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:

The Irish Times had a nice piece about the new exhibition of Robert Doisneau’s photography currently in show at the Cartier-Bresson Foundation in Paris. (Memo to self: check out Eurostar prices.) It rather undermines the image of Doisneau as a frivolous, romantic street photographer.

He captures the chalky, lonesome feel of the postwar industrial suburbs that were then rising fast on the capital’s periphery – brutalist towers, shantytown huts, oppressive grey skies, factory plumes rising in the distance. Workers file out in silhouette from the giant Renault plant at Boulogne-Billancourt, where Doisneau worked for five years. A faceless cyclist, his head cast downward, hurries home through the heavy rain. In Carrefour Saint-Germain (1945), the famously elegant cross-roads at the heart of Paris is under heavy snow, transforming it into an anonymous eastern European esplanade. During the second World War, Doisneau printed pamphlets and fake identity papers for the resistance, and here there are constant reminders of the war: Le cheval tombé (1942), an image of a fallen horse lying on a wet Parisian street as a crowd watches helplessly, represented for Doisneau “the great sadness” of his city under the Nazi occupation.

And yet familiar Doisneau signatures abound: the banality of daily toil brightened by a knowing, ironic juxtaposition, a belly-laugh, a stolen smile or – a recurrent theme – the escape routes dreamed up in a child’s imagination. And so, in La voiture fondue (1944), five children turn the clapped-out shell of an abandoned car into a sumptuous carriage, the coachman with his whip on the roof, another navigator on the bonnet, a third boy keeping a vigilant eye on the road behind.

But in a way the most interesting thing about the piece is a box about his most famous photograph — Le Baiser de l’Hotel de Ville.

I’ve seen that picture hundreds of times — and wondered if it had been staged.

A few years before Doisneau’s death in 1994, a retired couple came forward claiming they were the lovers featured in the photo and should be paid their share of the royalties. The case was dismissed, but in the course of it Doisneau revealed that the scene had been staged. While working on the Life series about Paris lovers, he had spotted Françoise Bornet and her then boyfriend Jacques Carteaud near the school where they were studying theatre, and they agreed to pose.

Some 40 years later, Bornet surfaced and showed Doisneau the original print bearing his signature and stamp, which he had sent her just a few days after the shoot. The couple didn’t stay together; Carteaud became a wine producer. In 2005, Bornet sold her original print for €156,000 at auction.

But it turns out that there’e even more to the picture. Look further into it:

The man in the beret striding purposefully behind the couple was Jack Costello, an auctioneer from Dublin, who was on a pilgrimage to Rome when the photograph was taken. It was 1950, a holy year, and he had travelled from his home in Clontarf by motorbike with a neighbour to join in the religious commemorations in Rome – the first and only time he ever travelled abroad. Costello is thought to have been sightseeing alone in Paris when he wandered into Doisneau’s frame. He never lived to enjoy his fame, alas. It wasn’t until the early 1990s that one of his sons spotted his father in a large poster of Le Baiser in a shop window in Dublin.

There’s a novel in this, you know. (Memo to self: phone Colm Toibin.)

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