Disjointed, rambling, blanket thing post

Rediscovering, remembering the Bretton Woods system. Does money control your life? Do you know what your money is based on? Who decides these things? Check it out.

Also: i stand corrected (Keith, Alex) - Special drawing rights is "a potential claim on the freely usable currencies of the IMF members" - wikipedia. NOT a currency. Okay then - glad that's cleared up.

In searching around for Special Drawing Rights info, i smacked into this strange topic of what is the US dollar worth? The US no longer uses the gold standard (where currency worth corresponds with how much gold you have stockpiled). Sure, there is still a reserve (aha! the Federal Reserve), but the US dollar floats with respect to the price of gold and all other currencies. According to wikipedia,

• "Today, like the currency of most nations, the dollar is fiat money without intrinsic value, which means that it has no backing and would be entirely worthless but for the fact that people have been persuaded to use and accept it as if it had worth." (my emphasis)

Somehow, this doesn't make me feel any better that i whittled away half of my savings upon entering the UK from the US. It also doesn't explain why it takes three people to sell me one measly box of Ibuprofen - or why Ibuprofen and every thing else has to be individually shrink wrapped in this country. Ah, i digress. First, the person at the counter tried to tell me that they only had the chalk-make-you-gag tablets. Fascinating, when i could see the caplets sitting just next to the throat-cloggers. Apparently the theory here was, "get the customer's item, and then have a social bonding experience with co-workers over how to ring up some invisible customer's items while discussing which item is a free gift and pretending not to hear the tangbile customer's request for a different item". Why did i give Boswell's my faith in the idea of the British Pound? What if, next time i was at the store, i just refused to pay, saying i don't believe in it? "Okay, well, since Bretton Woods, there's really no definition of money anyway, so here's your Ibuprofen. Have a nice day!" I'm not sure i won't be arrested.

Another trippy thing that happened today. Paul Jepson was teaching class, and he morphed into the existential detective! It could have been the fact that he was feeling under the weather and may have been hallucinating. But, he was describing the way we experience places, where we "know" or locate a certain place, and then we don't really know everything in between, and then we "know" another place. Aha - its a blanket thing! I knew it would all come together!

So you have Bretton Woods over here, and you have the chemist at Boswells over here, okay? (demonstrates with blanket) Then there's me and there's you, and there's the tree that fell over and blocked Marston Road for a few hours on saturday. Once you get the blanket thing, you can relax - because everything you could ever want or be, you already have and are. Brilliant.