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Startups are more omnipresent then neon these days. The explosion of VC funds, incubators, accelerators and other labs of the like is not limited to the coasts, as indicated by the venture moving in across the hall from our Chicago office next month. And with that little one billion dollar Instagram sale, the fever to come up with another elegantly simple, breakthrough idea is spreading even further.

To gain popularity, a potential startup these days doesn’t even need to be real, as demonstrated by the recent Tacocopter hoax. And it can also involve novelty toilet paper. In this era the bar can be low, so let’s make it even lower by celebrating pitches from three startups that haven’t, and probably shouldn’t, see the light of day.

Quick, you’re late to Paris in 1906 and your go-to corset is still at the cleaners:  what do you do? It is precisely occasions like these that I regret anchoring the bulk of my wardrobe in the Muppets heyday circa 1979. So I get over it and go. After all, this is the meal that’s a solid year in the making.

It’s my trip to Next, Grant Achatz’s restaurant masterpiece. Achatz is Michael Jordan in the kitchen, augmented by a Shakespearean bout with tongue cancer, a story coming soon to theaters. He continues to floor diners with Alinea, consistently ranked one of the best restaurants in the world, and is now upping the ante with Next and it’s impending neighbor Aviary, a ballsy reimagination of the cocktail lounge.

BBQ sauce stains denigrated inappropriate regions of my jeans, pedicabs ate a chunk out of this week’s lunch money and lines took a toll on my soul (should have used TaskRabbit), while a surplus of Austin food trucks with pun names both further questioned and restored my sanity.

In addition to joining the mostly Asian Wives and their escort for SXSW Interactive, I stayed to indulge in the music portion. With thousands of options for panels, keynotes and bands, I stumbled upon lots of awesome and sprinkles of crap.

7 days in Austin left me with the extremes of Evil and Good, which were equally enlightening. And below is what ultimately stuck amidst the alcohol haze.

Chris Al-Aswad via Twitter on July 23 at 4:49pm: There are no second acts in American Lives. –F. Scott Fitzgerald.

This is as much a story about alphabetical order as it is about hashtags.

Thanks to my favorite cohort, I had the opportunity to attend the NRA Show yesterday (THIS not this).

It was a huge cluster of everything food related from celeb chefs to the latest innovations in kitchen refrigeration to blenders that double as guillotines to mobile cuisine, also known as the new black. Sadly, there were no exhibitions dedicated to  The Human Centipede.

Aside from sampling a frightening range of food for 382 minutes, here are my top 3 highlights: