The New Yorker recounts the complicated history of a preposterously valuable timepiece.
[S]ometime around 2007, in the early days of social media, a new kind of watch obsessive materialized, equipped with native computer skills and an appreciation for the places where pop culture and the luxury market intersect. In those pre-Instagram years, fanboy wonks traded watch esoterica online: an image of Picasso wearing a lost Jaeger-LeCoultre; Castro with two trendy Rolexes strapped to one arm; Brando, on the set of “Apocalypse Now,” “flexing,” as watch geeks say, a Rolex GMT-Master without its timing bezel, a modification he made to better inhabit the role of Kurtz; and—the Google image-search find of them all—two frames of an uncredited snapshot of Lennon and his Patek.
“I’m not a watch guy,” Sean Lennon said. “I’d be terrified to wear anything of my dad’s. I never even played one of his guitars.”
Since its discovery, around 2011, the image has appeared online again and again, fuelling a speculative frenzy about what the watch—which cost around twenty-five thousand dollars at Tiffany in 1980—might bring at auction today, with estimates ranging from ten million to forty million dollars. (Bloomberg’s Subdial Watch Index tracks the value of a bundle of watches produced by Rolex, Patek, and Audemars Piguet, like an E.T.F.; the Boston Consulting Group reported that, between 2018 and 2023, a similar selection outperformed the S. & P. 500 by twelve per cent. In 2017, Paul Newman’s Rolex Daytona broke records by selling at auction for $17.8 million.) But all the clickbait posts about the Lennon Patek, as it had come to be known, were regurgitations that contained few facts. There was never a mention of who took the photo, where it was taken, or even where the watch might be.
During the long, dull days of the pandemic, I decided to see what I could find out. Several years went by, as I traced the journey of the watch from where it was stowed after Lennon’s death—a locked room in his Dakota apartment—to when it was stolen, apparently in 2005. From there, it moved around Europe and the watch departments of two auction houses, before becoming the subject of an ongoing lawsuit, in Switzerland, to determine whether the watch’s rightful owner is Ono or an unnamed man a Swiss court judgment refers to as Mr. A, who claims to have bought the watch legally in 2014.
Having reached its final appeal—Ono has so far prevailed—the case is now in the hands of the Tribunal Fédéral, Switzerland’s Supreme Court, which is expected to render a verdict later this year. Meanwhile, the watch continues to sit in an undisclosed location in Geneva, a city that specializes in the safe, secret storage of lost treasures.
After his son Hunter was convicted of lying on the federal form that must be submitted to allow the purchase of a firearm, President Biden shared with the nation his wisdom on Gun Control.
A few excerpts proving this president’s knowledge and understanding of the issues involved.
It’s time once again to do what I did when I was a Senator: ban assault weapons! I mean it. Who in God’s name needs a magazine which can hold 200 shells? Nobody. That’s right.”
I remember when I was campaigning, when I was a Senator, going through the wetlands of Delaware to meet all the people who were most upset with me—the fishermen and the hunters. And I came across a guy who was fishing. He said, ‘You want to take my gun?’ And I looked at him and said, ‘Yeah, I don’t want to take your gun. You’re allowed to have a gun, but I want to take away your ability to use an assault weapon…’ He said, ‘What do you mean? I need that gun.’ I said, ‘Guess what? If you need 12 to 100 bullets in a gun, in a magazine, you’re the lousiest shot I’ve ever heard.”
You know and I know: there are no 200-round or 100-round magazines for any rifles or handguns.
I used to be a law professor. When I was no longer the Vice President, I became a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Before that, I taught a constitutional law class and, well, talked about the Second Amendment. There’s never been a time that says you can own anything you want. You couldn’t own a cannon during the Civil War. No, I’m serious. Think about it.”
Joe Biden was, of course, never really a law professor. Joe Biden received a sort of honorary appointment at U of P that Politifact describes here:
The university’s faculty handbook says a practice professor’s “primary” activity is teaching, but the job may also involve supervising independent studies and internships, serving on committees and attending school faculty meetings.
Biden served in his position for about two years because he went on leave for his 2020 presidential campaign. Biden was paid more than $900,000 for this university role from 2017 to 2019, according to tax forms he’s filed.
Shortly after Biden’s University of Pennsylvania appointment was announced in 2017, Kate Bedingfield, then a Biden campaign spokesperson, told the university newspaper The Daily Pennsylvanian that Biden would not be teaching regular classes.
The Philadelphia Inquirer reported in 2019 that Biden’s post “involved no regular classes and around a dozen public appearances on campus, mostly in big, ticketed events.”
And he’s wrong about private ownership of cannons in 19th Century America.
It isn’t that hard to find images of leonine aggression directed at automobiles. And they do apparently bite spare tires!
In the latest Spectator, Aidan Hartley shares a priceless family memory/
When my family farmed in West Kilimanjaro, in Tanzania, my father had a fine Boran bull called Larasha. He adored that bull, which he had bought from the great Boran rancher Miles Fletcher in Kenya. At that time, a troublesome lion was regularly killing cattle out in the bomas of the neighboring Maasai pastoralists. One night dad’s stockman was driving home in our old Series 3 Land Rover, which had no windscreen or top, when the headlights illuminated a male lion on the track. He slowed down, expecting the beast to move off, but instead it placed its front paws on the radiator and roared at him. The alarmed stockman accelerated forwards and the lion, with its growling mouth visible over the bonnet and its hind legs planted on the ground, pushed back. The Land Rover’s wheels churned in the dirt, the lion roared and the two were locked in a deadly scrum. Then suddenly, the creature leapt up on to the vehicle and bit right into the rubber of the spare tire fixed on the bonnet. A blast of punctured air shot up into the lion’s face with sudden force, its fanged cheeks and black mane riffling in the wind, so that it was thrown backwards off the vehicle, allowing the now terrified cattleman to race off into the darkness.
On inspection later, a large tooth was found embedded in the shredded spare tire. My father suspected this must be the lion that had been troubling the Maasai — and its injury during the encounter with the Land Rover now made it even more of a threat to livestock. Very soon afterwards, the beast barged its way into one of our cattle bomas, jumped on to the humped back of that fine bull Larasha. With one mighty swipe of his paw the lion broke the bull’s neck and immediately he set upon its carcass, tearing into its guts. The herdsmen, who had been snoring nearby, woke up and gave the alarm. With shouts and whoops, the cowboys tried to shoo off the lion, but only when a man appeared with a shotgun and began blasting away, did the bloodied predator withdraw.
You have to wonder how it came about that practically all the greatest institutions and corporations in America have fallen into the hands of pea-brained conformist Woke nincompoops.
Timothy Jacobson visited the invasion site and came away with a nice story.
[A]n anecdote told by our guide later in the day as we stood atop the remains of a concrete fortification down on Omaha Beach — that most sticks in this pilgrim’s mind. It is a remarkably unremarkable coastline, of gray sand and scrub vegetation rising inland, today built, if far from built-up, with some houses and commercial beach establishments of the sort that would be familiar to beachgoers anywhere. As we gazed over the scene, not knowing quite what to say, our guide, sensing our awkwardness, told us of another group of visiting Americans from a few years before when aging veterans of Operation Overlord still returned to pay their respects. He recalled how one visitor, probably in his fifties and too young to have served then but evidently wanting to sound patriotic (perhaps he was), expressed disgust at the signs of commercial activity along the beach:
“Just look at that; it’s awful, disrespectful, a disgrace. American boys died here. This place should be preserved just like it was back then, for them.”
The group grew quiet until a companion traveler, twenty or thirty years older, clearly of a less-polished background but who in fact had been there on D-Day, corrected his younger countryman:
“Hey Mac, shut it! Y’dunno what you’re talkin’ about. Families on the beach and kids playin’ in the sand: that’s what we did it for.”
Merci, monsieur le guide. I wish I could remember your name.
…of the New York City Department of Education. An actual email:
Happy Father’s Day (June 16)
On Father’s Day, we invite everyone to express love, gratitude, and appreciation for all individuals who identify as fathers. This includes fathers who have lost their children, those who have lost their fathers, those who yearn to be fathers, fathers with complicated relationships with their children, individuals who chose not to be fathers, and those who have strained relationships with their fathers, father-like figures, and guardians.
Let’s celebrate the many forms of fatherhood and show our appreciation for these individuals’ vital role in our lives.
