Month: March 2001

Waiting for my ride to the airport

While I’m waiting for the car service to show up to take me to SFO so I can fly to Haifa (and then on to Hursley and Paris), a few timely or amusing links:

More later from some airport, perhaps….

A preview of the next recession

Much to my surprise, checking in for the flight to Tel Aviv was as quick as checking in for any other international flight — the other times I’ve flown to Israel, I’ve had to hand-carry our checked luggage to the super X-Ray machine before they’d take it — but in both cases, I was changing airlines in London from American to British. This time, the trip is all on TWA, and I guess they handle Tel Aviv luggage often enough that they know how to do it without making me do the schlepping.

Since I had plenty of time to kill before my flight, I decided to circumnavigate the airport and look at the art exhibits. SFO runs a very active museum program, and the exhibits are often very interesting; today, I enjoyed the exhibit of police headgear through the years and around the world and the exhibit of strange collectibles (swizzle sticks, Elvis memorabilia, anything with “Bluebird” on it, to name but three) and interviews with the collectors. Unfortunately, they were in the process of changing over a couple of the exhibits, but it was definitely better than sitting around for an extra hour.

My route took me through the Central Terminal, which was the International Terminal until late last year. Now, it looks like this:

Is this what a recession looks like?: (Actually, it's the old SFO International Terminal, now deserted in favor of the new SFO International Terminal)

I hope it’s not a preview of things to come if we slip into recession — my driver was telling me that the car service’s business has definitely fallen off in the past few months.

Now, onward to JFK and TLV!

A little Torah study – Silicon Valley style

We’re just back from Torah study and Shabbat Minyan services, waiting for the kids to arrive for Jeffrey’s belated birthday party.

At Torah study, we finished discussing Parashat Noach (Genesis 6:9-11:32), spending most of the time on the story of the Tower of Babel. We were talking about the somewhat interesting order of events in chapter 11, verses 3 and 4:

They said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks and burn them hard….Come, let us build a city, and a tower with its top in the sky….”

where first, they make the bricks and only then decide what to do with them. And it occurred to me that this was very much like the VC frenzy of the last couple of years:

They said to one another, “Come, let us gather venture capital…come, let us build a company, and a business plan with its top in the sky….”

where the funding seemed to come first, and only then a decision about what to do. But this time, instead of burning the bricks hard, it was the investors and employees who got burned.

At services, of course, we heard the regular weekly portion, Ki Tisa, and the accompanying Haftarah (I Kings, 18:1-39). The major action in the Haftarah takes place atop Mount Carmel — and, if all goes well, that’s where I’ll be in less than 48 hours (Haifa, to be more contemporary). It’s a small world sometimes!