Seems like it’s not a good time to be a celebrity, they’re dying left and right. With all the hoo-ha going on around this “Michael Jackson was the best performer ever!” NOT! I thought I’d weigh in with the one passing that actually had any connection for me, that was Farrah Fawcett. Not that I knew her, I didn’t. But I sure did spend time looking at her poster!

No claims of best actress ever, no claims of most attractive woman, no claims of best human being, none of that is necessary. But for a heterosexual male of my age raised in the US, Farrah was for many, the first big celebrity crush. Looking back on it now, the 1970’s style is dated (she certainly inspired a whole generation of females to have “feathered” hair in the following years.) I remember watching Charlie’s Angels just to get a glimpse of Farrah.

While I’m sad at her passing, I can’t help but wonder if it provided some relief given her protracted illness and treatments. All I can say thanks for the memories Farrah.

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It always seems to happen, you find a good service, become a customer, and then after it proves its worth, the service promptly goes under. I consider it lucky I didn’t sign up for that TEN year membership…In any case, Clear, the airport security screening accelerator ceased operations this week after it couldn’t secure terms from debt holders.

To put this bluntly, this sucks! Clear was one of the best things to happen to air travel in the post 9/11 world. You could whisk through security in 5 minutes or less with minimal hassle. Even though I have airline status, those lines are never as fast or efficient as Clear was. So long Clear, we hardly knew ya! Hope someone resurrects the concept.

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It occurred to me yesterday that I’ve lived in the Bay Area for nearly 20 years (tough to believe, but true) and I had never visited the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose. So, we bundled the girls into the truck and off we went to the south bay in search of adventure.

For those of you who don’t know, the Winchester Mystery House is billed as a large mansion with many oddities, curiosities, peculiarities, and gasp, ghosts! What we found was less exciting, a tourist trap (and an expensive one at that, $72 for three tickets) that was really, at least I thought, sad.

The story starts with Sarah Winchester nee Pardee, widow to William Winchester of rifle fame. After having her only child die as an infant from a wasting disease and her husband some time later from tuberculosis, the story goes she visited at “medium” in Boston who indicated her child and husband were taken by the spirits of all those killed by Winchester rifles. In order to keep the spirits at bay, she should “go west,” find a home, and keep building continuously and as long as that happened, she would live in peace.

Mrs. Winchester had inherited $20M and control of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company from which she earned some estimated $1,000 a day. This is 1884, so that’s real money for the time. Taking the medium’s advice, she struck out for the west and ended up in San Jose where she bought a 160 acre fruit farm with an 8 room home, a barn, water tower, and other supporting buildings.

After she took possession of the property, construction began, and continued 24/7 until September 5, 1922 with Mrs. Winchester’s death. The result of 38 years of construction was a 24,000 square foot home with 160 rooms, 2,000 doors, who knows how many windows, three elevators, multiple kitchens, a seance room, and multiples of 13 and 7 everywhere with occult symbols like the spider web appearing in Tiffany leaded glass windows throughout the property. There are doors, windows, and cabinets that open onto walls, a stairway to nowhere, and many, many other inexplicable features in this property. While it certainly has some interesting aspects, it’s no Hearst Castle or Biltmore House.

Mrs. Winchester employed nearly 30 people full-time as her house staff paying them $3 a day, each day in cash, so she could simply say “Don’t show up tomorrow” to those who displeased her. This was 2x the normal daily wage so she never had a lack of willing talent to choose from. The prevailing theories about the home, completely designed by Mrs. Winchester are, bad design as the first and trying to confuse the spirits of the dead as the second. After walking through the property, my theory is she was nutty as a fruit cake and had the financial wherewithal to create a physical expression of her mental illness.

In fact, the only real mystery around the house is who the owners are now. Even that’s not much of a corker, Winchester Investments, LLC is the registered owner and Gerard Raney and Ray K. Farris and their families are the names associated with the company according to multiple sources in the public domain. The tour guide simply answered my question with “local families who like their privacy.” The grounds are now a little over 4 acres with beautiful gardens, a cafe, gift shop, arcade, picnic area, and private meeting rooms.

While it was intended to be spooky and scary, mostly I just left feeling sad that this woman was so tortured that she lived her life in such a manner due to complete and utter bullshit. What a waste. And how sad.

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Given the Twitter-mania that seems to be sweeping the world, it would be a public service to talk about Sharespost, the passive bulletin board to connect buyers and sellers of private equity of hot companies like Twitter, Tesla, eHarmony, Facebook, SolarCity, and a couple of hundred more.

This is really a very good idea as shareholders of privately held startups have never had such a convenient was to transform their shares into cash in advance of “the liquidity event” all startups attempt to catalyze. Now, this isn’t like opening an E-Trade account, it’s more involved and expensive than that. To keep the riff-raff out, the minimum transaction size is $25,000 and there is a flat $2,500 transaction fee payable to US Bank.

In order to stay in the good graces of the Securities and Exchanges Commission, Sharespost is simply putting qualified Buyers and Sellers in a place to have a private conversation and making pertinent information about both parties and the companies available for faster and more efficient decisions. So I say kudos to Greg Brogger & Co to providing a much needed and potentially very useful service to shareholders and buyers alike.

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The thing that is most surprising to me about the recent election in Iran where the incumbent hardliner won re-election is that anyone would be surprised about the outcome. I mean, come on, this regime in Iran is not exactly known for concepts like democracy or even making decisions based upon data (see Islamic Republic - if it ain’t in the Koran it ain’t happening.)

So there’s all this news coverage spewing all over on this subject and I find myself asking “why is anyone surprised and why is this news?” When the Ayotollah dies and isn’t replaced, then we can see if any real change is possible in Iran. While religious nutjobs run the country, things aren’t going to change without armed revolt.

I have no enmity toward the Iranian people (in fact, some of the most interesting, intelligent, kind, and capable people I know originally hail from Iran - often they’re more oblique indicating they’re from Persia.) Indeed, I hope for their sake, they are able to reach some reasonable accord between their own collective free will and religion. It’s just that the situation that has recently played out had zero promise of that happening.

It’s up to the people of Iran to figure this out and if we’re smart, we’ll stay out of it whilst that happens. The rule of unintended consequences you know…Meanwhile, present-day Iran provides good example of why to keep church and state separate.

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