Things the Consumer Society Thinks You Should Own (based upon advertisements in a recent issue of The Atlantic Monthly):
– a stone from Hadrian’s Wall
– a hood ornament from a Mercedez-Benz
– a Blackberry
– Bose Quiet Comfort 2 Acoustic Noise Canceling Headphones
– a clarinet
– Junghams Apollo Mega Multi Frequency Atomic Watch (with radio-controlled accuracy; accurate to 1 second in 1 million years)
– a Panama fedora
– flawlessly tailored two-ply cotton pinpoint Oxford shirt
– the world’s first crumple zone
– an heirloom-breed, pasture-raised chicken
Two economics professors from George Mason make regular posts on their blog under the topic of “Markets in Everything.” Here’s an index to those posts:
http://marketsineverything.com/
One of my favorites from May was the Urinating Monkeys. According to a New Your Times story about the New Delhi monkey problem,
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With the city’s trapping program a failure, some residents are getting a bigger monkey, a langur, to urinate around their homes. The acrid smell of the urine scares the smaller rhesus monkeys away for weeks.
…”Mr. Singh said that he had 65 langurs urinating on prominent homes and buildings throughout Delhi. He and his partners feed and walk each monkey during the day, but they remain tied to their posts overnight. He charges about $200 a month.
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In January, “Markets in Everything” highlighted this knock-off of the original malt whisky shipped to Antartica by Shackleton:
http://www.medfordwine.com/proddetail.php?prod=087647112167
If the NYT monkey story is referring to the price in US dollars, then you can have a bottle of the Shackleton whisky for a penny less than a month of monkey urination on your home in New Delhi. Supply and demand, I suppose.
Imagine yourself, Jerry, relaxing in a flawless two-ply cotton pinpoint Oxford shirt, shading your eyes from the sun with the brim of a Panama fedora, sipping a glass of Mackinlay’s Rare Old Highland Malt “Shackleton” Whiskey, all the while using your Bose Quiet Comfort 2 headphones to cancel the annoying sound of 4 langur monkeys screaming while they urinate on your home. Markets in Everything, indeed.
Yes! I can see it, taste it, smell it. Thank you Tim for this wonderful conjoining of the seemingly incongruous. I have to wonder if monkey piss would keep the red squirrels out of my office. $200 would be a bargain.
Gotta, know, is an heirloom-breed, pasture-raised chicken more or less likely to pull a cluck?