magnates and barons

We went to see There Will Be Blood last night. I think that you should see it too. It's not as dark as the trailers make it out to be, but the characters are totally crazy. And I promise that if, like me, in the first half an hour you find yourself with your eyes closed, willing the screeching music to stop, you'll get over it and the acting will win you over. Granted, when exiting the theater everyone last person was kind of shaking their heads like, What on earth did I just see? But I'm sure that by the time they reached their cars they had decided, as we did, that it was fantastic.

And it got us talking about old-school oil and railroad barons. If we could go back, and be a magnate in some industry, what would it be?

+ Great Lakes shipping, Chicago to Northport line. Run people+timber

+ Brick foundry, later expanding into marble cornices and gargoyles

+Aeronautics

+Refrigerated railroad cars, later expanding into ice cream trucks, then the world's first soft serve.

+ first major midwest brewery, based in Leelanau Cty., use boats from shipping line to ship bottles to Chicago

+Shot glass souvenir magnate

+Pancake houses

You wouldn't have to try too hard to figure out which ones came from me...