Got an email from Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper last night. Says that he was reading yesterday's blog and didn't realize that I was only after 29 billion dollars.
He did the search on Google like I suggested. Yes, in today's money, the two billion for the atomic bomb in 1941 would work out to twenty nine billion.
Where's he going to get the 1.1 billion? He said that he was cancelling the G8/G20 meeting scheduled for the end of June. Says that he's been getting a lot of slack in the press over the costs (especially the fake lake) and decided to just cancel the whole thing.
He admitted that an article he'd seen about the summit also got him thinking. He included the link and I admit that I was shocked, too. G8 summit costs could treat 4 million HIV patients. I would have got him thinking even more if he'd of realized that they weren't talking about the 1.1 billion he's spending, but rather the $430 million spent by the Japanese government to host the summit in 2008. (Let's see: 4 million X about 2.2 = just under 10,000,000 HIV patients).
I wrote back in a panic as I didn't want to be blamed for the cancellation and persuaded him not to cancel it completely. We spent a few minutes looking at Skype and when he realized that you can have up to 25 callers on line at the same time, he had a brainstorm. At $84.99 for the Freetalk headset and webcam times twenty people, he'd rather go ahead on Skype (plus, he said that he was afraid of the protesters).
Not to be outdone by his neighbour to the north, Mr Obama called to let me know that the stem cell stuff would get 0.5% of the Recovery and Reinvestment money. Pulling out our online calculators we figured it out to be $3.935 billion. When I queried him about the making it an even four billion, he told me not to press my luck.
Now I had just over five billion dollars.
Just as I finished with Mr Obama, I could hear the phone ringing again, and again, and again. The nurse was talking to me now (in Japanese) telling me that she doesn't even look like President Obama.
It was all a dream. And then it clicked. What I told Mr Harper was wrong, it must have been a dream. Skype doesn't allow up to twenty five callers on video conferencing; it's only five.
Even though it was just a dream, it was encouraging. Imagine that one sixth of the money could come from cancelling a one week event and giving up 0.5% of something.
The money is definitely there. Just got to get it.
Let's just find a way to make that dream a reality, right?!
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