I was walking upstairs at 6am to go put my running clothes on and head out the door for an hour when Kenai started barking like crazy.  I inferred that we had a visitor and looked out the window.

That’s our driveway.  It’s 6:30am and I still haven’t left the house.  There’s nothing quite like living in the mountains.

If you ever have the chance to see Alan Greenspan do an hour of improptu Q&A in front of any audience (in this case 500 business people in Denver), do it.  I went to the AMG National Trust Bank sponsored event today at the Denver Art Museum titled “Art, Alan and AMG.”  It was awesome.

AMG and the Denver Art Museum were superb hosts.  Greenspan was amazing.  He stood up for most of an hour and took random Q&A from the audience.  His answers were cogent, direct, and powerful.  It was fascinating to watch him think for a few seconds and then spit out a comprehensive, well articulated answer to question after question after question.

After fielding a few questions on energy policy and oil, someone asked him a random question about the middle east.  Greenspan thought about it for about ten seconds and then succinctly stated “I don’t think I know enough about that particular issue to have a qualified answer.”  That was – without a doubt – the most impressive moment of the day. 

There are very few people that have enough confidence to respond to a question in front of 500 people that way.  I expect Charlie Munger does, but the list gets short quickly.  Greenspan won my heart and mind with that one.

Update: The Denver Post has a summary of some of Greenspan’s answers.

Sotheby’s is having a huge Contemporary Art auction tonight – you can watch it live online.  The Rothko (White Center 1950) is unbelievable.  Sotheby’s minimum price guarantee to David Rockefeller (owner of White Center) is $46m (Rockefeller paid less than $10,000 for it in 1960.)  Now that’s “art investing.”

My favorite picture in the auction is Christopher Wool’s FUCKEM.

Way out of my league, but fun to fantasize.  I used to call these things “paintings”, but it seems to be in vogue to call them “pictures”, so I’ll give it a try.

Amy and I love art.  My mom is an artist and I grew up with art, galleries, collectors, and museums.  Amy and I have been collecting since we started dating and I still remember agonizing over our first purchase greater than $1,000.

We are both patrons of the Wellesley Davis Museum.  As a result, we get to go on an annual trip somewhere in the country to look at art.  This year’s trip was to New York City.  I felt like hiding from the world for a couple of days to take a break so I tagged along with Amy and 30 other Wellesley women.

We spent two days wandering around looking at private collections.  We saw several amazing ones (think > $100m of art in apartments ranging from 5,000 to 20,000 square feet.)  The collections were heavy on abstract expressionism and were deeply influenced by a couple of New York art dealers.  Rothko is my favorite abstract expressionist and I got a chance to sit in front of a few beautiful ones and quietly contemplate them.

I was intrigued by the entire experience.  The novelty of sitting in someone’s living room looking at a Bacon Pope, a Rothko, a Dubuffet from the 1940’s, a Cy Twombly, or a Clifford Still wore off pretty quickly and I started thinking about how these folks made decisions about what to buy.  Each of the collections included a raft of chinese antiquities which appear to be the cultural counterpoint to the abstract expressionists.

After two days of this we needed to escape to Chelsea and look at some contemporary stuff that was more in our league.  While I’m struggling to understand why a Francesco Clemente painting goes for $225,000, I found plenty of stuff I could relate to including Leonardo Drew.  Plus it was a beautiful day in New York.

I did very well on the math part of the SAT but not as well on the verbal part (I did ok, but I was definitely more MIT than (or is it “then”) Harvard.)  Since the phrase “unique” crosses over nicely between the math and verbal sections it belongs in my Pet Peeves universe.

Today I was in a meeting where someone mocked the phrase “very unique.”  I smiled since I’ve heard this one so many times.  His next statement was “unique means one of a kind – that means something can’t be ‘very’ unique.”

I knew I’d seen an interesting rant on “very unique” on the web somewhere and I was uniquely pleased that Google didn’t fail me.  In addition to the “pro very unique” argument, I found some “anti very unique” and “definitive there are no very unique” people.

Don’t forget to get your domains straight.

Jack Bauer (ok – Keifer) explains why he says “damn it” so much on 24.

Thanks Jason S for the pointer.

There are a bunch of verbal tics that people use that drive me crazy.  “Honestly” and “to tell you the truth” are the two that I dislike the most. 

Another one that I hate is “that’s a good question” as the immediate response to a question.  I know this is just buying time to start to formulate an answer, but it always annoys me.

Today, one of my partners (who heard me coach a CEO on this the other day in preparation for a presentation) told me that I had just said “that’s a good question” three times in a meeting we were in.  I looked at him with my normal incredulous “huh?” look and said “really?”  He didn’t respond with “that’s a good question” but responded, “I don’t mean to be an asshole about it, but really.” 

I guess I’ve been promulgating one of the verbal tics that annoys me.  If you notice me doing this with you, please admonish me appropriately.

Passion for ideas for new companies come from lots of different places.  I’ve learned to pay attention to them and see where they lead.  Sometimes they lead somewhere; often they don’t but make me smarter about the world.

Recently an investor that I’ve gotten to know and really like started talking about an idea for the ultimate travel community web site – its purpose would be to facilitate a community comprised of members that love travel.  The community would enable sharing of ideas, recommendations and travel experiences.

When I started playing around with user generated content and local search in 2005, one of the obvious applications to me was something oriented around travel.  At the time I looked hard and found nothing particularly compelling.  Ironically, the most interesting thing was the Yahoo Travel Planner which – while interesting – was very rough and underfeatured.  It’s gotten a lot better but still misses the ball somehow – probably around its lack of real social networking and lens through “trips” rather than specific reviews in geographies.

So – I’m looking around for something like is the intersection of a deep content site like Yahoo Travel with a real social network / UGC site like the stuff at YourRunning.com.  There would be a couple of pivot points: the user, the trip, a group around a trip, and groups of interests in trips.  Each user would be able to generate a blog and other user generated content (video, photos, comments) around a specific trip.  Groups would be able to communicate with each other (via whatever the appropriate messaging is – including real time stuff like Twitter.)  All the data would be persistent – so someone interested in a specific trip could see what was good and what was bad.  Search would be pervasive and accurate across all the content on the site.

The trip construct would obviously be monetizable through the creation of actual trips (and affiliate revenue / advertising.)  This is one of the really interesting parts of the idea – once you lay out a trip online – as a function of other people’s trips – you can then make plane tickets, hotel reservations, dinner reservations, and event schedules automatically, get maps and directions, and have an itinerary generated.  Assuming that all my fantasies about the Implicit Web become true, your compute infrastructure should be smart enough to do this for you automagically.

I’ve looked around for stuff like this but keep coming up short.  If you are out there and working on this (or know of something that does this well and has a real community), leave a comment about what you are up to.

I picked up the following Dr. Seuss quote on a piece of paper laying around in the conference room I was in earlier today.

You have brains in your head.
You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself
any direction you choose.