Catching up on the Boston Globe this week, I spotted a couple of interesting items. Movie reviewer Ty Burr wrote on his 2008 Resolutions. I liked the last one:
“Celebrate the small, the quiet, the slow, the carbon-based. This in defiance of every impulse of our governing pop culture, which herds us like lemmings in the direction of the big, the noisy, the blitheringly fast, and the digital. The humanimated ‘Beowulf’ came out in 3-D in 2007; the Boston Common is scheduled to get a commercial IMAX screen in 2008; both developments point toward the frenzied gigantism that is the future of Hollywood entertainment. In such a landscape there may be no more radical act than an extended, uncut, analog image of a human being. Next year, then, let a thousand low-rent movies bloom – warm-blooded mammals to run between the feet of the reigning dinosaurs.”
A column in the Business section talked about how much of the United States’ assets and interests are being bought up by foreign nations. But my Canadian friends will probably be highly amused by this part:
“The second-largest buyer of American business interests wasn’t a region or a swath of connected national markets, but a single country. What nation strikes fear in the heart of the informed business xenophobe? Oh, Canada!
“Seriously. Our neighbors to the north, the ones we think of as so unassuming, were among the world’s most aggressive buyers of American interests last year, when foreign acquisition absolutely boomed. Let me rattle off a few numbers to prove a point and be done with it.
“Foreign buyers spent about $294 billion in more than 600 mergers and acquisitions involving American targets in 2007, according to Capital IQ. That’s roughly the same amount of money foreigners spent buying US companies in the three previous years combined.
“Canadians were involved in 159 transactions worth nearly $41 billion in 2007. That’s roughly the same number of deals Canadians struck in 2006, but they spent 48 percent more last year.”
We may have to change all the stars in the United States flag to little maple leaves if this keeps up! *g*
