The Only Investment That Never Fails

What would your own album look like if you were in a band? Follow the directions below and find out.

Here are the rules:

1 – Go to Wikipedia. Hit “random” or click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first random Wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

Page retrieved: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drayton_Valley_Thunder

2 – Go to Quotations Page and select “random quotations” or click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four or five words of the very last quote on the page is the title of your first album.

Quote used: “Goodness is the only investment that never fails.”
Henry David Thoreau (1817 – 1962)

3 – Go to Flickr and click on “explore the last seven days”
or click http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days
Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

Third picture: http://www.flickr.com/photos/22266861@N06/3431315898/

4 – Use Photoshop or similar to put it all together.

5 – Post it to FB with this text in the “caption” or “comment” and TAG the friends you want to join in.

I love the end result. If you have not realized yet, I actually cheated by one word for the title – Only Investment That Never Fails without the ‘The‘ sounds partial and obscure. As soon as I got this random picture from Flickr, everything clicked to me. The album cover suggests a semi-enlightened man leaning on the tree of life – or whatever tree it is, as long as it belongs to the Gaia - gazing straight out of the cover into our eyes, where the moment of realization comes into us as we look back into the frame. Green field, blue sky, solemn man, tree of life – the only investment that never fails is life itself. Yes, the life that was given to you ever since you inhaled the first breath of oxygen into your velvety lung.

Of course, there is an alternative explanation that the only investment that never fails is the Earth – that we have to go green and caress the Mother Nature, protecting her from the legion of ferocious and self-invested species – homo sapiens, duh! But I am not a hippie and I do not spend 24/7 contemplating a philosophy about the Tragedy of the Commons, so I prefer to stick with a less-obvious-but-more-honest interpretation that I offered in the paragraph above.

I edited the picture a slight bit to suit the tonality and the mood of the concept, while the typography I used for the fonts are deliberately simplistic to further conveys the idea. It turns out very lovely that I decided to spend some more time to put the whole thing into words – yeah, the ones you are looking at right now – although I am supposed to resume my COM206 readings because the final examination for this semester is just around the corner.

The only scar in the whole thing: Drayton Valley Thunder. Why does it sound like some lame emo bands which names seem randomly churned a la Dashboard Confessional or, God forbid, Panic! At the Disco. Oh well, it was randomly churned from Wikipedia. The so-called Drayton Valley Thunder turns out to be an ice hockey team which won some kind of youth championship circa 2001-2002. I could care less but it seems that whoever named the team as Drayton Valley Thunder probably has a talent to write a thrash metal number about dungeons and dragons. Seriously, folks, someone could have photoshopped Drayton Valley Thunder into this album cover (http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41S71EWF1ZL._SS500_.jpg) and nobody would have noticed.

Drayton Valley Thunder is a decent name for a band. It is just not quite appropriate when put together as an album cover – ‘valley‘ is perhaps the only thing that is remotely close to link the whole concept. Perhaps it would have been better if it sounds closer to a folksy singer-songwriter kind of name – think Bob Dylan, if he were to build his entire career not as a solo artist.

I think I better stop here.

I am starting to mumble incoherently.