Morning people who have come here on purpose, and people who were looking up weird stuff on Google and accidentally landed here (your secret’s safe with me). Here’s yesterday’s Sunday Times Column, I hope you enjoy it.
A MILLION MILES FROM NORMAL – By Paige Nick
MORE MONEY THAN SENSE
Are rich people everywhere losing the plot? Imagine having such huge amounts of money that at some point you run out of normal things to spend your stash on and you have to start spending it on weird things. How else do you explain the kinds of stuff rich people are buying these days?
It seems like once they’ve bought every house, car, jacket, gadget, island, and pair of Tom Ford sunglasses they’ve ever wanted, all that’s left to blow their pocket money on is weird facials, odd enemas and cigars rolled on the thighs of virgins.
It makes you wonder whether too much money makes people moggy?
In America for example, for the price of a small family sedan, one can buy a facial that includes three hours of deep-pore cleansing, a diamond exfoliation (using real diamonds) and a caviar mask. It sounds more like lunch with a Russian Tzar than a spa treatment.
And for the even more revoltingly rich geezer, for around $425 you can pick up a little gold pill, which you swallow to make your poop come out flecked with pieces of real gold. I shit you not. It was created by an artist named Tobias Wong, whose aim was to literally ‘turn your innermost parts into chambers of wealth’.
Ah, so that’s how the queen does it.
Or you could just eat corn, otherwise known as poor man’s gold.
The whole idea of putting something valuable in one end and retrieving it from the other end at a later stage reminds me a bit of smuggling, less rich people have been doing it with cocaine for decades.
And for your playboy terra-billionnaire, now for a serious wodge of cash you can buy a single designer Louis Vuitton Condom. Nothing says ‘have balls, will travel’, quite like whipping one of these puppies out of your wallet. In fact, I would imagine that half the trick of landing a gold digger to help you spend the millions you find between your couch cushions, is to keep your Louis Vuitton condom in your Louis Vuitton wallet.
And while you’re spending that kind of dosh on looking, sounding and pooping rich, You may as well drink rich too. The most expensive coffee in the world is made from animal poop. (What is it with rich people and poop?) It turns out that the enzymes in the Asian Palm Civet’s stomach breaks down the coffee bean’s bitterness, leaving behind only the most delicious, pure, succulent beans. You have to wonder about the first poor sod who discovered that. Hey, at least it isn’t elephant dung they have to sift through.
The way it works is that people (who are no doubt much poorer than those ultimately buying and drinking this coffee) forage around in the jungles of Southeast Asia collecting civet poop, then they take it home, wash it lightly, roast it, grind it and sell it to the obscenely rich. Please nobody tell them what’s in rich people’s poop, because if they’re willing to sift through the civet’s business for mere beans, imagine what they’d be willing to do for flecks of gold.
Or if none of that floats your jewel encrusted 50-foot boat and you need to buy a gift for someone who really and truly does have everything, how about a 24 karat gold toilet for hundreds of thousands of greenbacks, a crocodile-skin umbrella for $50 000, or 50 gold staples for your stapler for just $175? Or there’s always perfectly round, hand-shaved balls of ice (cubes are just so square) for $40 each, or the world’s most expensive loo paper, coming in at $30 a roll. Perhaps this is where the term fools gold comes from?
Ok, I get spending ridiculous amounts of money on, well, crap. But really? Who stares at their poo afterward? Please, don’t anyone answer that. Unless you’re a doctor.