Thanks for your useful comments on my social network idea. You make some good points. It's true that young people probably wouldn't have any interest in interacting with middle aged or older people, unless they were people who could somehow further their careers. And "winners" would have no interest in speaking with "losers." Another problem is that most people are basically kind of boring, and there's not a whole lot you can do with that. Really boring people would manage to come up with boring answers to anything, even questions that tried to somehow trick them into being interesting. So, back to the drawing board. Or not.
My vengeful self is delighted to see that the Norwegian prosecutors are starting to ask Anders Breivik questions designed to deflate him and make him look silly and pathetic, such as inquiries about the long period he spent living at his mother's house, playing the video game "World of Warcraft" sixteen hours a day. Hopefully, they have a great deal more embarrassing material to cover, so they can successfully show him and the world that he is a sad, sick, ridiculous person. That would be the ultimate punishment for a self-important coward like him.
I hope your tortillas turn out well.
I don't want to see Romney win because I think the economy is finally going to be turning around, and I don't want the Republicans to get to take credit for that. But it is true that some very difficult decisions will have to be made in the next four years, and whoever makes them will look bad, and will infuriate the other side. Or maybe difficult decisions don't have to be made, maybe we can just keep staggering along, putting it all off for another day. It seems like the state of California is able to more or less be permanently bankrupt, without having to do anything about it. Or is that not true?
You've got to hand it to New York City.... they pretty much have it made. It has such a concentration of tourist sites and activities, and such a reputation as a happening, must-see experience, that it is constantly FILLED with tourists coming to spend thousands of dollars on lodging, food, shopping, theater, and everything else. It is like Disneyland, masquerading as a huge city. It is particularly attractive to foreign tourists. Every time we go down there to visit Hayden we notice throngs of tourists from Asia and Europe. In the last couple of years we've particularly noticed a lot of Russians, but there are plenty of people from all sorts of countries, including China. A lot of the really wealthy foreign people like to own an apartment in New York where they can stay when they're in town -- we're talking Arabs, Chinese, Russians and others with million dollar pads scattered in different places in the city. This all helps keep the real estate prices permanently sky high. Hayden is living down in the Wall Street area -- it's actually cheaper to live down there because it's not a lively social scene-type neighborhood, it's a place where people work all day, then clear out. It's interesting that a very high percentage of the tourists down in Wall Street are foreigners. They consider the New York Stock Exchange, and Wall Street to be must-see places, more so than American tourists. The site of the World Trade Center is eventually going to be a huge tourist draw as well.... they're working on a stunning and large memorial area right now, and it's already flooded with people who come to observe the progress and snap pictures of where the twin towers once stood.
I think most tea-party types think Bush was a dud because he wasn't conservative enough.... he didn't stand up for "true" conservative values. And the fact that a lot of conservatives are now sort of agitating for some sort of more powerful military threat against Iran shows that people don't necessarily learn anything from past experience or history, even very recent history.
--edward
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