New Orleans

Today I saw a lamp that had a price tag of nearly half a million dollars. Yes, HALF A MILLION! FOR A LAMP! It was not even that big.

Yes, it was a Tiffany lamp; quite rare, I guess.

But Mark and I were talking later about this...how is it that a lamp can be worth that much? CAN it really?

I said it's the politics of scarcity. The fact that it's rare makes it sought after, and therefore pricey. But is any lamp really worth that amount of money? Think of what good that money could do in the world, feeding hungry children!

What about a painting, Mark asked, what if you paid someone $10,000 to paint a painting that takes them half a year?

Well then you're supporting an artist, and facilitating the creation of something beautiful. That is, in itself, a worthy end, I think.

(I used to be all about the function and not the form, but over the years I've come to believe that beauty for its own sake is completely valid and actually absolutely necessary in this world.)

So the difference is, this lamp is already HERE. By paying $468,000 for this lamp, all you get is the satisfaction of OWNING the lamp, a lamp that not many other people have. So WHAT.

Completely flippin' ridiculous, we both agreed.

Anyway, I'm posting a few pictures here of our trip to New Orleans, where we've been for the American Heart Association conference. There are about 25,000 people here for this conference! I've been very fortunate in being able to attend some of the conference events, including an address by DR. OZ yesterday. Woo hoo! (For those who don't know him, just catch Oprah sometime, and he'll probably be on there explaining about your body in terms you can understand and relate to. In his other life, he's a surgeon in New York.)

Other than seeing Dr. Oz (front row center) and in direct opposition to his medical advice , I've been busy expanding my waistline here in New Orleans. They have these donuts here called "beignets," which are fried bread covered with powdered sugar, and I mean COVERED. The picture above is the sugar that was LEFT OVER after we ate all the beignets!

We've also been hanging out with Bob and Noelle (who arranged the Grand Canyon trip on which Mark and I met), who are also here for the conference. After gorging ourselves on beignets at lunch, we ate MORE beignets later that same day with Bob and Noelle.

Mark's daughter Amy is also here...she is a Sarnoff Fellow right now, taking two years off in the middle of medical school to do research. We were very excited to go to her poster presentation Monday morning...see picture of very proud papa with (in our unbiased opinion) brilliant daughter!

After seeing Dr. Oz and then Amy's presentation, I was pretty much done with the conference, so I decided to go on a city tour. This included the very unusual cemeteries they have here, all above ground and some of whose markers cost as much as a hotel.

Again, I just don't see the point here of so much expense. Just burn me up and return me to the earth, please. Or just throw me in there! Fancy coffins and cement vaults just retard the process that I'm trying to facilitate! Skip the coffin entirely!

Anyway, after the tour I was having a lovely time sitting in the sun across from the St. Louis Cathedral (see picture with the mule-drawn buggies in front) when I heard this calliope music...I couldn't figure out quite where it was coming from, so I walked around the trees and down the steps and across the streetcar tracks and up onto the river walk and...

there it was: a paddlewheeler with this woman on the top deck playing this organ-looking thing in front of a set of pipes which lit on fire, one after the other, and belched huge plumes of steam...WOW! And it was LOUD!

Then we went to this restaurant where I had one of the best meals of my life, and then we saw this cornstalk fence hotel where Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin (and Elvis stayed there too), and then we stopped in a few antique stores and saw the lamp. And a few other things, one of which is pictured here. If you are interested in buying an armoire that was owned by Empress Eugenie and is decorated with two intertwining engraved wooden L's, it is for sale in New Orleans for only $168,000.

:-)