Hawaii is in both the conscious and unconscious portions of my mind because I had a dream about it a few nights ago. I must have been thinking that moving it closer might have made the trip more feasible, because in dreamland, the entire Hawaiian island chain had been relocated to the Gulf of Mexico just off the coast of Florida. Apparently, hurricanes do not pose sufficient challenges for Florida - the state now needs to face volcanic activity as well.

In addition to having become part of the Island Relocation Program, Hawaii was renamed to Etrusca (most of the dream consisted of looking at a map that looked like it was straight from a circa 1948 National Geographic). I'm sure that islanders wouldn't mind being moved almost halfway around the globe *and* becoming Italian.

Cuba was a tiny dot in the southern Gulf, perhaps a nod to my once-upon-a-time political science major in college when we spent many trimesters studying various communist regimes. One of my professors claimed that the differences between communism and socialism could be summed up by the observation that if a socialist didn't agree with you he would merely spit at you while a communist would piss on your carpet. It doesn't make any more sense to me now than it did then. But I did get an A in his class.