You are browsing the archives of appraisal.

Thomas Baldwin, a 67-year-old resident of Bellingham, Washington, made news himself when he bought 10,000 copies of The Bellingham Herald’s election wrap-up edition. Yes! He purchased–at 50 cents a piece–10,000 copies of the same issue of one newspaper… And why? Well, Mr. Baldwin believes that this particular edition will become a collector’s item and be worth oodles of money because the cover has a picture of America’s first ever black president-elect and a headline that reads “Obama Wins.”

“Absolutely everything I have, I take nothing with me.” That’s what Ian Usher told the entire world when he decided to auction off his entire life. Mr. Usher, a 45-year-old British businessman, had been living in Perth, Australia with his wife Laura. On June 29, the final bid was taken for all that he had and all that he was. As soon as the buyer pays him, Mr. Usher claims he will walk out of his house with nothing but the clothes he’s wearing, his wallet, and his passport, and head to wherever the winds blow him to begin a new life…

We all know the story of how Leonardo da Vinci used his time machine to travel back to the Jerusalem of antiquity, where he burst in on the Last Supper, forced Jesus and the Apostles to one side of the table, and placed them all into unnatural postions. After snapping several Polaroids with a Kodak he had acquired on a trip to the future, da Vinci returned to his own time and painted “The Last Supper.”

Ever nearer grows that sweet, sweet conclusion called insanity. My mind swirls and turns, knowing not which way lies the path that can liberate me from the evidential crumbling of common sense and the death of humanity. With each new achievement, with each new advancement, and with each new gadget, we seem to lose a little more… everything. Indeed, all those aspects that have propelled our species through our history–a mosaic both beautiful and tumultuous–have seemed to separate themselves into the thriving and the dying.