I spent a weekend writing up 27 versions of the classic fairy tale. Same story and same facts each time; but in each, the backstory before it happened & the thoughts in each of their heads change–resulting in a very different story each time. Fun, light, tons of hidden easter egg gifts for the readers – and each one reinforcing that whenever I see someone behaving in a way that makes no sense to me, I need to ask myself, “what does he know that I don’t?”
@smorganfriedman–with neither selfies nor food.
Ask me about it. Checkraise built the most modern poker technology on the market — including the first in-browser, real-money, fully legal poker game. And it gave me an excuse to spend most of my time in São Paulo for a few years and learn Portuguese.
@morganfriedman but heed the warning in my Twitter bio: I know a ton about a tiny number of topics; nothing about anything else. Each of my observations here is obvious, trivial, or wrong.
Spanish Etymology: Spanish for Nerds. I am obsessed with understanding where words come from, in many languages–and connecting the dots. My passion since I was 8 years old. For fun, I turned my decades of notes into a blog, with tens of thousands of subscribers. Get the book, as well.
Created the market for modern art ketubahs. Led the company to profitability, and built a fantastic and loyal community around our art and style. Now I’m Chairman–just because that makes me sound important!
Procentris. Procentris’ of Online Marketing Services, managing the online marketing for its US SEO & SEM clients. In Bombay. Managing dozens of Indian SEOs = Premature White Hairs.
I love this speech I gave, about my idiosyncratic way of walking around cities. (It starts out slow the first ~4 minutes… but stick it out for 13 minutes, it gets awesome as I get into the groove.)
WNIP. Every Wednesday since 2008, the best people I know in the country would come to my house for drinks. (Except for interludes when I’m abroad!). Often includes very, very awesome people.
As CEO of The Marketing Scientist, I ran the online component of Álvaro Colom Caballeros’ candidacy for the Presidency of Guatemala. We won.
The Marketing Scientist. Started an applied psychology lab: figuring out how to get 1+ million people buying your product. I’ve done it a few times :)
Buy the book, Overheard in New York. I’ve written two books–both Top 10 best-sellers on Amazon, and both published by Penguin. And buy the sequel, Overheard in the Office.
Overheard in New York. Founded a humor empire with my (successful!) mission to get 10 million people to laugh at my jokes. Time Magazine‘s Coolest Blogger of the Year. Endless Media Attention: my 15 minutes of fame. (And our sister sites, incl. Overheard in the Office).
Wordcounter. Founded the first & leading site to count the number of words in a document.
Basex. Analyst, then Senior Analyst, then VP of Research at Basex. Focusing on Knowledge Management research.
My very first company: one of the first print-on-demand systems. Got lucky, right before The Crash.
Inflation Calculator. Began the first & most visited site to calculate the US inflation rate.
Cliche Finder. Began the first & most popular searchable database of cliches. I don’t hide my love of cliches.
Penn, the Low Ivy. Won the Alumni Society Award as one of the 10 best students of my year. Won the Lilian & Benjamin Levy Award for writing, too. And yes, I’m a pretentious grammar snob for saying “was graduated” rather than “graduated.” I also use the Oxford Comma.
When still a baby bopper, I founded my first site & bought my first domain on date that most people remember for some other reason that happened a few years later.
I discovered ‘the Net’ (information superhighway?) and had lots of ideas for web pages–and taught myself programming, made them, and years later, they still get a ton of traffic. There are many, but here are a bunch, for Memory’s Sake: Yiddishisms: Yiddish Sayings (I also interviewed my relatives and wrote a book on my family history but that’s not for public consumption!); the first Antoine de St Exupery page; the first Albert Einstein page; the first Simpsons Quote page; the first Ogden Nash page; the first Francis Bacon page; the first site about my hometown Great Neck; my long-time game of finding words-in-other words; my favorite etymologies; my long-time favorite poem; my thoughts on wandering around; my game of trying to understand business-ese; the only guide to walking around NY’s ethnic neighborhoods; some ancient quotes that once influenced me; my cv; books that moved me; and pre-Facebook photos of me.
Childhood math nerd.
Childhood piano freak.
In middle school, I read John & Abigail Adams’ collected letters and loved their epistolary style. So I found lots of pen-pals and wrote to them like this. I did this for years until I became quite good. Then I spent a decade doing the same but for other lots of other people’s styles.
Starting when I was approximately 8 years old until late high school, I’d spend 2 hours every morning memorizing the dictionary (and its etymologies), before the school bus came. The trusty, unpretentious World Book Dictionary, of course.
Don’t remember it well. But my dad looks great in this photo with me, taken generally around that time.
The entire extended family—everyone, very poor—all came to my great-aunt’s house for dinner every Sunday night, for decades. The weekly luxury. When she was in her 90s, she laid down her head while cooking the dinner, and died. The whole family arrived over the next hours, as scheduled. They ate the dinner. It’s what she would have wanted.
Five poor brothers emigrated from Minsk, Belarus to NY. The great depression was so bad for them that four of them returned to Belarus. Those four were murdered (you know, that issue with Germany). The one who stayed in NY was my great-grandfather. Thanks for not moving back to Eastern Europe on the eve of Hitler and Stalin, G-Gramps!
My great-grandfather emigrated from “Minsk Gubernia” to NY. Saved money, sent enough back to send for his wife… and the ship arrived, and his wife’s sister stepped off. Wife died and she took her place. She ended up being my great-grandma! Love those traditions.
23andme tells me I’m 100% Ashkenazi via Minsk/Belarus, confirming the family lore. 23andme has not yet confirmed the other family lore, on all sides, that we were all the poorest of the poor peasants: penniless rabbis, and the women who took care of them.
My story begins with my first known ancestor, for the human part of my DNA, was Y Chromosomal Adam. He’s the first “anatomically modern human,” as the evolutionary-biologists call them: the one man whom science has taught us that I’m descended from. And all other modern humans, too.
They say, in our family lore, that 1,165,000 years ago our family’s distant ancestors were reptiles and thus we still have some trace of reptilian DNA in us. 23andme confirmed I do have some non-human Neanderthal DNA in me, at least. Who knows if the reptilian story–a bubbe-meise, as my grandma called them–is true or not. If I had to bet, I’d guess the chance that this is accurate would be about 0.00298347%.