Oh my, worlds colliding! A friend of mine worked for him. Your assessment appears entirely accurate.
I've only ever heard of this guy in the context of him being a dick. E.g.
I get the sense that a bunch of Silicon Valley (the show) was taking the piss out of him.
Is he actually one of those assholes who tried to establish an offshore glibertarian paradise which is the basis for this joke, or is this just playing off that?
Well, this post certainly contains a lot of obscure references. It's like when you try to read the posts on a blog dedicated to a single sports team and the site has its own nicknames for every player and shorthand references for every event in the last 5 years and you have no idea what they're talking about.
8: I laughed at the person on my FB food who said yesterday, "I'm giving up for lent." Yes! I'm with you. Where do we lounge?
All the food in my FB feed is recipes for combining pre-packaged foods in alarming ways or my cousin humble bragging about something he made.
9: Peter Thiel is the major funder of Seasteading. That may be who you are thinking of. I followed them quite closely in the early years but gave up after it became clear they weren't really serious. They want to bring a floating glibertarian paradise into being fully formed. I pointed out on their mailing list that this is crazy and they should to start out with a small self sufficient floating colony of some sort and build out from there. The idea of enduring any kind of material deprivation in their quest for gliberty was met with horror.
I like Nutter Butter for their simplicity. Why do people have to complicate them.
Not sure "he only has 20 million dollars" is such a sick burn.
The author of the piece linked in the OP has an interesting site.
Don't click that if you plan to eat in the next few weeks.
19: I clicked, because I want to fast successfully in Lent.
Calacanis is a seriously weird guy; he's the most extreme, cranked-up, almost camp version of Silly Valley culture, but at the same time, he's a New Yorker and you'd be surprised at the balance in his career between actual tech startups and shouting the odds on the internet. Surprised. Well, shocked. Well, appalled.
I mean, here's Wikipedia:
Silicon Alley Reporter - "Calacanis's tireless socializing earned him a nickname as the "yearbook editor" of the Silicon Alley community" - ie he spent the .com boom ligging off the free booze and swag being an access journalist, and folded when the bust arrived. there are a lot of people who did that.
Weblogs, Inc - ie when blogging started he ligged and leeched off that, getting someone else to do the engineering and producing something actually! worse! than blogger! or livejournal!, and managed to flip it to AOL Time Warner because they were rich and clueless. They of course ran it into the ground.
Netscape.com - "Eight months into his tenure with AOL, Calacanis was offered a chance to be the General Manager of the new Netscape website. Calacanis used the model pioneered by Digg, Del.icio.us, and Furl and added an editorial layer to the system,"
note that he very much wasn't involved with Netscape when it was an actual technology company that made a web browser, although he likes to give the impression he was. instead he put some vaguely hip curlicues on a page AOL had for people who hadn't updated their PC since 1998 and pretended he was an entrepreneur when he was actually an AOL-Time Warner middle manager.
Sequoia Capital - "Until May, 2007, Calacanis had a role of "Entrepreneur in Action" at Sequoia Capital, one of Silicon Valley's leading venture capital firm, a position he held since December 2006" WAT I DON'T EVEN. What the fuck does that mean? What did he do all day?
Mahalo.com - "Calacanis founded Mahalo.com, a "human-powered search engine",[23] which launched in alpha test in May 2007." - so he copied Ask Jeeves. But in 2007.
In 2009, Calacanis founded the Open Angel Forum, an event that connects early stage startups with angel investors. - he put on a conference to hang around with the rich and the cool kids
ThisWeekinStartups - he put on a conference to hang around with the cool kids and the rich
LAUNCH Conference - he put on a conference to hang around with the cool kids and the rich. note a pattern?
Dyn - This is actually a real thing! It's the company that used to be called Renesys and it makes really useful BGP monitoring tools. Not that he had anything to do with this, as they started doing that before he joined the board.
this is pathetic, isn't it? there is nothing in there in the least bit innovative, useful, exciting, or even profitable as an actual business rather than a gig to screw around in. it's a whole career dedicated to standing near the bright people, as HST would have said, trying to look like you're with them.
also, it looks like his mini-VC fund mostly invests in....his own company. ah well at least he's only thieving from the rich.
And the OP is genuinely very funny. Thanks. It almost makes up for reminding me of Calacanis's existence.
I used to see his name back when I was reading Techcrunch (why?). The affect and easy bullshit is something, though I doubt he's even in the top 1% of dicks in Silicon Valley.
"Entrepreneur in Repose" seems like a good resume line to chase after.
This might just be because I spend too much time on twitter, but I found this to be pretty boring. Some SV guy is probably a jerk. Ok.
Even though I don't follow anyone who produces stuff like this directly, enough of this kind of thing gets retweeted by people who have otherwise interesting comments that I've had to mute something like 100 people to avoid having "X is a jerk" or "Y is a moron" show up all over my twitter feed.
Entrepreneur, Run
Entrepreneur Is Rich
Entrepreneur Redux
I don't think I have 100 people in my twitter feed.
Silicon Alley Reporter - "Calacanis's tireless socializing earned him a nickname as the "yearbook editor" of the Silicon Alley community"
I met him a number of times during this period. Awful. The fact that 23.last is probably correct is thoroughly depressing.
I keep coming back to reread 26, so thanks for that!
18: Her two previous blog articles about Wadhwa are really good, too (and also explain the airport references to Wadhwa in the OP).
Sral is a jerk. Retweet it, tweeters.
More: White Rapper Jason Calacanis Don't Need You Now, Baby
They should have used a dead squirrel too.
I had not realized until just the other day that squirrels frequently come in much larger sizes than the regular grey squirrels we have here. Now all of those hillbilly jokes make way more sense.
"Now, one time, this hillbilly come to find that he was crushed bodily beneath a squirrel..."
I had not realized until just the other day that squirrels frequently come in much larger sizes
By "the other day," maybe you mean February 2?
I didn't see a real groundhog until I was maybe 20. I had no idea they were that big.
I grew up thinking chipmunks and groundhogs were the same thing.
Actually this was regarding the horrifically large fox squirrels they apparently have in Iowa.
At some point I discovered that a bunch of people I know use the word "chipmunk" to describe ordinary-size squirrels with stripes. I can't remember the context. Maybe it's a regional thing--I was used to both squirrels and chipmunks being reasonably common sights when I was a kid.
I think you're too far to the left to win, if you're trying to run for president.
I didn't realize the there was a North American squirrel with stripes.
No striped tree squirrels around here, I don't think.
Maybe fox squirrels are what my dad has in his yard. I thought they were red squirrels, but wikipedia says they don't live near there.
I have a great book about squirrels that I should hunt out. The preface talks about how the former assistant of one of the authors (now curate of mammals at the Field Museum) used to shout "Sciuridae Forever!"
13 Lined Ground Squirrels are quite common here, and usually referred to as "chipmunks". I'm not sure I've ever seen an actual chipmunk in the wild.
According to Wikipedia, it is apparently the abundance of 13 Lined Ground Squirrels which led to MN becoming known as "The Gopher State." Which is stupid, as they aren't very similar to gophers.
Maybe it isn't technically a chipmunk, but it says they are less than a foot long. That's pretty small for squirrel.
Probably some kind of scurrilous plot on the part of the Iowans.
52: Those things are weird-looking. Not to be all judgmental about squirrels.
The ones in the city are barely 6 inches.
52: Also: "also known as ... the leopard-spermophile". Oh, right the leopard... what now?
I used to think chipmunk, ground squirrel, gopher, and ground hog were all the same thing. Now I only think the first three are the same thing. Or at least close enough that only a specialist need care about the difference.
"Ground squirrel" covers the category to which chipmunks and groundhogs both belong. A groundhog is a kind of marmot. Gophers are in a different family altogether.
They're ground squirrels, not squirrels.
All the animals come out at night: Sciuridae, Thomomys, Leopard-Spermophiles....
No, gophers aren't any kind of squirrel.
Who here has had squirrel? I had it once but in a pie, which mixed it with nonsense.
Ground squirrels are squirrels! The other kinds are tree squirrels.
63: Not if they don't apply themselves.
Antelope ground squirrels are very common at Chaco. Visitors would typically refer to them as "chipmunks," which we would correct because park rangers are pedantic.
Some acquaintances apparently ate a city-bred pigeon once. It was the most disgusting thing they'd ever eaten, according to reports. I can't imagine the squirrels would be much better.
65: I looked it up. Calling a "ground squirrel" a "gopher" is very common and therefore, unless you're a linguistic prescriptivist, right.
I've eaten turtle dove, which I think is the same thing as a pigeon. It tasted like quail, but it was not from a city. I've never eaten a squirrel.
But it's blurring a useful distinction! A gopher is a different animal altogether. Once you throw gophers into the mix, you might as well start broadening the squirrel category to include shrews and... what's that? IT'S MOLE!
Pigeons are rock doves, I believe.
Looking through Wikipedia a bit, it appears that squirrel taxonomy is basically a huge mess. Common names, traditional scientific names, and rigorously defined species based on genetic clades all result in totally different classifications.
If it's larger than a vole, and smaller than a capybara, it's probably a squirrel, according to Moby.
72: They are. I guess I don't know what to call birds either. What I ate is more usually called a mourning dove, though turtle dove is a commonly used name also. It's not even the same genus.
You don't lose any distinction if you split the gophers into gopher-gophers and ground squirrel gophers.
71: Well played, and still has to deal with the naked mole rat.
Ground squirrel might be good for burgers or sloppy joe but you want a nice fillet if you're trying to be classy.
I've had squirrel. Some slightly crunchy friends invited me for dinner and announced proudly that everything we were eating, apart from the mushrooms which had come from Tesco, had been produced by them on their allotment. The squirrels had been eating the broad beans; accordingly, we ate the squirrels. Not bad. Casseroled, if i remember.
They were willing to eat squirrels but not willing to grow their own mushrooms?
How did they kill the squirrel? I thought guns were hard to come by there and an allotment sounds like too confined of a place for shooting.
Truly the UK is an inscrutable and mysterious land.
You can't really grow mushrooms on an allotment, I think - don't you need a cellar? Which they didn't have.
I understand that they trapped the squirrels and then broke their necks.
See? We're really quite scrutable when you get to know us.
I don't want my head unscruted.
You don't need a cellar for mushrooms in a proper climate, i.e., one in which mushrooms grow in (on) the woods. I had thought Knifecrime Island was such a climate. You stack any cordwood not already showing fungi in a corner, inoculate them, eg with plug spawn on dowels, wait a few years and there you go.
I admit that I don't really know what "allotment" means in a British context; in my world it means something that certainly doesn't apply there. My understanding of mushroom growing in general matches clew's, however.
History always repeats itself -- first as a privy, then a mausoleum.
"Allotment" simply means "plot in a community garden," but of course the Britishers like to make everything just a wee bit fancier.
An allotment is a vegetable garden on an area of land owned by the local authority which rents out plots to people who want to grow their own fruit and veg. Usually there's about a 15 year waiting list to get one.
The community garden closest to me had about that long of a waiting list. Then they closed it to bury people in.
86: it is entirely possible that they didn't have a spare corner of their house which they were willing to stack with decaying wood.
Can you get regular mushrooms with the method in 86? I thought that was just for shiitaki and related.
Tree mushrooms versus ground mushrooms.
An unusually active subset of ground mushrooms.
You don't lose any distinction if you split the gophers into gopher-gophers and ground squirrel gophers.
Split them into the gophers that contain themselves as an item and the gophers that don't.
It was my understanding there would be no gopher set theory.
(Because he did both Ford mockery and Caddyshack, amiright?)
I almost posted this article earlier this week about what a colossal asshole Chevy chase is and how everyone hates him.
He's only got a city named after him, not a whole nation.
Caddyshack holds up as a work of art. Fletch, not so much.
100: It certainly seemed to be the unanimous assessment of anybody who had ever worked with him.
101. Be fair, the number of people with whole nations named after them is pretty small. St Dominic, St Lucy, Christopher Columbus, Simon Bolivar, any more?
101. Be fair, the number of people with whole nations named after them is pretty small. St Dominic, St Lucy, Christopher Columbus, Simon Bolivar, any more?
Amerigo Vespucci (or John ap Meryk depending who you listen to). The Qin Emperor.
109. The Qin emperor is OK, though it's not the name the country calls itself (also Georgia), but America is a continent or a shorthand.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_named_after_people
Herman, right? Since we're allowing names not used by the residents of the country in question.
Nope, Google says I've been misled about the etymology of "Germany."
113: in what sense is "United States of America" not named after Vespucci? Are you saying it's named for the continent which is named for him and "named for" isn't transitive?
Maybe Brazil is named after Otto Titzling.
Saudi Arabia, though that's more after a family than a person arguably.
Damn it, I go there before seeing that someone posted a Wikipedia link.
117. I would parse "The United States of America" as "The specific states which form the Union, and happen to be in America (or were until 1959), as opposed to all the rest of America". The operative part of the name is "United States", "of America" is merely descriptive.
122 seems like some nit-picking.
This was interesting, from the Wikipedia link: "Djibouti" means "Land of Tehuti" or "Land of Thoth", after the Egyptian Moon God."
But we all really know that Djibouti got its name as a shorthand for "That Booty."
Not to mention everyone's favorite country You Are Gay.
113: China is the name China calls itself in English. Ditto Georgia.
Some good ones in that Wikipedia list. Should have got Israel, Philippines, Mauritius of course. I would disallow St Vincent and St Christopher, because they're only part countries. Also, Swazi ethnicity predated Mswati II by quite a bit and the country is named after the people.
100 - How much of a raging peen do you have to be to have Lorne Michaels ban you for being too unbearable and rude?
And here's another thing—why does "Oxford" refer to both a kind of shirt an a kind of shoe? Or why stop there, why can't I get oxford cloth pants [ed. apparently one can] and socks and be clad head to toe in "oxford" apparel?
What, Oxford bags? How perfectly foul.
|| Quick legal question: it's well known that illegally obtained evidence isn't admissible in a criminal court. So if I were a police officer who burgled a suspect's house and found evidence of his guilt of a crime, I couldn't present that evidence in the suspect's trial for that crime.
a) what about non-police officers? If I were, say, a burglar myself, could my testimony that I saw the evidence when I burgled the suspect's house be admitted?
b) more interestingly, what about in a civil court? If I, as the police officer again, said "X is a crook" and he sued me for libel, could I use truth as my defence and cite the illegally obtained evidence to show that he really was a crook and I therefore hadn't libelled him?
|>
Er, yes. A hypothetical friend. Two hypothetical friends. One's a burglar.
130: Aren't the laws in Blighty much different? What with suspending habeus corpus and all that?
Oxford women of a certain age, please.
130b -- It seems to me that it would be admissible, but the plaintiff is going to amend his complaint to add a count for trespass.
130a -- I bet the answer is that it's admissible so long as the burglar wasn't acting as an agent of the police during the burglary.
130a is a great example of the importance of the en dash. As the continuation of the sentence makes clear, ajay isn't asking about "non-police officers", unless his hypothetical burglar friend also happens to be some kind of officer, in say the military or the guild of thieves or something. He's asking about non–police officers.
129: Oxford bags, though, are not made of oxford cloth. The term refers to the cut, not the fabric.
137 is the old, the true, the best nosflovianism.
Djibouti should have stuck with "The Territory Of The Afars And The Issas". Even after independence.
The operative part of the name is "United States", "of America" is merely descriptive.
Likewise, Mexico is also named "Estados Unidos Mexicanos". As opposed to the un-united Mexican states, which are now part of the USA.
Thing is, if you go down that route the Philippines aren't named after King Philip because the name is The Republic of the Philippines. The state is named after the islands. The islands are named after King Philip and were named after him long before the republic existed.
King Philip was King Philip II and presumably named after King Philip the Not Enumerated In Spain But IV in Burgundy. I don't know if he was named after one of the three previous Dukes of Burgundy named Philip because there was a different house. I would guess that it traces back to Philip of Macedonia through either Philip the Apostle or Philip the Evangelist. Either way, the Philippines are Alexandria Senior.
86: You stack any cordwood not already showing fungi in a corner, inoculate them, eg with plug spawn on dowels, wait a few years and there you go.
My housemate set such a thing going last year: apparently we have another year to go before mushrooms begin to show themselves. He's growing shiitakes rather than porcini mushrooms, which I may or may not be sad about.
The logs are outdoors, though. We shall see what happens.
142 would be true if there were a significant part of the Philippine Islands not incorporated in the Republic. There is and always has been a majority of the American continent not incorporated in the United States, and when the founding honchos named their country they knew this. Moreover, notwithstanding the fever dreams of Burr and Jefferson Davis, it has never been a part of the official ideology of the United States to incorporate the whole damn continent. Most of America continues to lie outside the United States and will do so until the next supercontinent forms.
124: The Ancient Peruvians caught crabs in Lake Titicaca.
||
Coming soon to a town near you it's a hideous train disaster!
|>
I don't understand why a single person can't in charge of multiple trains, like the woman who oversees the six self-serve checkout stations at Wegmans.
For one thing, married people are less likely to booty dance to that song "Come on the Train, and Ride It."
123: But we all really know that Djibouti got its name as a shorthand for "That Booty."
Also a person, a sheikh in fact.
Actually that's a Frank Zappa album. smh
I believe porcini aren't easily cultivated -- they need a live host.
92: The stack of logs can be outdoors. Doesn't bother mushrooms generally. I would never do it in my basement because way too much of my foundation is made of wood.
I am going to get the Nixoniad finished by this weekend. I PROMISE. I've got another bit up already. Not much more left to do.
At least the bots are grateful. They must have to grind through a lot of crappy content to be so happy about reading a post such as this.
I do hope they are treated well, and given smoke breaks and time to go to the bathroom.
170 The recent restoration of Welles' masterpiece Chimes at Midnight and my great desire see it at the cinema has me wishing for more Falstaff in the Nixoniad.
170 The recent restoration of Welles' masterpiece Chimes at Midnight and my great desire see it at the cinema has me wishing for more Falstaff in the Nixoniad.
Agnew is kind of a Falstaffian figure. I can see Shakespeare having great fun parodying Safire's bizarre speechwriting style (it's a bit like Bottom the weaver).
