But when I was taking screenshots for this post, I noticed that something was off. Foursquare’s Cronin Park pin, if you zoom in on it, turns out to be across the street from the actual place – in an adjacent green patch that is authoritatively labeled by Google Maps as… James Cronin Park.  Didn’t I add James Cronin Park to Google Maps two years ago?  What gives?

A search for “Cronin Park” shows two places: map point A is next to Google’s mislabeled Cronin Park; map point B is the center of the actual Cronin Park as added to the map by yours truly in 2008.  Indeed, you can see my car parked across from the park on Franklin street.

Just to make sure, I visited the site today, and “my” Cronin Park – the triangular one – is indeed, still James P. Cronin Park, still marked by a big rock with a plaque on it.  The park across Franklin Street has no name that I could find on site, but it seems to have been anointed by Google Maps.  Neither place is mentioned at the City of Cambridge’s DPW page of parks or shown on the Park Maintenance district 2 map.

What does this all mean?  Probably not much you didn’t already know.  Google Maps isn’t perfect, crowdsourcing with curation cuts both ways, the City of Cambridge website isn’t encyclopedic.  We’ll see if this post or my efforts with Google and Foursquare make any progress in getting Cronin Park properly located and noted.  In the mean time, be sure to check in if you’re passing by.

o. You can get started with Facebook ads on the cheap. Anybody can run ads on Facebook on a CPC or CPM basis (and I’ll wager that they’ll roll out CPA after a while) with a few dollars and half a clue.  Results improve with additional dollars and clue.

1. Facebook ads are not behavioral, and they’re not search ads either. In the main, you can target Facebook ads at facebookers based on what’s in their profiles – location, age, relationship status, gender, employment, stuff they like, etc. This info is self-reported and subject to the categories that Facebook has created. This is not the same as search ads that target people based on what they just an instant ago typed into a search engine.  Adjust your expectations accordingly.

2. There’s some serious freshness bias. I’m willing to bet that the first (full) day you run an ad, you’ll get more impressions and more clicks than any other day after that.   I don’t know for sure why that is (or even if it’s universally so) but I suspect that the ad serving system is biased towards newer ads.  It’s also possible that the Facebook community gets immune to your ad very quickly.  In any case, I find that making small modifications to you ads on a weekly or even daily basis can help mitigate this effect.

3. It’s got nothing to do with advertising, but you can use the Facebook ads interface – for free – to do some quick and dirty market sizing. Just go in as if you were creating an ad, and play with the targeting options to get exciting factoids like the number of people on Facebook who are single, in your geographic area, and like dogs.  You can get all that info without even writing any creative or paying for any ads.  But be careful about generalizing this info as Facebook adoption isn’t uniform around the world or across demographics.

4. Help is available – for a price. Facebook has some ad service people who will talk to you if you’re buying at least $15k/month in ads. Furthermore, they will under some circumstances provide you with a “business account” – a separate login to the ad system that’s not linked to anybody’s individual profile, a definite plus for businesses.  On top of that, sometimes they can be convinced to provide a bulk ad upload capability.  This would seem to be in their interest as it lets customers run lots and lots of ads.  Note that in order to run ads promoting your fan page, you’ll have to make the business account a page admin, which you can do only by email address, since the business account doesn’t really have a profile.

So do I recommend Facebook ads? I’m not going near that question, I’m just sharing some things I’ve discovered.  Do your homework, test a little, double down if it’s working for you.  Advertising is key to Facebook’s world-domination revenue goals, and in the short time that I’ve been working with Facebook ads, I’ve seen them invest a lot in the capability.  While they still have some distance to go, they provide some opportunities that you can’t get with seemingly similar search ads on the more mature Google and Yahoo ad networks.  And, I might add, Facebook’s ad system is parsecs ahead of LinkedIn’s.

Your mileage will vary, but I hope you’ll share what you find too.

Maybe it’s the recessionary times, but I noted that the companies on offer seemed to cluster around the more basic of human needs.  Not to say they weren’t smart and sophisticated ideas.  Here’s a rundown, and then I’ll get to the strange underwear theme that ran through the evening like an elastic waistband.

Birchbox, a “new concept in beauty retail” that sounds just a little bit like a fancy coffin.

Chargify, a recurring billing service for serial entrepreneurs who have better things to do than worry about dunning and fraud.

DoInk, a community of “artists, animators and doodlers” reusing one another’s artwork to create animations and drawings.  they ran away with the audience choice award by a wide margin, and many tweets reminded people to “show this to the kids.”

JitterJam, some “web-based social marketing software”

manpacks, just what it sounds like, automated underwear delivery for “busy men”

Milabra, a “Visual Intelligence Platform” that serves up ads based on the color and content of a website’s imagery. Smart MIT guys, cool technology, kinda sluggish demo.

RelayRides, like Zipcar but with your car. Or maybe like Circle Lending but with your car. I like the idea that they allow more driving with the existing fleet of cars.

Trustmarker, a provider of “digital trustmark networks” which are, um, those things, you know, like verisign, but your own. I think.

Marketeers have heard endless variants on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and the philosophy of selling “medicine, not vitamins”  but I thought this was largely (not entirely!) a refreshingly down to earth bunch of startup ideas.  What’s more basic than entertaining kids, feeling good about how you look, building trust, and getting around town cost-effectively?

But those concepts are as often as not boring or undifferentiated.  And that’s probably why what’s arguably the most absurd of the ideas – manpacks – was the one that everyone, even the other presenters, was taking about.  As the Lorax pointed out, you do not need a thneed, and as I am pointing out, if you’re too busy to pull together some underwear, you need to re-think your business.  But the image of busy (or more likely, lazy) men ordering a tailored internet subscription to their, um, unmentionables, has a strange appeal.

Manpacks is the youngest of the webinno companies – the only one founded in 2010 – and it’s already got a bunch of press.  I have no idea if it has or deserves any customers.  Maybe it’s just a brilliant publicity stunt for some other business, but it helps us ask two good questions…

1. does your business actually solve a real problem?

2. have you built a story around it that would make anybody care?

I have great comfort from this fellow: methinks he
hath no drowning mark upon him; his complexion is
perfect gallows. Stand fast, good Fate, to his
hanging: make the rope of his destiny our cable,
for our own doth little advantage. If he be not
born to be hanged, our case is miserable.

- Gonzalo, The Tempest, act I sc i

But anyway, I come to review Tupelo, not to mangle Shakespeare. OK, I’ll stop this time.  Really.

Tupelo looks and smells a lot like Magnolias,and I’m not sure they’ll ever get entirely out from under that shadow, but they do their legacy proud in my view.  Professora M had the Pan Fried Catfish With Cheddar Grits, Collard Greens & Spiced Pecan Compound Butter and I took on the special seafood gumbo with crawfish and prawns, coming late to the realization that gulf coast seafood may never be the same again.  For openers, we shortened our life expectancies with beer and cider, and a dish of crispy deep-fried cheese grits.  Let me type that again while you defibrillate.  Crispy.  Deep-Fried.  Cheese. Grits.  Oh yes and oh no all at once. Piping hot and salty, too.

The seafood entrees were filling to the point of a bit much, which is a terrible shame since the desserts were from Petsi’s Pies, including a brown sugar pecan pie that days later still haunts my dreams.  Other notables on the menu that I’ll have to return for include a brisket, gumbo, spinach ricotta crepes and a raft of tasty sides including the dreamy creamy cheesy grits and collard greens.  No sign unfortunately of Hoppin John or Shavonne for that matter, but I suppose some secrets had to die with Magnolias.

Tupelo occupies an important spot in Camberville gastronomy, the pivot point between the established Cambridge Street Inman Square corridor and the edgier things happening in the Someville side of Cambridge street Eastbound towards the Galleria.  It also holds down a solid middle ground in Northern Southern cooking between the upscale Hungry Mother and various homier options such as the Plough and Stars’ southern fried chicken and that at Coast Cafe, both previously noted here.

I know I’m leaving out a world on the other side of the Charles, but I can only eat so much of this sort of food.  Comment away, and I’ll add it to the list.

You may not realize it, but it turns out that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is almost exactly the same size as the autonomous Italian region of Sicily – 10,555 and 9,926 square miles respectively.  Mass has the edge in population – 6.5 million vs 5 million – but that won’t stop me from pointing out…. five reasons why Sicily is better than Massachusetts:

Sicily has the largest active volcano in Europe. (That’s Mt. Etna, which is 10,890 feet high) Massachusetts has the largest Federal highway project in the USA.  (That’s the Big Dig, which is about $22 Billion deep)

In Sicily, shops close in the afternoon for a long lunch. In Massachusetts, banks and bars close early.

Sicily was colonized by the ancient Greeks over 2,000 years ago and later became an important part of the Roman empire. Many of the events in the Iliad and the Odyssey take place in Sicily.  Massachusetts was colonized by uptight English religious fanatics 400 years ago.  Many of the events in Ally McBeal take place in Massachusetts.

In Sicily, you can get a good espresso almost anywhere for about a Euro. In Massachusetts, you can get Dunkin Donuts coffee almost anywhere.

Sicily gave the world the Cannoli. Massachusetts contributed, um, well, there’s no cuisine section in the wikipedia entry on Massachusetts, so I’ll just stop here.

• Preheat overn to 350F
• Combine and cream
  • 1/2 pound (2 sticks) margarine or butter [avoid margarine at all costs; substitute peanut butter for half the butter]
  • 1 cup firmly packed brown sugar [if your brown sugar has turned into a rock, gently microwave it into molasses]
  • 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• Add and beat in
  • 2 eggs
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• Add
  • 1+1/2 cups flour
  • 1 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1 teaspoon cinnamon [I've never bothered with this, although I have been known to add some ground coffee]
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt (optional) [salt is never optional]
• Stir in
  • 3 cupts oats
  • 1 cup raisins [feh, I use chocolate chips or more likely a hacked up chocolate bar or Reese's pieces for special occasions]
• Drop by rounded tablespoons onto cookie sheets [use a larger spoon or just scoop chunks with your hands if you get bored]
• Bake 10-12 mins

Viola!  Chocolate chunk peanut butter oatmeal cookies.

Earlier this week, I noted a bit in xconomy singing the praises of Central Square as a new startup hub, singling out a particular office building and featuring a couple of its startuppy tenants.  I’m all for it, having previously noted Beta House and OpenCoffee among others.  Plus, Central is home to Harmonix Music.  Good news, to be sure.

But the day before that article, Hollywood Express closed their Central Square store, adding to a distressing list of businesses vacating Central Square and its environs.  In fact, I was both pleased and saddened to discover an entire blog devoted to the disappearance of businesses along Cambridge’s Massachusetts Avenue.  Compare for example my February 2009 post on the decline of the furniture cluster to Empty Mass Ave’s post on the same topic in February of this year.  Apparently, we’re all in this together.  Empty retail space around Central now includes the long-gone Gap, Pearl Paint, all those furniture stores, the space next to the Central Square Theater, and I’m sure more.

The other good news is that restaurants seem to be thriving even as retail suffers – Rendezvous, Four Burgers, Craigie on Main and Garden at the Cellar are all great –  but I can’t help worry that we need a bit of everything to make a neighborhood that all those fancy startup types will actually want to inhabit.

We can blame the economy for some closures, especially the furniture stores.  We can blame changes in technology and media for the demise of record stores, video stores and maybe even bookstores. We can blame landlords, that’s always popular.  I think we often forget to blame ourselves for not shopping, working and doing business enough in our own neighborhoods and cities.

Posto is a Neapolitan-focused slow-food influenced joint with a wood-burning pizza oven, a wine bar, and several impressive menu items beyond pizza.  It’s been packed on each of my three visits. The minimalist website is little more than menus and links to Facebook and Twitter – an interesting development I’m seeing more and more for businesses.

1. Pizzeria

Pizza is Posto’s main attraction.  They serve just one size, a generous personal pizza, in ten classical and modern varieties with a handful of options from $12 for the Margherita to $18 for some of the fancier pies, with some add-ons that can take you to $25 and beyond.  Fresh farm egg, anybody?  The ingredients are top-notch and the crust is about right on the chewy-crispy continuum.  I keep meaning to ask for mine well done to get more of the wood-fired char.  Maybe next time.

2. Vinoteca

With 19 red wines by the glass (yea, and some whites and pinks and fizzies too), this is a pretty serious wine bar.  What really impressed me was the mix of prices – you can get a decent glass of wine for $5  In fact there are four reds and six whites for under $10 a glass.  And there are some $20/glass reds too.  The only odd thing – and maybe it’s only odd to geeks like me – is that there’s a gap in the red wine price curve between $6 and $11.  Random omission, statistical aberration, sinister anchoring ploy?  Who cares – drink up.

3. Et Cetera

Posto offers some attractive appetizers, including some nice arancini, classic calamari, and a delicious burata.  They also offer some crispy fried pig’s ear.  Yes, you read that right.  Like the saying goes, you can’t deep-fry a silk purse.

With sea salt and lime, how could I resist?  Well, let’s just say it’s probably nor for everybody. There’s a real difference in the texture of the thin end of the ear and the thick end, and I’m not sure if either one is what I had in mind.  But I’m glad I tried it and for $7 it was well worth checking out.  There’s no shortage of other pig parts on the menu, from roast pork and prosciutto on the pizzas to guanciale (that’s jowl, folks) in one of the pasta dishes.

4. Pasta?

I’ve tried two of the three pasta dishes on the menu.  Very impressive for a pizza joint, but it’s obvious that we’re not dealing with a regular pizza joint here.  Agnolotti with veal, chard and savory herbs were delicately lemony and beautifully hand-made.  Tagliatelle with braised rabbit, fava beans and peas was also a spring-themed winner.

5. Basta!

Yes, there’s even dessert.  They make their own cannoli, of which I was initially suspicious – how could one restaurant do all this?  Well, for $5 I ended up with two good-sized cannoli.  No silly dipped shells, no campy candied fruit, just the shell, the cheese and the powdered sugar, folks.

Time will tell if Posto can overcome geographic destiny, but I’m rooting for it.

Naturally, once you’ve created an admittedly pointless geographic entity, at least if you’re me, the next step would be to map it.  Sure, it’s usually pretty easy to know if you’re near the ocean or not, and pretty easy to measure on a map to any given place.  But where can I get a map of everyplace that’s more than 100 miles from the ocean?  Sadly, I came up empty, but along the way, I noted this map of the coastline as altered by rising sea levels of various magnitudes.  Limeduck world HQ seems safe to +13 meters, more if I’m willing to commute by canoe directly from the window.

Naturally, this level of flooding would only push the SSEZ deeper inland.

Another note on this topic is that by my rule, there is nowhere in all of Japan where I would not order sushi, because  in Japan the farthest from the sea you can get is only 120km (~75mi), in Maebashi.  This leads me to consider reducing the SSEZ to 120 km.  Because I need the greatest precision in my bogus heuristics.

First things first.  Vegetarian food is available.  You can make it yourself, for one thing.  Between pizza, burritos and falafel, no vegetarian is going hungry anywhere around here.  But what I’m looking for is a sit-down dinner, white tablecloth, table service, wine list, grownup restaurant where vegetarians get more than one or two choices.  Preferably places where the menu is seasonal and local too. So what does the greater Boston area have to offer?

OpenTable (far from exhaustive, but pretty good for the nicer places) gives just one search result for “vegetarian” and that’s Tantric Indian Bistro.  Like most if not all Indian restaurants, Tantric has a selection of vegetarian options but does not otherwise qualify as a vegetarian restaurant.  If they are listed as vegetarian, lots more places on OpenTable should be too.  For my Indian restaurant money, veg or otherwise, I prefer downscale Punjabi Dhaba or upscale Tanjore.

Elephant Walk (Boston, Waltham and Cambridge) is worth mentioning for a good list of vegan items, most but not all of them on the Cambodian side of the French-Cambodian menu.

Vegan options are a whole other discussion, and almost all the “fine” veggie options I’m discussing are reliant on dairy and eggs, but I’ll call out Grasshopper in Allston and Grezzo in the North End.  Grasshopper is of the possibly-buddhist “mock meat” school where you can order “chicken teriyaki” on the menu and get some seitan-simulation thereof.  If that’s your thing, you’ve lucked out.  If not, you may find it disturbing on many levels.  Grezzo is not just vegan, it’s raw.  Nothing is cooked anywhere near boiling.  If that’s your thing, you’ve lucked out.  If not, you may find it disturbing on many levels.

I haven’t personally tried either Veggie Planet at Club Passim or the new Pulse Cafe vegan place near Davis but neither seems to be what I’m looking for.

As an omnivore with both friends all over the eating map, and also as somebody who’s trying to pay attention to what I’m eating, my ideal choice would be a place that serves a reasonable variety of options – like the Indian places, but more upscale, seasonal, local and of course, with a good wine list.  In this category I nominate VeeVee in Jamaica Plan.  ”Vee Vee serves mid-priced, modern American food, with a focus on fresh seafood, vegetables and grains. The menu, which will change seasonally, features local products whenever possible.”  So says their website, but they may have backslid on the meatwagon a bit – of the six entrees on the menu right now, three are fish, two have no evident animal parts and one is a pork shank. Even Green Zebra in Chicago has one or two seafood items on the menu most of the time.

In this vein, we also have to discuss omnivore restaurants that have off-menu or little-known vegetarian options. The better a restaurant, the more likely it is that the chef will accommodate diners’ preferences when possible.  Sure, lots of fancy places play the “no substitutions” game, but I find that the very best will do almost anything, especially if you give some notice.  (By the way, asking for a substitution or a change is a surefire way to find out what’s made to order and what’s been stewing since yesterday!) Here are some that I’ve noted.

Craigie Street Bistrot – now Craigie on Main – is well-known for an “everything but the squeal” approach to eating a pig, but they also have a superb vegetarian tasting menu buried in a footnote on the menu.  It seems to be chef’s whim of six or ten courses for the same price as the omnivore version, $90 and $115 respectively.

Bergamot – the newcomer to EVOO’s old space near Inman square – offers a $20 vegetarian entree that for some reason is not printed on the menu.  They were willing to serve the nuts on the side with several dishes so I have to assume they would also make meatless versions where practical.

Upstairs on the Square offers five and seven course vegetarian tastings with optional wine pairings ($55-$115) which are very very nice.

Ten Tables (Cambridge and JP) offers a four-course (three savory and a dessert) vegetarian tasting for the remarkable price of $30 (Cambridge, where the omnivore version is $40), and at least the JP location will whip up a vegan version with 24 hours notice.  I had the vegetarian version earlier this week in Cambridge and it was wonderful – first of the season english peas in a lettuce salad, cavatelli with wild mushroom ragout and pea tendrils, purple potatoes, squash and radicchio with spinach puree, and for desserts, chocolate terrine with sea salt and basil ice cream and toasted pound cake with jam and cream. (It’s extra nice that even when the whole table had to order the tasting, we got two different desserts at the end)  I must say that I missed the sardines from the regular menu, but three veggie courses left us more than full.

And there are plenty more like those.  They don’t quite fill the bill because there’s essentially just one vegetarian option, but the multiple courses and ever-changing nature of that one item makes it a good choice if you go once or twice a season or less.  And with prices like those, who goes that much more often?

So we’re still on the hunt for the Green Zebra experience in the hub, but it seems there’s still a lot of meatless fun to be had here.

Then somebody “corrected” me and said it was wrong.  I fired back some citation or other and didn’t think much more about it.

Then a consultant making a pitch for our business chided us in his pitch presentation on our lousy grammar by citing that very post. (Dear consultant guy: 1. you really should make sure your client is unambiguously in the wrong, and 2. there’s a sentence fragment in the middle of your own blog post on the subject of grammar. At least we agree that grammar counts.)

Every geometer knows that two points determine a line, and now – counting the original author – I had at least two smart people saying that data should take a singular verb.  I needed to think more about this.

There’s plenty of evidence that I was right to write “the data say” but also plenty that “the data says” is not wrong. The estimable Grammar Girl has a good blog post that begins by complicating things – it’s not about data being singular or plural; it’s about data being or not being a mass noun – and ends with some good guidance about picking your path and sticking to it.

I’ve come around to a different idea.  Using a possibly controversial construction is a no-win situation.  You either earn points with antiquarian scholars and sound overwrought, or you please the crowd and sound dull to the nitpicky.  It’s a bit like the forcefully correct use of “whom.” Either way you risk some people thinking you’re careless or ignorant.  If you’re got a sentence, especially a headline or title, that forces the reader to think about whether a word in it is right or wrong, I think it’s time to choose a different word or write a different sentence.

Perhaps instead of

…the data say… or …the data says…

we might try

…the survey says… or …my research reveals… or …4 out of 5 dentists agree…

Have I given in to the forces of the incorrect by avoiding the issue?  I hope not.  I don’t suggest anybody stop correcting errors of “you’re” vs “your” or allowing “alot” to slide by for “a lot” but when there’s room for common usage to differ from correct usage or where usage is evolving, making your readers think about grammar instead of reading and digesting your point is a bad idea.

Green Zebra is a real find in an unassuming Chicago neighborhood, not so far from a place that advertises burritos “as big as your head.”  Orthodox vegetarians and vegans be warned, it’s not 100% vegetarian (there’s usually one seafood item on the menu, scallops this time) and there’s plenty of butter, eggs and cheese.  I don’t know how many dishes were strictly vegan, but I didn’t feel overwhelmed with dairy as sometimes happens with Indian vegetarian food, at least in the USA.

We enjoyed an array of small plates and my camera skills declined as the evening wore on and bottles were drained, so I can’t say for 100% certain that these items are exactly as labeled.  They aren’t really in order either, but there were to a plate, delicious and beautifully constructed. I would single out the spinach crepe with oyster mushrooms as a standout, but the field was very competitive.

The waitstaff surely thought us mad, cackling with glee as we divided even the smallest plate in four.  Green Zebra isn’t cheap, it’s certainly a special occasion place, but if you don’t live in Chicago, every time you visit is arguably a special occasion.  Meat eaters might question the bill with “that much for just vegetables?” but we were more than satisfied.  If I had to give a down note in my review, I would say that the place is a little too quiet, as if full of monks gravely consuming their gruel.  Food in general is worth celebrating, and food this good deserves some hoopla.  One could also quibble that the ingredients couldn’t possibly all be local or seasonal (tangerines in Chicago in February?) but I hope that at least some were from the great farms of the midwest.

So… back in Boston, we ponder the conundrum: how can such vegetarian excellence exist in the midst of cattle country and but not here in enlightened liberal studentopolis?

Surely the demand exists.  Students might not be able to afford the likes of Green Zebra often, but their parents must visit sometimes.  Organic food, yoga studios, Buddhist temples, pet spas all suggest affluent vegetarians are about.

Surely the raw materials exist.  Farms and farmers markets thrive.  Locovorism is on the rise.  Even accounting for

Surely the talent is here.  Boston ranks well for both density and quality of restaurants and boasts some top-notch culinary schools.

Surely the business model is proven.  Restaurants are tough business no matter what, but low-end vegetarian restaurants get by, and high-end omnivore joints too, so why couldn’t a high-end veggie place?  Green Zebra seems to have no trouble with high prices and full tables.

I’m at a loss, and it’s Boston’s loss too.  Until then, when you’re in Chicago, be sure to balance out your beef intake with a visit to Green Zebra.

The Mac’s dictionary app drew an amusing blank, and the OSPD claims ignorance of glurge.

It turns out that glurge comes from Snopes.com, the great debunking website.  I quote therefrom:

Glurge is a term specific to snopes.com, coined in 1998… The word was invented by Patricia Chapin, a member of the urban legends discussion mailing list run in conjunction with this site. At a loss for words to describe the retching sensation this then-unnamed category of stories subjected her to, she fashioned a word that simultaneously named the genre and described its effect.

Glurge … is the body of inspirational tales which conceal much darker meanings than the uplifting moral lessons they purport to offer, and which undermine their messages by fabricating and distorting historical fact in the guise of offering “true stories.” Glurge often contains such heart-tugging elements as sad-eyed puppies, sweet-faced children, angels, dying mothers, or miraculous rescues brought about by prayer. These stories are meant to be parables for modern times but fall far short of the mark.

So now you know.

1. Spam
2. Corporate Blogs
3. Self-Appointed Experts
4. Accumulationism
5. Constant Partial Attention
6. The Echo Chamber. Dance all you want on the grave of print, but at least when you went to the newsstand to buy your favorite rag, you had at least passing exposure to the headlines on the covers of opposing rags.  Creating personalized newsfeeds and groups of friends and followers lets us indulge our weaker impulse to attend only to those with whom we already agree.
7. Social Media Exceptionalism. Exceptionalism as you may recall from the last couple hundred years of United States politics, is the belief that your thing is, well, exceptional, and therefore “does not need to conform to normal rules or general principles” [wikipedia] – this is more or less a continuation of PR Exceptionalism and Brand Exceptionalism, two great “we can’t/shouldn’t measure this program” belief systems.  I’ll grant that social media is by nature more measurable and that many practitioners are making good efforts to measure it, but exceptionalism still kicks in when the measurements don’t live up to what we hoped and we decide we must have underinvested or decide to call the program experimental. No more excuses, no more faith-based marketing, I say.
8. Social Media Purism.  Or maybe I should call it Puritanism.  The idea that Social Media is All You Need and the related idea that It Cannot Be Mixed or Diluted with Other Modes and Methods have the ugly tang of fanaticism about them.  The flavor of the month is tasty, no doubt, but it’s not the only one.

Just two more plagues to go.  Stay tuned and stay ducky.

At least according to the stickers in this egg decorating kit, there’s also an Easter Frog.  Clearly I’m not doing this holiday right.  I even put an egg under my pillow before I went to bed but it was neither replaced with cash nor even poached by morning.

The canonical plagues are:

1. Blood (water turning into blood)
2. Frogs (lots of frogs, everywhere)
3. Lice
4. Beasts (like wild and marauding ones)
5. Livestock disease
6. Boils
7. Hail (sometimes described as mixed with fire – eek!)
8. Locusts
9. Darkness (all day)
10. Death of all first-born children

Perhaps tonight social media peeps will hold back a tweet or ten in recognition for the suffering visited upon us by social media, social marketing, and all the attendant hoohah these past few years.  Here are five, and I’ll serve up five more within a week.  I have the full list pretty well figured out, but I’ll happily take nominations.

1. Spam.  OK, social media didn’t cause spam,but it didn’t stop it or even reduce it.  We have to contend with actual malicious content as well as content that’s merely obnoxious, such as oversharing or overtweeting.
2. Corporate Blogs.  Companies trying to cash in on the authenticity and openness of social media have created some of the least authentic blogs in the universe.  I know, I’ve written some of them. Sure, you can use a blog for PR and for link building and for SEO, but hey, guess, what?  You can also use it to share what’s really going on in your company.
3. Self-Appointed Experts.  Nature abhors a vacuum, and people seem to want experts to explain to them how to use democratic, user-generated media.  Seems to me they miss the point, but I hereby appoint the self-appointed social media experts a plague.
4. Accumulationism.  OK, I probably just made that word up, and if I didn’t, I probably misused it.  Anyway, the mis-measurement of social media success or influence by the number of followers, the number of links, the number of friends, the number of posts, and so forth is pernicious and misleading.  Feh.
5. Constant Partial Attention.  Mobile devices are as much to blame as social media proper, and this was a problem with email before, but it’s gotten so much worse.  The need to even try to consume the torrent of microdrivel prevents people from focusing for even a minute on any one thing of import.

Well, that should keep you all busy as you attempt to discreetly update your facebook status while digesting the meginah.  Stay tuned for five more plagues over the rest of the holiday.

So you can imagine my interest in an event called POLENTONISSIMO.  Something about the most giant polenta.  In Dorchester.  How cool is that?  Just look at this giant polenta.  Just look at it!  And that’s after 20 people stuffed themselves.

To give you an idea of scale, you can see part of the Ashmont MBTA station at the lower left and a military-issue parachute at the top right.

OK, I exaggerate a bit.  Anyway, the point is, chefs Max Thompson and Chris Douglas brought a Pietdmontese tradition to Tavolo in Dorchester.  The story goes something like this:

Well, the legend goes a little something like this: in sixteenth century Piedmont a little band of coppersmiths got stranded in the teeny village of Monastero Bormida thanks to a pesky spring storm. They asked and received edible aid from the Marquis in the form of maize, flour, eggs, onions and sausage, which they then cooked into frittatas and a gigantic polenta. And thus Polentonissimo, an annual celebration of this fable, was born.

Now you know.  Apparently, in Italy, these gigantic polenta can run into the metric tons.  My grasp of Italian units of measure has been called into question in the past (witness the terrible Florentine steak error of 2003 and the unfortunate Chianti mis-estimation of 2006), but I’m sure you get the idea.

Arriving a bit late with Prof. M, I was just in time to see Douglas and Thompson add a stunning amount of butter to a huge vat of cornmeal mush.  They went on to make sausage right before our eyes (it’s true what they say about the making of sausage, by the way) and concoct a red sauce with perfectly poached eggs.  Look at the results, just look at them!

As if that wasn’t enough – and believe me, it was a dayenu-level of sufficiency – there were starters and dessert too.  Among the starters was frico, a delightful Friulian cheese and potato pancake.  I would happily truck out to Tavolo for Friconissimo if such were offered.  Dessert was a perfect trio of gelato – chocolate, hazelnut and pistachio.

So Cambervillians (and Cambervillans) who never cross the river, there’s some good reasons to find out about the pot of polenta at the end of the red line.

Despite persistent rumors that they will soon start, no airline that I know of is charging for carryon baggage.  Here’s why I think they’ve got that backwards: Charging for checked luggage encourages people to carry on more and larger bags.

So what, you say?  It’s their own burden to carry and stow the stuff.  Perhaps so, but it also makes the boarding and deplaning processes much longer for everybody, and according to the Flight Attendants Union it also causes thousands of injuries a year to passengers and airline personnel.  The very people who carry on a larger bag because they want to save time by not waiting for baggage claim are delaying everyone in boarding and everyone aft of them in deplaning.

When overhead storage space is free and unassigned (you have no particular claim to the space above, unlike the space under the seat in front of you which seems to be part of your tiny purchased real estate) you get the classic tragedy of the commons as there’s no disincentive to overusing the resource.

In short, airlines are lax about enforcing size and quantity limits on carryon bags when a simple schedule of fees would take care of the problem for them.  And the best part is, if you’re too cheap to pay the additional carryon bag fee, you still reap the benefit of getting on and off the plane faster!

I attended a seminar at Sloan called Talent Wants to be Free with attorney John Bauer of Robinson & Cole, entrepreneur Branko Gerovac and Sloan Prof. Matt Marx, which seemed to be about the use or misuse of con-compete agreements but turned out to also be a lot about the unfavorable comparison of the Boston metro area to the SF Bay area in tech terms.

Mainly, I want to talk about the non-compete stuff, but I have to quote a couple of the comparisons made on the East coast – West coast discussion.  It turns out that Middlesex county MA (roughly the North side of the Charles West to Hopkinton and North to the NH border, including Cambridge, Somerville, and Waltham but not Boston) is very similar to Santa Clara county CA (the area around San Jose, including Sunnyvale, Mountain View and Cupertino but not San Francisco) in terms of population, education and even home prices.  But Middlesex has lagged Santa Clara in terms of tech jobs and startups for 20 years.  Why?  Lots of reasons, some of which were discussed over at BostInnovation recently, but let’s get back to non-competes, which might be one of them.

Prof. Matt Marx (it must be awesome being a business professor named Marx) showed some data from his exploration of non-compete agreements and I found two bits of his evidence particularly damning:

Non-competes are signed disproportionally by younger and less-experienced employees. Older and more experienced employees are more likely to negotiate or even refuse these agreements.  You have to figure the older and more experienced folks know something that apparently their juniors don’t.

Non-competes are often sprung on new employees late in the process. Note that I said “employees” not “candidates.” What does it mean when this document isn’t disclosed or even discussed until it’s pretty much too late?  A sizable number of Marx’s respondents reported being given the agreement on the first day of work.  By then, they had already exited their previous job and (if they were the ethical types) turned down any other offers they had on the table.

I take the latter point as evidence that non-competes are being applied in a stealthy manner, the way you go about doing things when you know they’re a little shady.  It can’t quite be called coercive (that would be illegal) since you can always not take the job or quit it.  I take the former point as evidence that these agreements are not in the best interest of employees, even when you take into account the honor of taking the job.

It’s got to be hard for Massachusetts companies to give up this seeming advantage, even the ones that want to, because their competitors may still retain it.  Of course, in some sense, MA companies are competing with CA companies for talent, albeit only the sort of talent that’s considering a 3,000 mile relation.  What’s interesting is that Google’s MA office is sticking with the California model and not doing any non-competes with employees.  I doubt they’re suffering for it.

I’ve only scratched the surface here, but I suggest MA employees in the process of a job change or even just thinking about one should do these things:

• Discuss your current non-complete agreement with a lawyer.  It’s not as expensive as you think, and it could certainly save or earn you a lot of money in the future.
• If you’re at the offer stage with a new opportunity, ask to see the non-compete (if any) before you sign, and discuss it with a lawyer.  Do not assume there is no agreement if they haven’t mentioned it.

I’m not a big fan of excessive regulation on legal agreements between rational parties, but what I heard at the panel suggests that non-compete agreements are neither as controlling or enforceable as employees often think, nor as helpful as companies often think.  It looks like without these agreements, more business grow faster and employees earn more.  Exactly how can that be bad?

Having exhausted the obvious first choices of public libraries and used bookstores and come up empty, I decided to see what else was out there.  Regular and online bookstores had or could order the book, but at 300+ pages each for two volumes, I thought this might finally be the time to look into electronic readers.  The idea of carrying hundreds of books around in a few ounces of electronics never appealed much to me, but the idea of carrying around one very large book in a smaller form factor was starting to make me think again.

Kindle, Nook, iPod, iPad, PC – no shortage of reading devices, each covered plenty well by pundits worthier than I.  But what about the media itself?  It turns out that there’s something called Project Guternberg, a collection of free downloadable ebooks, generally ones that have landed in the public domain after their copyrights expired.  There’s also Google Books of course, where you can read but not generally download books.  Reading books on a 5 pound laptop wasn’t the answer I was looking for.

After some poking around, I found what I thought would be a terrible solution, but the price was right.  I downloaded the free Mobipocket reader for my phone and picked up the Melville at Project Guternberg.

As it turned out, I read 350 pages of turgid 19th Century prose a few pages at a time on my two-train commute over the course of a month or so.  It wasn’t ideal, but it was certainly convenient.  I could read with one hand while holding on for dear life with the other.  I didn’t have to worry about losing my place and even in a very crowded train, the device was small enough that I didn’t worry about elbowing fellow passengers while using it, and it was easy to slip back into a pocket without wrangling a book or larger device into and out of a bag or case.

I wondered if there was hope for paper.  And then I met Paige.

In the back of the Harvard Bookstore is a Rube Goldberg contraption consisting of two different printers, a couple of computers and a clear plastic box containing some very sharp blades and pot of boiling hot glue.  It’s called Paige M. Gutenberg.  Get it?  It’s a book machine.  In goes paper, ink, glue and a digital file, and out comes a perfect-bound book in a couple of minutes.  It’s a wacky marriage of cyber- and steampunk. You can smell the glue when you stand near it. I had to try it.

After some consultation with the staff, I learned that you first have to select (which generally means buy) the digital file from a variety of sources, and then once the machine is warmed up, the printing and binding takes just a few minutes.  Unfortunately, for whatever reason, the files of Mardi were as costly, perhaps more so, than the pre-printed books.  But in the spirit of investigation, I paid $30 for volume two and watched Paige crank it out.  The print quality was great and the paper stock pleasant.  The cover (also printed on the spot with a different printer on different stock) was a little on the cheap side, and the binding was not quite perfect perfect binding.

All in all, if you really need it right away or it’s out of print, this is a great thing. But I fear it’s years late and more than a few dollars short in holding back ebooks.  Sure, it makes high(ish) quality printing and binding on demand available to small-time authors or artists, but even a five minute wait at a bookstore compares poorly with near-instant delivery to a computer or handheld device.  And if you insist on paper, you can often get cheaper and higher quality books shipped in a few days – even same day in some cities – from the giants of ecommerce.

Still, I’m glad there are options, especially because those options are evidence of interest in the business of publishing which means people are still reading, and that’s good.