Welcome to Bright Friday†

A day that will be remembered as The Day Marin Saved the U.S. Economy.%

[SUMMARY: OMG hubris!]

I had a brilliant idea‡ while I was puttering around Gawker the other day and came across an article on the big fancy Obama inaugural concert. As the guest list rolled out to the horizon,^ it started to look like the punchline was going to be, "...at which time Jesus will speak a few words before Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra§ serenade a six-story image of Obama with a specially-arranged version of 'It Had to be You'..."¶

With Obama fever at the highest it's likely to be,# and with people willing to spend serious bucks in a hard economy just to secure their respective copies of Tuesday's New York Times,†† it seems to me the inaugural concert could be recorded and sold, with the artists GENEROUSLY donating‡‡ all proceeds to the United States citizenry.$

There could be package deals with photo albums or letters from the prez... there could be special downloadable versions with bonus video tracks... hell, there could even be a kids' book and a sing-along version of the kids' inaugural concert.

Then the proceeds could be split 25/75 between paying down the national debt and going straight to tax-filing citizens to spend at their local retailers.@ Like Alaska's petroleum-driven payments to its constituency, this could be a regular check.§§

To keep the dollars rolling, there could be adjunct First Hundred Days concerts, First Term Concerts, It's Been a Great Run, Ten Year Anniversary¶¶...

We are a nation of hype and advertising and packaging and collectibles and nostalgia, along with an overblown sense of history that only comes from not having very much of it.

The possibilities are nearly endless.


†FOOTNOTE (crossed): It's the opposite of Black Friday!

%FOOTNOTE (percented): See yesterday's footnote.

‡FOOTNOTE (double-crossed): If history tells me anything, it's that when I get this excited about something, the distinctive sound of crickets in the empty ether awaits me. I'm prepared for that. Hey, I may have serious hubris, but I have *realistic* serious hubris.

^FOOTNOTE (careted): Usher is even using his whole name. Roman numeral and all.

§FOOTNOTE (swerved): I know they're dead. It's part of the joke.

¶FOOTNOTE (paragraphed): If you can find a more appropriate song, I'll eat a spider.

#FOOTNOTE (pounded): He's gotta step on some toes sometime. Despite rumours to the contrary, he's human.

††FOOTNOTE (ddouble-ccrossed): That's NEXT Tuesday, for twenty years down the line when blogs are as au courant as card catalogs with hand-typed entries and nobody remembers what a huge deal this all was. And for that day, newspapers were hand-held, tree-based, interactive devices with which members of the general public actually followed the news instead of it following them.

‡‡FOOTNOTE (doubble-crossssed): The donating part is key.

$FOOTNOTE (moneyed, appropriately enough): Yes, I know there's something fallacious about asking people to buy something then sending the profits back to them, but this would be an INTERNATONAL marketing campaign. If Vladamir Putin wants his Stevie Wonder fix, he's going to have to put a dime in my pocket.

@FOOTNOTE (atted): Or, y'know... to save their mortgages.

§§FOOTNOTE (that's some kind of fancy money): I envision quarterly for the first year, semi-annually for the remainder of the presidential term, then annually thereafter.

¶¶FOOTNOTE (put your microphones in the air!): All, of course, with highlights from the original inaugural concert, but one track or two on the original concert should never, ever be available again so it can become rare and mythical. Also? Where does one put the footnote marker in relation to ellipses? I'm already itching because "inaugural concert" seems less-than-ideal, semantically speaking, and I don't want anything else on my record today.