I love reading articles about the obscene amounts of money some pieces of art appear to generate in auction. Before the Salvator, the highest ranking artwork sold was Picasso’s Nude, Green Leaves, and Bust, which he banged out in one day — and which sold just recently for over a hundred million dollars. Not bad for one day’s work, and I bet his only regret was not to be alive to take part in the proceeds.

And now we have the DaVinci, which sold for 450 mil even though no one can fully authenticate that it’s actually by DaVinci. What’s that saying about a fool and his money? In 1958, it sold at auction for about fifty bucks. It re-appeared in 2005, where it sold for a measly twenty grand. Then a bunch of people who are supposed to know about such things got their hands on it, worked it over, determined they had no real clue whether or not it was genuine — and it sells for a half-trillion anyway.

You really have to wonder about such things.

Then, tying the story back to the Queen’s hesitance to meet the Leader of the Free World… well, put it all together and, as one might expect, greed will trump (excuse the pun) anything. It’s livin’ the dream, baby!!… even if the dream is exactly that.

OK, time to put our elf hat on and figure out something for a Christmas story… Look for a bit of buffer between now and then, but we’ll get it started soon enough.