We Only Have Ourselves To Blame For This
A friend in England has alerted me to the following political development.
Anyway, it was nice while it lasted until President Bush screwed it all up.
In light of your failure in recent years to nominate competent candidates for President of the USA and thus to govern yourselves, or most recently to regulate your financial markets, we hereby give notice of the revocation of your independence, effective immediately.
(You should look up 'revocation' in the Oxford English Dictionary.)
Her Sovereign Majesty Queen Elizabeth II will resume monarchical duties over all states, commonwealths, and territories (except Kansas, which she does not fancy).
Your new Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, will appoint a Governor for America without the need for further elections.
Congress and the Senate will be disbanded. A questionnaire may be circulated next year to determine whether any of you noticed.
To aid in the transition to a British Crown dependency, the following rules are introduced with immediate effect:
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Alex Keto
6 Comments
Just Take A Break
Amid all the gloomy headlines about bank failures, collapsing stock markets, and fruitless meetings by the wizards of finance, one sentence knocked me as flat as if it had been delivered by a sledge hammer.
"It looks like I'm going to have a lot of work to do between today and when the new president takes office," President George W. Bush said.
Why? Is there anything left standing that you haven't destroyed, sullied, tarnished or bankrupted?
Seriously, everything is going to be all right because at least my legacy is set.
I'm Moving
Well, it's autumn and in some parts of the world that means it's time for the grape harvest.
The Italian town of Marino, according to a BBC report, traditionally celebrates the harvest by disconnecting the water main to the fountain in the central square and running sparkling white wine through it. The fountain literally gushes champagne and every one can take a cup or glass and have a sip.
Except that this year, the town employees disconnected the wrong water main and surprised residents around the square turned on their house taps to find they had hot and cold running champagne. Sounds like those workers hit the champagne supply a bit before they got to work that day.
What a place! I'm moving.
Camping
There's an old saying that if you really want to know what goes on inside a person, you should go camping with them. Yep, nothing like spending a few days in close proximity under unusual if not mildly stressful conditions for it all to come out.
However, having said that, I never really expected my daughter to sit up in the tent last weekend and, well, you know, puke. This was taking letting it all out a bit too far.
But that's what happened on the weekend camping trip to Patapsco State Park which is just outside Baltimore and with parts of it actually in Baltimore.
We were all sleeping soundly when about four in the morning I awoke to wretching noises. My poor daughter was in some distress and looking a bit sheepish and by the time the fog of sleep had cleared, it was pretty much all over.
"Why did you do that?"
"I don't know."
The T-Rex On The Loose
For no particular reason I could discern other than the book was lying around, I picked up Michael Crichton book Jurassic Park recently and re-read it for the second or third time.
I suppose I do this sort of thing to build up my meager knowledge of science since before Crichton got famous, most everything I knew about physics and the cosmos came from watching the original Star Trek series. In any case, Crichton talks a lot about Chaos Theory which, at least as it comes across in the Jurassic Park, can be boiled down to the idea it is a hubristic notion that humans can understand extraordinarily complex systems. Which isn't to say we will never get to the bottom of them, but rather that at the moment, we have about as much chance of doing this as cave men did of building a World Trade Center.
Meanwhile, our country's financial system seems to be, in the coded parlance of the upper crust leadership, under some stress. Or in the earthier words of our erstwhile national leader, who is a whiz at being simplistic,"that sucker is going down." Whether he meant Wall Street, his legacy, or both is unclear.