I sat for my jacket cover photo the other day, another sign that Release Day is drawing ever closer. (90 days, to be exact. Hokey Smoke! as Rocky the Flying Squirrel used to exclaim) I lobbied my publisher hard to use either the “cobra shot” on this blog, or the “camel shot”, but as usual, I lost. What you’ll see is a straight up “Presidential” look: Navy blue suit and light blue tie. “The photographer worked miracles!” was my Development Director’s reaction. How am I supposed to take that?
So, I thought Obama did well, but, as usual, it will be a case of converting the sunny vision of America on Top Again into a reality. The overwhelming reality right now is: how in God’s name are we going to come up with the jack to invest in a Lionel toy train set much less a nationwide network of gleaming high speed trains? A part of me wanted to see my former CEO, Jim Nehmer, walk up to the podium and say to Obama, like he used to say to me after I would run on about all the wonderful FINCA projects I wanted to fund this year: “You’ve got no money.”
Well, let’s dream a little, while we can. It’s better than contemplating the sourpuss of John “Boo Hoo” Boehner, hovering over O’s left shoulder like some sinister Signer-in-Chief who preferred to sit on his hands rather than translate for us. Did you count his grimaces? They bested the standing ovations 6 to 1.
I’m tired of the “new civility” already. Bring back the Good Old Days! Let’s mix it up, guys!
I had a nice chat yesterday with Microfinance’s Blogger-in-Chief, David Roodman yesterday, at my office.
http://blogs.cgdev.org/open_book
I made him agree to some ground rules first, but he forgot to make me agree to any ground rules, heh heh, so….
We’ll follow the protocol anyway, and let’s just say that, despite his having smacked FINCA upside the head a while back for some aspects of our research methodology he found less than rigorous, we found much common ground. I will go into that in more detail down the road, as well as some other transcendental things that are afoot in our besieged industry, which I currently under a gag order not to divulge. The time will come.
Getting back to the speech, there were some things missing, like any mention of that hair trigger issue, gun control. Not that we need it, of course, despite the fact that every single law enforcement officer and every mayor of every city in the U.S. supports it. But you can see the NRA’s logic: there are still hundreds of thousands of Law Enforcement Officers who have as yet NOT been mowed down by the superior fire power of the Bad Guys they are trying to apprehend, not to mention over 200 million U.S. citizens still walking around in shopping malls as if they didn’t have a care in the world. So as our Near Miss Senator from Nevada said, Man Up! all you policemen out there on the beat. No more of this Man Down!
And even if we did get down to, say, a few hundred Law Enforcement officers, the solution would NOT be to control the sale of 30 + round clip assault rifles. The correct answer would be to arm our Law Enforcement establishment with commensurate fire power, obviously.
Oh, I forgot. We cut their budgets.
Another important research finding was Guns Don’t Kill People, Bananas do.
That’s right, when someone goes over the edge, their first reaction is to go to the local Safeway and stock up on bananas. Ripe, green; doesn’t matter. If they can, they’ll fill three shopping carts full of them, and link them together, like tractor trailers. If the cashier looks at them funny – Kablam! – Chiquita Banana, right in the kisser.
I think that will do it for today.
Rupert