PLEASE, NO MORE ICE!

Don’t give me ice on roads and trees,

Just give me ice in Scotch, oh please,

Don’t give me ice on walks and drives,

Just give me ice on rinks, high fives,

Don’t give me ice on lines and poles,

Just give me ice on food in bowls,

Please, no more ice that kills our juice,

Just give me warmth and Doctor Seuse!

Greenland is covered with a one mile thick slab of ice.

I am not going there cause, to me, that don’t sound nice!

“I meant what I said and I said what I meant. Please, no more ice”

TRADE WITH CHINA --- GOOD OR BAD?

There are many working class Americans who have lost their jobs because of China’s ability to manufacture durable goods at a cost that is less than we can produce those goods. So, is trade with China a bad thing for our country? Maybe for the short term but trade with China is a necessary and good thing for the future of our country. The trend towards a global economy is unstoppable. Trade protection and tariffs are short term remedies that will quickly fail and be bad for the future of the U.S.A.  History proves they do not work.

The U.S. led the world through the industrial era and it will lead the world through the information era. Technology and ingenuity were important for the age of machines and manufacturing. But now, they are even more important for the vanguard of the information era. Overall, we are currently a net exporter of services with a surplus of $136 billion. Now, our most important product is intellectual property. In spite of the recession, exports of financial services were $230 billion last year. Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter, shows that we are now the technological leader of the world. Imagination and knowledge will continue to be our strength in the future. Our present economic migration from a material- based industry to a knowledge economy of intangible goods such as, software, design, and media products is a realty that we all must get on with in order to survive. We are no longer the cheapest producers of physical products!

SOMETHING TO GET YOUR MIND OFF WINTER

Biting winds, subzero temperatures, unassembled snowmen, winter-weary depression, makes you wish the recession had not destroyed your get out of here and go south funds. You need something to think about that takes your mind off your misery. Well, try to get you mind around the “Big Bang Theory”. It will get your mind off winter’s stranglehold on you.

Biogenesis is what scientist call the study of the origin of life. The Big Bang is the event that they say led to the formation of the universe. A little tiny speck, the size of an atom, incredibly dense, filled with energy, under super extreme high temperature and pressure, blew up and created a universe filled with homogeneous and isotropic dense energy. Are you with me so far? O K, now, this ever expanding universe, consisting of quark-gluon plasma and elementary particles, starts to smash everything together at speeds faster than the speed of light, which created particle-antiparticle pairs which caused a baryogenesis reaction resulting in quarks and leptons which resulted in the predominance of matter over antimatter. Voila! Our Universe is born! Then, it was just a matter of time (14billion years to be exact) until our solar system came together with earth smack in the middle of a Goldilocks zone, not too close and not far from the sun. Then, a single cell evolved into 30 million species (including human beings) co inhabiting our lovely planet. That only took 4 billion years to happen. I wonder what’s going to happen next?!! 

A BOOK REVIEW

It has been awhile since I have reviewed a book. I just finished reading a series of books that were so good, I have to tell you about them. These books grabbed me and kept me reading until I had finished all three. They are called the Millennium-Trilogy and consist of: THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE, and THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET’S NEST. The author, Stieg Larsson of Sweden, died at the age of 50 shortly after completing the three novels. Because he was so talented, it is a shame that he died so young. His books have become the second biggest sellers in the entire world.

Larsson’s background in journalism seems to have helped him to become an outstanding novelist. I went from one book to the next as fast as I could. I was led into a world that I knew nothing about and found it to be captivating. His characters are so vivid and complex that they seem real and believable. The imaginative plot kept me completely absorbed. I was delightfully entertained by this author. I wish I could read more of his work but he is gone from this world.