COMMUNITY COMMENTARY:Ready to prove how successful he is

I am a lot better off financially than my parents were during the Great Depression — I can afford to heat the house with gas rather than coal; I can afford to buy a new car, rather than a used car every 20 years and I can afford lean ground beef and butter now rather than cheap, fatty ground beef and margarine. So I figure that I have arrived. In order to demonstrate that, bolster my ego and accommodate all my kids and grandkids, I'm going to build a 15,000-square-foot dream castle right in the middle of the Verdugo Woodlands on a tear-down lot I bought.

For all those kids and grandkids who occasionally visit, I need 15 bedrooms and 15 baths as well as eight garage spaces for our herd of Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs. It would be both déclassé and unsanitary to have anyone share bedrooms and bathrooms. But to show my thoughtfulness for the neighbors, I'm going to build only a 15,000-square-foot house, which is much smaller than I really need.

Of course, its construction will require removing all the useless, space-hogging oaks and sycamores on the lot. In addition, I'm going to install a 20,000-watt outdoor audio system so that I can play some of my favorite Gaelic music for parties and other occasions. My music will entertain many across hill and dale, especially the drums, which will happily reverberate between the Burbank and the Pasadena borders. To show how generous I am, everyone in town can enjoy my music, free of charge.

There probably will be a bunch of whiners over the size of my castle but they're too dull to realize how much it will increase property values. Once my castle is built, there will be droves of people who will realize that they too can build their dream monsters in the desirable Woodlands and they will clamor for property there, greatly inflating property values. So all you whiners, stop whining and be grateful for the wonderful things I'm doing for you.