Is a posting every 6 months considered "Blogging"?

Well. Once post every six months. No one will accuse me of running off at the mouth...at least not for this blog.

Since last I've posted, my writing business has fallen victim to The Financial Meltdown, so I've decided the time is ripe to become a documentary film maker. My subject is (duh!) The Financial Meltdown. Not as boring and dry as you might think.

As it turns out, the periods of boom and bust we now may lovingly think of as "Bubbleomics" are in fact present in a pattern that repeats itself in 10 to 15 year intervals since the establishment of the U.S. Federal Reserve - arguably the first of many unconstitutional and most likely unlawful acts.

The problem with the research phase of this project is you of course can't talk to anybody who still holds a government office, and those who are retired and willing to talk are largely incoherent and senile. Not that the one's in office now aren't senile. I think senility is relative anyway...some people are born senile and only compound the problem with a little learning and experience...others burn a sharp blue intellectual flame well after they've gone gray and bony.

Needless to say, the most interesting part of making a film is raising the money...especially if you're a first-timer like me who likes to throw around names and numbers as if they're a done deal. BIG talker, everyone thinks. Only, of course, until its done.

Will it get done? Time will tell. There are hundreds if not thousands of companies going off a cliff right now cause they can't obtain enough credit to operate their perfectly viable businesses. Who's going to want to fund a documentary film by a first timer in these conditions?

Fortunately, the list to which I can market the idea is somewhat vast, having been developed over the last decade by GATA, which stands for the Gold Anti-Trust Action committee, an organization that has been loudly proclaiming the illegal manipulation of the gold price for nearly a decade. They are interested in seeing this film get made and are of the opinion that I'm just the man for the job.

There is no web site yet, but there will be one day soon. You're probably better off finding out more about it at my other site, http://www.midasletter.com.

Re-thinking the Blog

I've only recently realized that people I know and love and in some cases respect (kidding) actually read this thing, so I've decided to apply some thought to the process instead of amuse myself with fanciful drivel. (Look...there I go again...)

Things are shaping up on so many fronts this year, and life is spooling off so fast, that it seems like it was just yesterday that I was swiping 20s outta my mother's wallet to score weed at the high school cross town cause ours was so lame. We would actually bolt to the north end of St. Catharines at lunch time, having taken up a collection during morning classes to score an ounce, which we would then roll into spliffs for distribution towards the end of lunch, usually resulting in us skipping the rest of the day to smoke the profit.

Its been an entrepreneurial existence from day one for me.

The payoff seems to be around the corner (though I've thought this about thirty times over the last thirty years).

In the midst of the contraction of capital underway globally, myself and some fellow bandits have hit upon a rather novel way to fund big resource projects faster cheaper and earlier than the banks are willing to on a debt basis.

I won't bore you with the details, which essentially entail arcane mathematical foofooraw combined with good old fashioned sales force. The fees threaten to be big. You'll be able to tell if suddenly I renounce my environmental diatribe in favour of a Hummer (not that kind of hummer...dammit)

I've been trying to line up a Hydrogen 7 from BMW, but in order to have one here in Canada, I would have to install my own hydrogen generator and liquefaction plant. The generator would split the four hydrogen atoms off of the single carbon atom in the propane I have delivered here, and would cost about $5,000. The liquefaction process and storage unit is going to run me closer to $1 M. And BMW still won't sell me a Hydrogen 7, because I'm not a celebrity.

Here's an excerpt from the most recent email barrage I finally received after a global electronic circle jerk thats been going on for weeks now:

Dear Mr. West,

Thank you for your email to BMW AG. It has been forwarded to us as we are the subsidiary responsible to address any questions or concerns from Canadian customers.

In response to your inquiry, the BMW Hydrogen 7 has been built in a limited series in Europe and driven in the US and other countries by selected users in 2007. Unfortunately, at this time, it is only available to those selected customers.

Sincerely,

Mylene
Customer Interaction Specialist
BMW Canada

Jay Leno got one. Brad Pitt pulled up to the Oscars in one. I mean, come on! How credible is a Hydrogen product if anybody can't buy one who's willing to jump through so many golden hoops to do so?

My new tactic is to embarrass them into it through a campaign of nasty article publishing. I sure hope the financing business goes well. Wouldn't I look like a jerk if they finally agreed and I had to plead poverty.

Also...get this: I'm going to be on TV on April 18th at 8:30 a.m. Vancouver time, 11:30 a.m. in Toronto (duh). Here's the email:

Hello James
I have booked you for BNN the Commodities Report show on Friday April 18^th

Studio address is:
720 King Street West
10th Floor

The show begins at 11:30am EST but you will need to arrive no later than 11am EST in order to get makeup done etc.

One of the producers will contact you before hand in order to get your two top picks and go through a few email questions.

Best of luck on the show,

Warwick Smith

Watch me turn into a blathering idiot live on TV! What could be more fun than that?!!
Love, Me

The Hydrogen Economy is Here

Last week, I drove a modified Ford pick-up truck that burned hydrogen in its internal combustion engine. My exhaust output was pure water. What a rush to actually drive a vehicle powered by the only truly "zero emissions" fuel.

Now I know what you green fuel experts are thinking: "Well, its not really a zero emissions fuel if it takes a lot of electricity to create the hydrogen". This is true.

But the hydrogen in my fuel cannister was provided by a filling station in North Vanvouver owned jointly by a group called "IWHUP" (Integrated Waste Hydrogen Utilization
Project), whose members are committed to the establishment of hydrogen infrastructure. This hydrogen was captured and purified from the waste exhaust stream of heavy oil upgrading plant in North Vancouver. Besides bleach manufacturers, petro chemical refiners and fertilizer manufacturers are some of the best sources for waste hydrogen. In Canada alone, over 50 million kilograms of hydrogen are vented annually from industrial processes, which is enough to power 200,000 hydrogen fuel cell vehicles.

Multiply that by a factor of ten for the U.S., and you can see the potential. With the release of the Honda FCX Clarity, the first production vehicle scheduled for public availability at a reasonable cost ($600 per month), the transformation of North America's carbon economy into a hydrogen is now underway.

General Motors has stipulated that it will have pure hydrogen vehicles in its showrooms in selected markets by 2011 or 20012, and public transportation (buses) vehicles are gradually occupying a larger percentage of the world's commuter systems.

Are we actually going to reverse the trend of global warming with such rapidly integrated solutions? It almost is starting to look like it.

Find out more about the waste hydrogen capture process at http://www.htec.ca .

DISCLOSURE: I am in the process of becoming a shareholder of HTEC, and by the looks of things, an employee as well. There is no single business idea I've believed more strongly in than HTEC's.

Dog Mother Boyfriend Ouch

The dog just punctured my arm...bleeding minimal...blood pressure normal at 120 over 80...I can spare a few pints. We like to play ruff.

Speaking of rough, me wee ma and me wee bf downed 3 bottles of a tart cab sauv at Salt of a Saturday afternoon. As seems to de rigeur in that alley, numerous stoppers-by affected our peregrinations sufficiently that I'm free to splog to my heart's content.

Hemingway said the first draft of anything was shit. Clearly not a slogger. Popped his fuckin head off with a 12.

So to appease the domestic parliament, I've forsaken both Salli and Shane's joint 40th, Cameron's 30th, Kenji's inevitable. Its enough to make me support a faster despooling of the life thread. For those of you who aren't here, you should see the new office environment fabricated mostly from great Ikeas, but which will ultimately camouflage the ultimate purpose of what I like to think of as the "Shit Lab". Not that our products will be shit...more so that progress towards evolving new products from this subterranean lillypad demands a line of disinformation designed to free the smugly fucklings from concern. Makes HOW mush sense?

Riding the bi polar thermals is all.

What dya do when your just not cut from the fabric? Sew a new path?

Selected Perspectives from Forest

I deleted my facebook profile today. I'm beginning to feel too virtual, as if slowly decomposing into packets of 1042 bytes easily lost by feckless routers. I prefer to keep my existence and associations actual.

I wander through the woods with the dog for at least two hours a day, unless I have to leave the island for the day. Even in the rain, the light and shadows and variations on green clear the static in my head and invoke clear vision. By the end of the first half hour, its a tantric mind that listens for whispered wisdoms aloft on silent breezes. Or delusions spit forth by an insistent and silly sub conscience.I often look up disoriented by the progress I've inadvertently made.

Facebook's success is predicated entirely, I'm convinced, on the ability for self-conscious inferiority complex to tabulate friendships and accumulate credit for posting material gleaned from other sources. Look how many friends I have and how much fun I am. Lame-ass, I think.

Blogging, on the other hand, facilitates the mindless ramblings of marginally literate talents (ahem) self-deluded into a conviction of moral or perhaps technical authority that must be shared. A pattern of regular blogging reveals the essence of the character unless the essence is an ersatz contrived persona, which interests some but bores others.

To me, the blog is way to sort of dump the mind's clutter onto a screen in front of me to see what kind of garbage I'm accumulating. Looking over this so far, for example, betrays the morose mental disposition that I've been dealing with lately. Though I swear I won't fall into one of Blogdom's most pervasive and annoying tendencies, that of wallowing in self-obsessed whining.

I write so much meaningless garbage in the course of a day, I think I need to exercise the blog a bit more just to confirm my humanity. Contracts, invoices, email to clients and such drivel seriously threaten to castrate my imagination.