Hail mary full of Cheese?
The Virgin Mary Grill Cheese Sandwich ( VMGCS ) saga came to an end late November with the blessed sandwich selling on eBay for $28,000. The buyer? None other than Golden Palace Casinos—an online gambling house.
Now it seems odd that an online casino would purchase the VMGCS. Other than a VMGCS-cam ( my idea! ) , there is no way to display it. However, Golden Palace, being good heathens, figured out how to cash in. Within days of the sale you could purchase VMGCS t-shirts ( X-mas shopping hint--I wear a large ) and plaster your face on at Not-So-Virgin Grill Cheese Sandwich. A very cheesy ( Sorry, I couldn't resist ) and poorly implemented gimmick. See the Lauren Jacobs Grilled Cheese Sandwich below for a sample of the output.
One thing though is for certain, no matter how you cut the cheese ( Again, sorry! ) , Golden Palace got a
bargain. The publicity and subsequent traffic to their website is easily worth 10x what they paid for the sandwich.
I have to admit I find it a bit odd that someone who was deranged devout enough to keep a partially eaten cheese sandwich, reverently packed with cotton balls, in a display case by her bed for ten years would then turn around and sell this "miracle" to a business that peddles in sin. However, considering that the VGMGCS's owner claims the sandwich has blessed her with over $70,000 in casino winnings over the last ten years, she obviously isn't sweating the morality of gambling.
Other sin-peddler's like Nevada's Moonlight Bunny Ranch are kicking themselves for not having the foresight to get in on the action. I'm sure having a virgin on site would bring business to a brothel.
In any case, 28G's is a pretty good haul for a slice of Land o' Lakes American cheese food stuck between two slices of scorched Publix white bread, even if one of them ( questionably ) sports the face of the mother of God.
Let's put this sum in a biblical perspective. One of the most common currencies in the Bible is "pieces of silver." ( Judas got 30 of those for turning in the J-bird ) . We'll start by assuming that a "piece" of silver weighs about one ounce. ( For the more visual among
you, 5 shiny quarters roughly equal an ounce. ) The current market rate for an ounce of silver is a little over seven bucks. This means the VMGCS sold for about 4,000 pieces of silver or over 130 times the price of Jesus himself. That's a helluva a sandwich!
Now I know the more precise among you are tapping your feet and saying, "Yeah, but what about inflation?" To you I say, "Shut up. Do you have to suck the fun out of everything?"
Lick, er, stick This
Well the trial run is over. Hopefully some of you got your butts over to
stamps.com during their Photo Stamp trial run and ordered up lots of stamps featuring John Wayne Gacy Pogo the Clown paintings and other reasonably tasteless images. I'm sure the USPS will never authorize this as a regular service because, you know, postage is sacred and can only feature dead presidents and cartoon characters. I hope you ordered plenty. My stamp is below.
Send praise and offers of financial gain to gspot@graysong.com . Send hateful comments to president@whitehouse.gov
