Tuesday, May 06, 2008
Too Much Money
You know you have too much money when you can spend US$1 million on a violin (does calling it a fiddle make is sound cheap?). And then you spend another US$120,000 to fix it after you fall on it.
FromYou really have to wonder about our race when people are making US$1 a day and starving while at the same time some guy can spend US$120,000 to fix his fiddle. And nothing against Mr. Garrett personally. At least you can do something with a fiddle. How about people who spend $20 million on a painting or some three thousand year old broken statue?
the BBC:
"Virtuoso musician David Garrett smashed a $1 million (£540,000) violin when he fell over after a concert in London over Christmas, he has revealed.
"I fell down a flight of stairs and landed on my violin case," he told the BBC. "When I opened it up, it was a total mess."
The 230-year-old instrument will spend the next eight months in a workshop, with a repair bill of around £60,000.
"I think it's worth the money," said Garrett.
I guess it's a matter of priorities. To me spending US$1 million on a violin is pretty stupid; for that matter so is spending a million on a house. However, I find that spending the million on a house is infinitely more sensible than spending the same amount on a violin, which in turn is better than spending that one million on some old painting.
I guess it's also a matter of how much a person's worth. To me, spending $45 on a set of drill bits that is also available for $15 makes sense because the $45 set is built better. However, if I couldn't afford the extra $30, I'd probably make do. The same goes for other people. For some folks spending $1 million on a house actually takes a smaller percentage of their worth, than it does for me spending $200,000 on a house. I figured out one time, when Michael Jordon was taking flack for betting $5,000 on golf, that his bet of $5,000 was roughly equivalent to me betting five or six dollars when taken as a percentage of income.
