Buy Some Stuff!

So the economy is teetering on the brink of disaster -- housing sales plummeted last month, as the credit expired, and unemployment is still high and sentiment low. (I'm only talking about the US here; your Euro types have even more trouble with your PIIGS and their insolvencies, and the rest of the world, I'm sure, has its own individual list of woes.) The only thing that can save us all is to spend money.

To help you do your part to save the world economy, here are some baubles and bangles that you might consider acquiring:

Amazon dropped the price of its flagship Kindle book-reading device earlier this week, in the wake of Barnes & Noble doing the same thing with their Nook device. (I'd link to Nook, but B&N doesn't have a kickback scheme that bloggers like me can use, so fooey on them.) You can get a Kindle for only $189 now, and Amazon claims a library of over 600,000 books (and I believe that doesn't even count the free classics and other stuff you can stick on a Kindle) to read on it.

But, you ask, what if I insist on reading old fashioned ink-on-paper, the way God and Gutenberg intended? Then Amazon can still help you out, as long as you're willing to trust their omniscence in gathering what "everyone will be reading this summer" into a Summer Reading Store. Can you afford to be reading a book different from the one all of your friends are? Surely not.

But let's say that you don't like reading books at all -- it's too old-fashioned and 19th century. You want something zippy and modern, something that's entirely digital. Well, Amazon now has a cellphone store called Amazon Wireless where you can get all the fancy new gadgets you'd ever want. (Unless, that is, you want an iPhone, which I haven't been able to find there. Guess those two pushy behemoths Amazon and Apple don't play well together.)

Here, have a banner:


But the most important thing to remember -- whether or not you follow my links, or buy anything from Amazon (ha! as if anyone could avoid buying from Amazon! it's futile!) -- is that the entire world economy is counting on you to spend lots of money to keep itself going. Remember, there are bankers at Goldman Sachs who will only get seven-digit bonuses this year!