Pie in the sky

Don't you think I have anything better to do than go scrambling around hundreds of square miles of the toughest wilderness in the state looking for pie in the sky?

Old Hare Krishna got nothing on you / Just keep you crazy with nothing to do / Keep you occupied with pie in the sky

[M]ost Americans are chronically materialistic and optimistic, more interested in short-range than long-range prospects, and have been for many generations. Pie on the table today or, at the latest, tomorrow—apple pie, mince pie, pecan pie, apricot pie, coconut cream pie, lemon meringue pie, peach cobbler pie, blueberry, blackberry, huckleberry, and pizza pie—that is what they want, not "pie in the sky," whether the source of that promise be Christianity or Marxism.

[…] I grew in the House Full of Practical People, so any grand, dream-chasing pursuit has always struck me as sort of pie in the sky.

Ah, I can hear the objectors say, all this is pie in the sky and too expensive. In fact, according to Lord Burns, "this is all perfectly feasible at a reasonable cost".

After listening to descriptions of local grants between $500 and $50,000 (Montana got a total of $593,691 this year), he said the comparatively small contribution from the endowment could be replaced by a national organization that is privately run. His local critics questioned how that would work, and Jane Alexander, chairwoman of the endowment, scoffed at the idea. I think it's very pie in the sky, she said in a telephone interview.

That’s certainly the case for Gretta Whalen, a 32-year-old freelance writer and communications consultant from Los Angeles, who leans toward Sanders. Clinton, she said, “has been around for so long, and we know so much about her, and not all of it is positive.” Sanders, by contrast, seems attractive, and his ideas feel new, even if “some of them are very pie in the sky and would be very difficult to get the rest of the country on board with.”

Pete McCleave first heard about stem cells during his sciences degree in the 1990s. “I knew about them, I just didn’t know what they could be used for,” he says. “It all sounded very pie in the sky.”