In April, 2008, the Swiss watchmaker Romain Jerome, who the year before created a watch made from remnants of the Titanic, introduced the “Day & Night” watch, which doesn’t provide the hour or the minute. Though it retails for $300,000, it only tells whether it’s day or night. CEO Yvan Arpa said studies show that two-thirds of rich people “don’t use their watch to tell what time it is,” anyway. Anyone can buy a watch that tells time, he told a Reuters reporter, but only a “truly discerning customer” will buy one that doesn’t.
A Piece Of The Action
Recently, Wall Street and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs created Fantex Holdings, which will allow investors to buy actual pieces of real players — namely, rights to 20 percent of the player’s lifetime earnings (including licensing and product endorsement deals). The firm told The New York Times in October that it will soon stage an IPO for budding NFL star Arian Foster, and hopes to sign up many more athletes, as well as singers and actors who are still early on in their careers. Fantex’s lawyers drew up a 37-page list of potential investment risks, such as injuries, slumps and scandals. Lawyers also mentioned that the stock will trade only on Fantex’s private exchange.
Cultural Diversity
— “For Japanese boys, the train driver sits alongside footballer, doctor and policeman as a dream job,” according to a September Agence France-Presse dispatch. Consequently, the system for the Tokyo metro area (which contains 35 million people) runs with the “precision of a finely crafted Swiss watch.” Delays, even of a minute, seldom occur. When they do occur, operators repeatedly apologize and hand out “notes from home” to commuters to present to their bosses to excuse the tardiness. Among the system’s drawbacks is the still-irksome groping of females on packed rush-hour trains, when operators routinely shove as many as 300 riders into cars designed for 150.
— Among the surprising legacies of communist East Germany is modern-day Germany’s commonplace “clothing-optional” lifestyle (FKK, or “Freikoerperkultur” — free body culture). A September Global Post dispatch reported on hundreds of FKK beaches across the country. Foreigners occasionally undergo culture shock at German hotels’ saunas and swimming pools, at which swimsuits are discouraged as “unhygienic.”
— China joined a handful of countries (and 29 U.S. states) by strengthening the rights of elderly parents to demand support from their adult children. China now allows lawsuits by parents who feel emotionally ignored. An October Associated Press feature on one rural extended family dramatized China’s cultural shift away from its proverbial “first virtue” of family honor. Zhang Zefang, 94, said she didn’t even understand the concept of a lawsuit when a local official explained it. She did say she deserved better from the children she had raised. A village court promptly ordered several family members to contribute support for her.
Latest Religious Messages
— Recent tests in Austria yielded the conclusion that 86 percent of the holy water in the country’s churches was not safe to drink. Most often, it was infected with E.coli and Campylobacter. University of Vienna researchers found samples with up to 62 million bacteria per milliliter of water; the busier the church, the higher the count.
— Various studies show churchgoers to be happier, more optimistic and healthier than other people, leading some atheists and agnostics to wonder whether the church experience could be fruitfully replicated but without the belief in God. The “Sunday Assembly” was created in London, and has now spread to New York City and Melbourne, Australia. It may go to as many as 18 other spots by year’s end, according to a September report in The Week. Founders seek such benefits as “a sense of community,” “a thought-provoking (secular) sermon,” “group singing” and an “ethos of self-improvement,” exemplified by the motto “live better, help often, wonder more.” They hope that eventually Sunday Assembly will organize Sunday schools, weddings, funerals and “non-religious baptisms.”
— An alleged drug ring in the Brooklyn, N.Y., neighborhood of Sheepshead Bay, was busted in September after police cracked a stream of Internet messages offering heroin (called “DOB”) and cocaine (“white girl”). Among the messages was one sent at 6:45 one Friday evening advising customers they had “45 minutes” to get their orders in for the weekend because the sellers would shut down at 7:30 for the Jewish Sabbath.
Questionable Judgments
— Los Angeles Animal Services has proposed that the city be established as a Sanctuary City of Feral Cats and that cats be exempt from property owners’ right to evict animals causing damage. Under the L.A. City Feral Cat Program, felines “will gain an inherent right” to be on residential or commercial property. Animal Services believes an enhanced spaying program will eliminate most feral-cat problems.
— “You hired a convicted prostitute and thief to handle state money?” asked an incredulous Connecticut state legislator in September when he learned that Suki Handly had been employed from 2008 to 2012 to pass out welfare benefits in the state’s Manchester distribution center, from which $44,000 was missing. Handly and two others had been found guilty of theft in Connecticut in 2010. Yet her prostitution and 2010 convictions were not known to state investigators until a chance audit in 2012. State hiring offices, of course, promised to strengthen background checks.
Least Competent Criminals
Ariel Sinclair, 23, an assistant manager at a Rite-Aid drugstore in Virginia Beach, Va., was charged in October with stealing $6,000 from the store’s Virginia State Lottery machine. According to police, access to the machine requires an authorized fingerprint, which she supplied. She didn’t anticipate that it would eventually be difficult to explain why she did this. “We work a lot of different cases,” said a police spokesman, and “some are easier than others.”
Readers’ Choice
— Among the things respondents to a Public Policy Polling’s October poll viewed more favorably than the U.S. Congress were hemorrhoids, the DMV and toenail fungus. The same firm’s poll earlier in the year showed Congress was liked less than root canals, head lice, colonoscopies and Donald Trump. But back then, Congress did beat out telemarketers, the ebola virus and meth labs.
— Among the reported expenditures that provoked Pope Francis to remove Limburg, Germany, Bishop Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst were a bathtub that cost $20,000, cupboards and carpentry worth $550,000 and artwork worth $690,000. The Vatican announced the church would open a soup kitchen at the bishop’s mansion.
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