Vanity Kills

Another meme from the house of crisper:

So. Through hard work and a little bit of luck, your little dot-com idea gets bought for huge bucks, you got a bunch of stock that went nuts, you sold at the perfect time, and now you're a free-and-clear billionaire. Travel, yes. Personal living comforts, naturally. Charity and philanthropy, yes, yes, of course. But what else? What would you do if money were truly no object, that maybe other rich people wouldn't spend their hard-earned cash on?

I'd like an observatory. Someplace warm where I could look at the stars or galaxies or quasars on the long Edmonton winter nights, or just hook it up to computer and CCD and discover asteroids to my heart's content. Ideally there would be one in the other hemisphere that I could manipulate via telepresence during the summer.

I'd also like to do the Stephen King thing and buy my own radio station to play all my favourite music, 24/7, plus other stuff that I might like if I tried it. Identifying every song before and after, so you'd never hear a song and then die of frustration wondering who the hell sings it. Maybe a video channel, too, that actually plays videos all day long, and never succumbs to the lure all real video stations do, of adding real programming and shows until it's indistinguishable from any other TV station.

So I'd need another TV station to play all of the TV series doing faithful depictions(author-approved, at the very least)of my favourite books. Like the _Wheel of Time_ one season/volume series. Or a bunch of Dick Francis books. Maybe some comic book adaptations--Sandman, Grimjack, X-Men, Love & Rockets(past the watershed, of course).

I'd hire a few people to program open-source software full time, and data-entry types to carry on my various projects when I get tired of them. Someone to work on more and more accurate simulation programs. And someone to keep our house clean and our books and papers organized.

That's just the big stuff. There's lots of little stuff that I'd settle for if I got a mere million or so...but that's a different story.