If dreams were for sale, what would you buy?

On roughing it…

Campers, roughing it in a country park, plugged in so many coffeemakers, TV sets, electric blankets, and vacuum cleaners the park transformer exploded.

Immediately RV makers began putting in generators. Now with global positioning systems, in-dash TV maps, and voice guidance, they can’t even get lost on our highways. There’s just no fun left in roughing it anymore is there?

Jenning’s paradox…

We are all going down the same road in different directions.

Downshifting…

What with all the food recalls, E.-coli frights, dog and cat food at risk, “downshifting” is, we are told by the Slow Movement, becoming more and more attractive to more and more urbanites, and there’s more of them than Carter has pills.

StatsCan says well over 80 per cent of Canadians are urbanites. These big city folk have every whim and whimsy, even their whimsical wishes, catered to by all those seeking profits in sports, entertainment, merchandising and votes, and more and more of their whims mesh less and less with “ruralite” whims.

(If they can be urbanites why can’t we be ruralites?)

“Downshifting”, as explained on the Slow Movement website “is a fast-growing movement of people who choose voluntary simplicity in all aspects of their life.

“Downshifters go beyond materialism — beyond the fast life. They downshift to a slow connected life.”

The Slow Movement is the name, getting rid of the hustle and bustle, and becoming “reconnected” is the game — reconnected with family, with food (by growing their own) and with time, theirs.

Rewinding this tape is a rerun of the good old days, and puts you in the ‘30s, ‘40s, even the ‘50s around General Bull Moose’s time.

Remember him? The general has a familiar ring to him. He was a big, rich, blustery, bombastic buffoon whose party line was “What’s good for General Bull Moose is good for the country!”

Cartoonist Al Capp invented the general as a counterpoint to his slow-living, straight-talking, shy, honest-as-the-day-is-long country boy, L’il Abner Yokum, who spent his days evading the marital goals of Daisy Mae, his well-endowed girlfriend.

Their “marriage” hit the front page of Life magazine, so celebrity was comical even then.

Yes sir, Go Slow! A posh on General Bull Moose, and the billion-dollar babies; live like the Yokums; take your foot off the accelerator, hang up the phone and start digging.

Going to the dogs…

Two guys were sitting in a restaurant talking about their dogs. The first guy said, “I taught my dog to read.”

“I know,” said the second guy. “My dog told me.”

Did you ever wonder:

Why the time of day with the slowest traffic is called rush hour?

Why Noah didn’t swat those two mosquitoes?

Why the sun lightens our hair but darkens our skin?

Why those guys and gals on stage with more sound hardware than all the Home Hardwares and pumping out more sound than a NASA shuttle launch, don’t sing alone so we could discover if they have a voice or not?

And the last one, why isn’t there mouse-flavoured cat food?

This “did you ever wonder” blurb came in an e-mail with this encouragement: “It’s your turn to spread the stupidity and send this to someone you want to bring a smile to, maybe even a chuckle. We all need to smile every once in a while.”

I present it for those who are “not on the ‘net’ to confirm you’re not missing as much as ‘net-connected geeks like me say you are. There’s many a time the ‘net could use a healthy dose of the Slow Movement too.

Nothing happens unless first a dream. (Carl Sandburg)

A tip of the hat to Pete Hamill for this thought: “I don’t ask for the meaning of the song of a bird, or the rising of the sun on a misty morning. There they are and they are beautiful.” As for us, we’ve shared many of both this spring, have we not?

Hence a tip of the hat to spring ‘07 too! Cool is OK too!