and she said.. "how you interpret the dream is probably more important than the dream itself"

I wouldn't even be that rich anymore. Used to be a million dollars meant something. It was a big crazy number that only Stalin and maybe a few Oil Sheiks and Howard Hughes really knew about. It was this big magical number that represented that the world could be bought and you could buy happiness.

Course this was back in the days when a little boy named Hitler was kind of grumpy about his jail time and petulantly wrote about poor little him.. sitting in his jail cell. I'm sure it was rough.

But a million dollars doesn't mean what it used to. First of all the dollar isn't what it used to be in the great white north. Back when I was attending university in the great white north you could buy beer for 66 cents USD. You could buy great fancy dinners for $7. You could even go to the movies for $4.20. Or should I say $4,20? But now? Now it'll cost you in the range of $8, just like it does down here.

A million bucks might get you a headache and a horseshoe pit in your back yard but it certainly isn't going to make you rich. Rich is not-having-to-say-you-sorry cause when you are you just pay instead. Rich is tossing money around like sponge cake at a wedding day and letting the maids clean it up.

Scrooge McDuck was rich.

Scrooge liked to let on that he was a real cheap bastard and never wanted to spend a dime but the truth of the matter is that he had the huge mansion and he had a helicopter on hand and a pilot to boot. Truth is that when he'd go on adventures with his great nephews he wouldn't cheese out and pack peanut butter sandwiches for lunch like a true miser would - he'd have baked lobster and crab and cheeses and fine wine. He'd have Launchpad grill up steaks on the back of the turboprop engine.

He even had a mistress once.

But I digress, a million clams aint' what it used to be.

One nice house in a nice neighbourhood: $500,000

One VW Phaeton for him: $70,000

One Land Rover Discovery for her: $50,000

One beach cottage getaway: $250,000

Four years undergraduate school for Son: $130,000

Look on their faces when all the money is gone?

Priceless.

Some people say you couldn't spend a billion dollars. A billion is too much, they say. To that I say Ho - Hey - Slow Down. Not so fast bucko. I certainly could spend a billion dollars and I could do it faster than you could say Kraft Macaroni and Cheese dinner.

As the late Senator Everett Dirksen said

A billion here, a billion there - pretty soon it adds up to real money

But one billion? Nah.. it's nothing. Pocket change. Half a stealth bomber. HALF! Know what else one billion is half of? It's half the cost of an Alaskan bridge to NOWHERE.

Unfortunately, this piece in the New York Times this last weekend comes a little late to be consider a possible April Fool's joke:

Even by the standards of Alaska, the land where schemes and dreams come for new life, two bridges approved under the national highway bill passed by the House last week are monuments to the imagination.

One, here in Ketchikan, would be among the biggest in the United States: a mile long, with a top clearance of 200 feet from the water ? 80 feet higher than the Brooklyn Bridge and just 20 feet short of the Golden Gate Bridge. It would connect this economically depressed, rain-soaked town of 7,845 people to an island that has about 50 residents and the area's airport, which offers six flights a day (a few more in summer). It could cost about $200 million.

The other bridge would span an inlet for nearly two miles to tie Anchorage to a port that has a single regular tenant and almost no homes or businesses. It would cost up to $2 billion.

Looks like I'm not the only one who can spend a billion in the blink of an eye.