential alumni mentors at the same time?

The image above, of Unithrive founders Nimay Mehta, left, Joshua Kushner and Tanuj Parikh, accompanied the article and was credited to Michael Falco.

Puerto Rican Day Parade

The National Puerto Rican Day Parade is taking place today in New York City. A few years ago, we headed into Manhattan on a Sunday without realizing it was Puerto Rican Day. We figured it out as soon as we were jammed in traffic on the 79th Street transverse, as Puerto Ricans waving their flags filtered by us. I had forgotten about this until I hit Google while writing this post, but there was a Seinfeld episode that featured the main characters stuck in traffic due to the Puerto Rican Day Parade. From The New York Times:

Faced with criticism from the leader of a Puerto Rican organization who found the ''Seinfeld'' episode on Thursday insulting, NBC apologized yesterday, saying it had not intended to offend anyone.

The second-to-last ''Seinfeld'' featured Jerry, Elaine, George and Kramer driving back from a Mets game and getting stuck in a traffic jam created by the Puerto Rican Day parade. At one point, Kramer tossed a sparkler and accidentally lighted a Puerto Rican flag on fire. He tried putting out the burning flag by stomping on it.

Angry paradegoers then began chasing Kramer. When they lost him, the mob began shaking Jerry's empty car and threw it down a stairwell. Kramer remarked that ''it's like this every day in Puerto Rico.''

The scene was an ''unconscionable insult'' to Puerto Ricans, said the president of the National Puerto Rican Coalition, Manuel Mirabal.

''It is unacceptable that the Puerto Rican flag be used by 'Seinfeld' as a stage prop under any circumstances,'' Mr. Mirabal said.

The Bronx Borough President, Fernando Ferrer, who is Puerto Rican, said the ''Seinfeld'' episode ''crossed the line between humor and bigotry.'' Mr. Ferrer said it was a slur to depict men rioting and vandalizing a car and suggesting that it happens every day in Puerto Rico.

As long as they keep holding the parade on the second Sunday each June, we won't make that mistake again. That's not a certainty, because the date of the National Puerto Rican Day Parade was chosen somewhat arbitrarily, as it's not based on any particular historical date. It isn't held on the anniversary of Puerto Rico's independence, because Puerto Rico isn't independent. That point was made, pithily and humorously, by The Onion a few years ago.