Girl Scout bailout

So according to a recent CNN article, the Girl Scouts average about $700 million a year in cookie sales. $700 million!!! What in the name of holy hell do they spend those millions on? More yarn for their arts and crafts projects? Is the material for their little green uniforms that costly?? Do they get bonuses or something? Go on vacation to the Cayman Islands? (I was too shy as a kid to join the Girl Scouts so I honestly have no idea what the heck they get up to.)

$700 million. jesus. I was suddenly struck with the idea...why don't THEY bailout the government? It's ingenious. EVERYone buys their cookies, right? Come on, you'd be inhuman or severely diabetic if you haven't scarfed down an entire box of thin mints at least once in your life. Soooo the Girl Scouts should take their millions upon millions to produce even more boxes of cookies and launch a massive WORLDWIDE cookie-selling campaign to double...nay...triple their profits. With those profits, they bailout the US government, and everyone is happy because the economy is back on track and because we'll all be wondrously fat and high from the excessive sugar-intake.

Obama, I'll be willing to draft a more detailed initiative for this...you just give me the green light and I'll get right on it.

Miracle on the Hudson

Amazing story of one pilot's incomparable skill and steady nerves. Still gives me chills, looking at all the pictures

Walking on a Dream

current song obsession...even the weird-ass music video is growing on me. I find myself making the same hand motions when they sing "when two people become one"

NYC pictorial pt. II : Winter

So today started out beautiful, crisp and sunny. I just wandered by my boss's office (I sit nowhere near a window) and lo and behold....snow! Big, frothy, drifty, flakes of nature's perspiration.

this guy isn't joking around

The Rise of Endymion

This is the last book of Simmons' Hyperion Cantos and arguably, the most moving. Raul, Aenea and A. Bettik have settled on Old Earth for the last four years but young Aenea knows it is time to leave and they must part ways. Raul is sent on a mission to retrieve the Consul's old spaceship (probably one of my favorite "characters" in the entire series) and Aenea and A. Bettik journey on so that the girl can spread her wisdom, so to speak, and to continue constructing her architectural wonders on a score of different worlds. The Pax is still in hot pursuit and eventually, things come to a head and Aenea and Raul and many others must meet their fate.

While reading this novel, I was pleasurably stunned at the depth and richness of this story. Dan Simmons must have spent years concocting this fantasy of far-future science fiction, incorporating the elements of quantum physics, morality, religion, love, architecture, geography, history...However, this specific book dealt foremost in the necessity of humankind's ability to evolve. In short, DS's message is: change is good. It is assumed that eventually, mankind will travel to and even live on other planets. In this book, you see that people have mastered space travel but only to conform the planets to Earth standards. What's wrong with that, you ask? Well, look what a pig's ear we've made of the one planet we have available to us so far. Since evolving to homo erectus, man hasn't changed in a millenia. We've just used our intelligence to make our planet conform to our needs. It's an unsettling thought. As Aenea says so poignantly... "choose again." We should all feel the urge, the desire, the need to be more, to be different and most importantly, to respect and to change with nature.

All preaching aside...the love story in this novel moved me to no end. Raul and Aenea are connected beyond the boundaries of time and distance. They are soulmates in the truest sense of the word and their story is inexpressibly beautiful.