(h/t to shakespierce…)

Jonathan Abrams raked down $13million in VC cash for a stake in Friendster (YASN). The safe bet would have been the $30million that Google was offering. This is a story that’s two or three years out of date but it seems to have grown legs because Google bought YouTube. The cultural poverty, the lack of imagination implicit in riding that Silly Valley merry-go-round, stretching out for the brass ring, over and over, trying to get rich from the business side… that’s what the NYT River of Cluelessness story is about today. It’s not about the fun Abrams had genning up a big social network enterprise in the days when YASN was a new acronym. It’s not about the staying power of useful products and services. It’s simply about the brass ring and the lionization of windfall success.

Any analyst worth her salt knew the potential and the limits of Friendster two or three years ago. The story of Abrams $13million payday remains a nice success story. Belittling the accomplishment because Google-power could have left him enormously better off is shoddy story telling.

Earlier this week when I read Joi Ito’s post about pruning his Shii tree I was struck by the intentionality and the meditative quality of the Shinto ritual he described.

Some connections I made after I read that post… my gingko tree has a similar spiritual value. It was a young tree sixteen years when we moved here. Now it is quite mature, large and dropping more fruit each year, its branches spreading wider over the driveway, over the lawn. While I do not approach the pruning with any particular reverence, this is a tree that demands study and intentionality. Later in the week, my friend Joanna’s kitchen popped up in the San Francisco Chronicle. She gave us some of the marble that she salvaged from the Crocker bank remodeling and we used it in our Berkeley kitchen when we remodeled in the late eighties. Our kitchen was trimmed by hand by a carpenter who had training in Japanese building techniques. Our Berkeley bungalow was not exactly four-square. Each corner of the room was a different height, floor to ceiling. But Nicholas and his team were able to trick the eye when cutting the moldings and the trim in such a way that the irregularities were absorbed by the irregularities they designed into the dimensions of the wood they used.

When he was finished, Nicholas drilled one extraneous hole into the countertop near the sink. He didn’t want to burden us with a creation that was perfect.