Newsgroups: alt.callahans
Subject: Re: A square grand
From: jwwalden@miavx1.acs.muohio.edu (P'relan)
Date: 25 Aug 92 20:16:00 -0500
Organization: Dept. of Physics

In article <1992Aug25.220213.12174@kakwa.ucs.ualberta.ca>, aaron@space.ualberta.ca (Aaron Humphrey) writes:
> "All right, here's a new game for you all.  What would you do if you had a
> million dollars?  After taxes--you won the lottery, you inherited it from a
> long-lost uncle, whatever.  You have a million dollars--heck, two million or
> ten million.  More money than you could possibly get rid of without buying most
> of a city or Van Gogh's "Sunflowers".  So, what do you do?
> 
> "Here's what I would do.
> 
> "First, I'd quit my job.  Boom.  So would my wife--I asked her.  We'd get a big
> house somewhere--my wife favours an acreage, but we could negotiate--with
> enough room to store >all< my books and tapes and stuff.  Plus room for about
> ten guests.  We'd have to hire a maid to clean it, of course, or a maid service
> or something like that, since this day and age disapproves of servants.

Perhaps not the most original question in the world, but a good way to know
interesting facts about people so here goes.  I certainly wouldn't quit my
job/occuptation as an assistant/doctoral student - I'd complete my degree and
try to find a professorship in physics exactly as I intend to do now.  I'm
certainly not doing what I'm doing now and will be doing to get money - I feel
that it's something very important that I have to do so quitting my occupation
is out of the question.

I could use a better place to live though the only real complaint I have about
here is that the kitchen is a little too small.  I think the maid service would
bother me as I keep things meticulously neat and everything is where it belongs
and should *not* be moved under any circumstances, but I could deal with a cook
since while I enjoy cooking it does occupy time I'd often prefer to spend
otherwise.  I guess I could always buy a good Chinese restaurant and move it
into my new palatial home.  (-:
 
Certainly more CD's and books since I never can buy nearly all the books I read
and it would be nice to have them instead of borrowing them.  Certainly I could
use a good computer, but nothing as dinky as a Color NeXT and of course, a
direct Internet connection to my home (and an AI to read all my netnews for me
too maybe).  Certainly, I'd have to upgrade my friends' computers as well
and maybe running a dialup UNIX system wouldn't be so bad with a few dozen gigs
of disk space.

> "I'd try to organize, or get someone else to organize, a big get-together for
>>everybody< from alt.callahans.  I realize that this is probably a completely
> impossible logistical problem, and that I might have to visit a few of you
> individually, and I'd probably want to go down to Australia anyway, but I
> think it would be really cool to fly all my net.friends up here for a bash.
> Or someplace else, if necessary.

Now that could be a fun idea...one I've thought about before.
 
> "I'd probably travel some, but not that much--my wife and I have a limit of
> about a week of travel before we really desperately want to go home.  And my
> wife likes her writing--I suppose I could get her a laptop, but she also wants
> to be playing tourist a bit when she travels--she just gets guilty without her
> writing.  But I'd love to see Arizona again, and Australia, and some places in
> Europe...

I would like to travel some places and bribe Toothpick's bosses to let her be
my tour guide. (-:
 
> "I'd give money to Canadian SF things, like the organization SF Canada, the
> convention ConText '93 and upward(who came in way overbudget on the two
> previous ConTexts but have survived because of the donations of satisfied
> members), writing workshops, writer's groups, etc.

Now if I had a lot of money there's a lot of research I could fund, maybe
donate money to universities for all those poor theorists out there who are in
need of a few gigaFLOPS of computing power and perhaps endow some scholarships
(how much money are we talking about again? :-).
 
> "One question that's been bothering me about this, though, is--what would I do
> for my friends?  If I'm humongously rich, I don't know whether I'd just throw
> money at them, or buy them gifts, or just entertain them lavishly.  I've had
> thoughts of buying an apartment building and giving them all free rent...but
> I don't know if that would work in practice.

I don't think that would be practical but it would be nice to not worry about
airline ticket prices and such so you could visit faraway people with
reasonable frequency or you could always buy your own aircraft, learn to fly,
and have enough space so you can put a small runway in your backyard...(well,
you said we a had *a lot* of money...)
 
> Current Read--IASFM November '89

So how would I go about getting a subscription to IASFM since I can't find any
recent ones with subscription cards?  They do still exist, don't they?
 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 P'relan (and Birith)      	   ``Time stand still -
 jwwalden@miavx1.acs.muohio.edu      I'm not looking back -
  or jwwalden@miavx1.bitnet	     But I want to look around me now.'' - RUSH