Dream House (bis)

Earlier in this blog I gave a couple of examples of my Dream Houses, well, this is another. I could very happily live in a place like this... I took this photo in August 1986 while living in France as a student. I had rented a bicycle at the SNCF train station in St Brieuc, and spent a couple of weeks riding along the northern Brittany coast from St Brieuc to Perros Guirrec. Funny that my future as yet unmet wife should have family with a house in one of the villages I rode through, a tiny place named Trebeurden. The region is known as the "pink granite coast" (la cote de granite rose), and there sure is some beautiful pink granite out that way. This house is no doubt a heavily photographed tourist icon, like the Eiffel Tower, but when I took this photo in '86 I was still thinking that I might someday break into the world of Fine Art photography... and I thought I was pretty original lying down on my belly to take the photo so the grass in the foreground would seem taller... I was a dreamer back then...
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You may have realized by now if you have perused this blog at any length that my dream houses and dream cars are an inauspicious collection, no one is likely to accuse me of having "la folie des grandeurs". I live a very modest life, and am quite happy to just to still be around... after more than a couple of brushes with death along the line...
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I was just reading about a gentleman named Dick Fuld who helped bankrupt Lehman Brothers bank in New York, and how he has amassed about 100 million USD in real estate, including a house on a private island in Florida, a Park Avenue apartment in NYC, a ranch out in Wyoming, etc... and all this paid for with the exorbitant, usurious interest rates you and I pay on our mortgages, and the amazing fees you pay for any minor bank transaction... all that so bankers can have huge bonuses every year and go out and buy houses on exclusive islands while the rest of us wallow in debt and toil away to pay our bills. Help, where is my airsick bag, I think I'm going to blow my lunch ! Where did the French put away all the guillotines they used so widely a couple of centuries back ? Some forms of greed inspired behavior are just so grotesquely obscene as to merit serious punishment... especially when the greed in question is preying on your wallet and mine. I've noticed that there seem to be a number of things to be angry about these days... and this is definitely one of them... maybe I'll have more time to expand on that theme if, or when, the wave of unemployment sweeping the planet catches up with me... thanks to the likes of Dick Fuld.