The Reluctant Whore

While England and Germany are currently in an aggressive competition to be the winner of the award for most miserable approach to Christmas, Hong Kong, it appears, is already the winner of best place to go if you have more money than God and you want to get rid of it as quickly as humanly possible without experiencing the awkwardness of thinking too much.

A while back there was the flippant purchase of a truffle the buyer didn't even like for $161,000 and this week there was the purchase of a tiny cup a mere 11.3 cm in diameter for a mere $19.3 million.

The thing is, the auctioneers actually anticipated that, at the most, they'd get half that for the cup but, as the purchaser a Ms. Alice Cheng said, "I didn't expect to buy it but my interest grew during the bidding process."

Oh, aren't those days when you don't expect to dump 20 million bucks in one afternoon but do anyway and you spend it on a miniature teacup that is, in fact, only 270 years old just murder but basically hilarious?

That's right, the 20 million buck teacup is not even several thousand years old and used by the first Emperor of China or something. No. In fact, it's not even old enough to have seen the American War of Indepenance.

Interestingly enough, the woman who bought the cup was in fact, a member of one of China's top advisory bodies, the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference and the man selling it was her own brother. Gosh, she didn't expect to use government money to pay her own brother double what he was expecting but then just happened to anyway?