More Dollars than Sense

By Paul Clark (aka motomynd)

Just when we think rich people might run out of ways to show off how much money they can afford to lose, we mere financial mortals are proven wrong yet again.


Used to be that if you were a rich businessperson who wanted to show off your stunning across the board business acumen, you bought an NFL football team. After all, if you are genius enough to become a billionaire, surely you can assemble a winning team, right?
    The modern-era poster boy for this is Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones. He bought the Cowboys in 1989, unceremoniously dumped several team icons, and promptly launched an epically bad season: 1 win, 15 losses. Undeterred, Jones took over complete control of football operations and built what was arguably the best team of the 1990s. The Cowboys won the Super Bowl in 1992, 1993, and 1995, and Jones was well on his way to showing the rest of the league that if you were smart in business, football was easy.
    Then came a dose of reality, and Jones’ hubris was rewarded as hubris often is. Since 1996 the Cowboys have 182 wins, 168 losses and have only won three playoff games – while losing nine. From the dizzying heights of league superiority they have plummeted into mediocrity, raising the question, yet again: how can someone be smart enough to become a billionaire, yet unable to sustain a winning football team? Yes, we are definitely thinking of Dan Snyder, owner of “The Washington Football Team,” when we ask that rhetorical question – the team has 142 wins and 193 losses since Snyder became principal owner.

Before you start thinking such folly is the stuff of the modern America “Monopoly Money” economy, there are prior examples.
    Back in the 1890s, a group of Shakespeare idolaters were so besotted with the “Bard” they pooled their resources to bring starlings from England to New York City’s Central Park. Why? Because they thought it important to populate the area with every bird Shakespeare mentioned in his writings. And thus a plague of “winged rats” was unleashed on the city – and the country – and millions of native birds were wiped out by the hyper-competitive foreign bullies. At least their legendary murmurations are beautiful and intriguing and provide a winged buffet for a wide variety of raptors. [See “These birds flock in mesmerizing swarms of thousands—but why is still a mystery.” (Nick Dunlop, March 26, Msn.com).]
    Hard to say whether the Shakespearean starling fanciers have done more damage to the country than Jerry Jones and Dan Snyder have done to their respective teams, but the starlings definitely have a much higher winning percentage: there are now more than 200 million starlings in this country, and they are found in all 50 states.
    Congratulations, Shakespeare, most of us will remember you for this long after we have mercifully forgotten “toil and trouble,” or whatever that inane drivel was.

When already internationally-famous fashion photographer Richard Avedon took what became this famous photo of “Nastassja Kinski and the Snake” in 1981, the Florida Everglades were still a natural landscape populated mostly by native species found nowhere else in the country. By the late 1980s the Everglades – and everything small enough to fit into the mouth of a giant snake – were under attack by Burmese pythons. The already out-of-hand situation was exacerbated when Hurricane Andrew destroyed a python-breeding facility in 1992 [“How Burmese Pythons Took Over the Florida Everglades” (Adam Janos, February 20, History)] and released countless snakes into the regional habitat.
    But how did matters get out of hand in the first place?
    Miami is only 30 miles from the Everglades and in the drug-fueled economy of 1980s Miami, just about everyone had money to burn and a girlfriend who looked at least somewhat like Kinski, especially if they were high, which is where most people were most of that era. So, you’re at a club, and one thing leads to another, and next thing you know you are out in a swamp, with a camera, with a $500 snake and a “hottish” $500 naked girlfriend, and one thing leads to another, and afterwards…oh hell, where did the snake go? And thus the pythons took over the Everglades and gave us yet another example of people with more dollars than sense.

    And there are more, of course, like the Stephen King fans secretly populating an island off the coast of Maine with St Bernard dogs in honor of their literary hero’s 1981 book Cujo, which was set in Maine, the author’s home state. In case you somehow avoided reading the book or paying a half-day’s wage to see the subsequent movie, it features a 200-pound, beloved St Bernard family pet stricken with rabies that attempts to kill as many people as possible before it inevitably succumbs to the disease. With a heart-warming theme like that, no wonder the book was a best seller and people stood in line to see the movie, eh?
    In this modern twist on the theme, the dogs on the island off Maine are vaccinated to make sure they won’t actually contract rabies, but they are given a degree of “assertiveness training” to make your time on the island a bit more exciting. Even if a 200-pound dog isn’t actually attacking you when it bowls you over and starts demanding snacks and extensive petting, there is a certain adrenaline rush. Lodging options include the legendary ill-fated Ford Pinto situated in a clearing, and an overhead “hammock sleeping system” strung between trees. If we go, we are opting for a hammock.
    Stephen King is not part of this unofficial “theme park” experience and was not asked to be. “You are familiar with Stephen King’s work,” notes the press release, “would you really want to spend a night alone in the woods with him?”

    Since there are only 32 NFL football franchises, rich people need to look beyond the obvious to find new ways to show off their fortunes, and show there was possibly a great deal of luck involved in amassing those fortunes.

Which brings us to the $700,000 robot NFT. [See “NFT art: Sophia the Robot 'self-portrait' sells for almost $700K at Nifty Gateway auction” (Oscar Holland, March 23, CNN Style).] I’m at a loss, so if you figure out how any of this makes any sense at all, please explain it to me in the comments section.
    When my son was six years old, he did a wonderful self-portrait, replete with a gap-toothed grin and spiky hair, and titled it, “I am a car.” He also did, from memory, a rather amazing drawing of a 1988 Volvo 240 station wagon, months after actually seeing the car in person. Given the relative ease of telling a robot what to do, versus a six-year-old child, I plan to put both of my son’s drawings on the market with a starting bid of $500,000 each – an obvious bargain compared to a $700K robot NFT.

The Plaza Hotel has been a New York City landmark for more than 100 years. As you can see from the Bing video “The Plaza Hotel: A Brief History,” it has always been a favorite with the rich, trendy, and famous, even if some of its past owners – Donald Trump among them – have a somewhat checkered history. Overlooked in the video is possibly the most interesting celebrity who ever resided in the hotel: Princess Vilma Lwof-Parlaghy.
    The “princess” was a famous painter around the turn of the 20th century, and her 1916 painting of Nikola Tesla is the only portrait he ever posed for. While living in “The Plaza” in the early 1900s, she had a lion as a pet, and often walked it on a leash in nearby Central Park. If you have the chutzpah to befriend Tesla, and the funds to live in such a rarified setting, maybe walking an adult lion on a leash in Central Park is as good a way as any to burn through your fortune. Yes, there was a time before it went corporate that NYC was actually interesting.

When Timothy Trossingham, formerly of Dalnatrat, Scotland – on the shore of Loch Linnhe – decided to auction his collection of early 1800s “John Bull” papers and threw in his (barely) still functional 1980s Commodore 64 computer, he was shocked that a bidding war developed and his hoped-for $25,000 sale topped out above $300,000. Turned out his computer had with it the only known functional copy of a very popular video game from the 1980s, and a Chinese artisan who had made his fortune from custom-folded paper dragons and such, simply HAD to own it.

    At least this example of more dollars than sense had a worthwhile result: Trossingham used his windfall to move to the United States and start his dream retirement. In planning the move, the long-time Lord Byron devotee had only one question: “Where can I legally own a pet bear?”
    Why a pet bear?
    When Byron studied at Trinity College in Cambridge, from 1805 to 1808, he was reportedly very upset to learn that dogs were not allowed as pets. In a huff, he discovered there was no anti-bear edict in the rules, so he bought a pet bear at a fair and moved it on campus with him, walking it on a chain and treating it as he would have a dog.
    So Trossingham, like the Shakespearean starling fanciers, HAD to have his bear to pay proper homage to Byron. After a brief search, Trossingham learned that North Carolina, South Carolina, and Nevada all allowed pet bears. He says it took him “about a millisecond” to choose Nevada.
    And there you have it: people make their money in sometimes strange ways, and they often spend it in even stranger ways. However you made your fortune, remember: Sharing is caring.

Copyright © 2021 by Paul Clark