A tweet from Armando Iannucci from the Oscar ceremony:

I’m sitting in front of Rupert Murdoch. What should I do to him?

Answer: block his view but offer him the option of seeing the ceremony for a fee.

Anglicans are the least angry religionists I know — which is what makes this post by Quentin so delicious!

A musician friend who knows that we have a Prius sent us this:

In response to Toyota’s massive car recall: Yamaha has recalled 20,000 pianos due to a problem with the pedal sticking, causing pianists to play faster than they normally would, resulting in a dangerous number of accidentals. The sticky pedal also makes it harder for pianists to stop at the end of the piece, making it extremely risky for the audience.

The Guardian had a nice obit of photographer Bill Francis today which included the observation that he was “passionate about his cameras and equipment, Bill always had the best, favouring a Hasselblad and his family of Leicas.”

But the photograph used to illustrate the piece shows him with a Rolleiflex and a 35mm camera which may or may not be a Leica and indeed might even be a Zeiss Ikonta — viz:

Not a Hasselblad in sight.

LATER: On reflection, I think he is using a Leica. An M3, maybe.

Aw, shucks: the VC industry is in trouble — at least if this Technology Review article is to be believed.

The real problem is not complex: there’s too much venture capital, and there are too many venture capitalists, for the industry to be really profitable. The industry as a whole now has about $200 billion under management, more than twice what it did in 1998, and venture funds invested $20 billion to $30 billion a year for most of the past decade. And on the level of individual funds, huge amounts of capital combined with falling startup costs have, in ­Anderson’s words, made funds “muscle­bound”: a $500 million fund can’t make too many small investments, even if that’s what would make economic sense, because the partners don’t have the time to supervise hundreds of companies. (This is one reason, along with the desire to limit risk, that many VCs have started to wait until later rounds to invest.) In the absence of another bubble, there’s no way for new companies to generate profits big enough to provide a reasonable return on $20 billion to $30 billion a year. Kedrosky, for one, argues that for the industry to consistently generate competitive returns, annual investment and money under management need to fall by more than half. And while Wilson describes himself as “very optimistic” about the coming decade, he says that the industry “needs to return to the size and shape it was in the late ’80s and early ’90s.”

The interesting thing is that this diagnosis is not especially controversial. Most people in the industry think there’s too much money. It’s like traffic, though: everyone thinks there’s too much of that, but no one wants to take public transportation. And while in most businesses competition takes care of the problem by forcing the losers out, here winnowing takes much longer, because venture capital isn’t like the stock market: if you get disillusioned, you can’t just pull your money out of it. The limited partners who invest in venture capital funds make long-term, binding commitments to meet the “capital calls” of the general partners who manage the funds and make investments. This is, from the perspective of innovation, venture capital’s great strength: instead of needing a quick return, it can afford to build companies. Nonetheless, it creates what Wilson calls “a huge amount of latency in the system.” So even though the industry has been moving toward a more sensible balance between money under management and potential returns, it takes a long time to push underperformers out.

This suggests that the industry as a whole still has at least a few years of underperformance ahead.

Travellers in East Anglia are often puzzled by place names like “Adventurers’ Fen”. In fact they are throwbacks to the first wave of ‘Adventurer Capitalists’ — i.e. the people who put up the money to pay for the draining of the Fens.

Cheer up! Here’s a piece of good news for a change.

General Motors is to wind down production of its gas-guzzling Hummer brand following the collapse of a deal to sell the business to a Chinese manufacturer.

The Detroit based company, which announced plans to offload Hummer last year as part of its efforts to focus on core brands such as Chevrolet, Buick and Cadillac, said that the proposed buyers, Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machines, had been unable to complete the acquisition.

As a result, GM said it would begin the “orderly wind-down” of the Hummer operations.

John Smith, GM vice president of corporate planning and alliances, said the group had considered a number of possibilities for Hummer and was disappointed that the deal with Tengzhong could not be completed.

The principles are: