Washed In Life's River

Ok, enough is enough. You know this isn't funny anymore. I just hope you folks out there in the rest of the country are enjoying the sunshine wherever you're at because up here in Northern California we haven't seen the sun since February. I'm not kidding. One day it's cloudy then the next day it rains. And then the next day it's cloudy again and the day after that it rains. It's been going on and on like this for over a month now and the ground is soaked and the streets are soaked and I'm soaked, and even though I don't live anywhere near a creek or a river it sure was peculiar to look out my front window this morning and see Burt Reynolds go paddling by in a canoe.

Ah, enough about that. I'm tired of talking about the weather but since I'm stuck here inside tonight I thought I might as well write about something. All I need is something to talk about. Hmmm, here's a semi-interesting topic:

The cost of things.

If you've been watching the news lately doesn't it seem like every other story is about how much it's gonna cost to fix something that's broke. Billions to fix New Orleans, billions to fix the infrastructure, billions to secure our borders, billions to rebuild foreign countries, billions for health care and homeland security and education and blah, blah, blah... I wonder if anyone's thought about hiring an auditor or home inspection type person to just go through all the things that need fixing and total up the costs. I bet it would come to petillions and petillions of dollars if you were to actually add it all up.

Which leads to one obvious conclusion. Namely, America needs some cash. Sure we could save more or we could sell more and try to raise some money that way, but I have a better idea. I think we need to do some empire building. Think about it. That's what the Romans did, isn't it. That's what the British did. That's the way you did things in the old days. When you needed cash you'd raise an army or build a navy and go colonize someone, and that's what America needs to do now. We need to find some country that we can subjugate and exploit and go invade them.

I nominate Canada.

Canada's got lots of natural resources and more than a little gold in their treasury, and we wouldn't even have to invade them. We could just send our armies up their dressed as tourists and they'd never know the difference. And then one day BAM, we take off our disguises and overrun them in a suprise attack. Easy as pie if you ask me. Venezuela would be another good country we could invade. They've got plenty of oil and hell, they aren't doing anything with it. I bet there's all kinds of countries we could occupy and loot and lord knows we could use the cash. Time to do a little empire building if you ask me.

Just something to think about, and not much of a topic really. Oh well.

Hmmm...

I got this new CD from the record store today. It's called Songs of Innocence and of Experience by the composer William Bolcom. I heard some excerpts of it on a podcast and it sounded pretty interesting. Won a grammy too. In case you're completely clueless let me explain that this is a huge work based on the writings of William Blake that spans 3 CD's and manages to incorporate just about every musical style in the book from "intense dissonance to folk, rock and reggae" (that quote is from the back cover). I was paging through the b0oklet and it says that it takes close to 450 people to perform it live. Pretty amazing. I can't wait to hear the whole thing.

Yeah, I know. Pretty exciting, huh? Well, what else is there to do on a rainy night?