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Welcome to The Water Cooler for May 4th, 2022. Happy Star Wars Day if you celebrate.
The WC is a random mix of stuff that could make you smarter (or at least help you sound smarter down at the pub). Anything useful/interesting/notable that’s on my mind will get pumped into your inbox every Wednesday.
And yes, we know it means toilet. I’ve had to live with these initials for 43 years.
Let’s go!
Table of Contents
You can buy the one of many copies of the Declaration of Independence
In three weeks, Christie’s will auction off a broadside copy of America’s Declaration of Independence. Estimates range from $1m to $1.5m, so if you’ve got some crypto winnings earnings burning a hole in your pocket, you can own a piece of IRL history.
Contrary to popular belief, there wasn’t just one Declaration of Independence document. It was, after all, a declaration. Between 150 and 200 original copies were printed out and distributed to the 13 colonies.
And if you can’t pony up about $1.5m or so, there’s another (and I believe slightly earlier) copy of the Declaration trading on the fractional platform Rally, at around $3m ($38/sh).
Henry Rollins is on tour – performing spoken word
Remember Henry Rollins from Black Flag and Rollins Band? Pretty hardcore, right?
I guess he’s, uh, mellowed out with age and he’s now in the middle of a spoken word tour, traveling through the US and Canada. As far as I can tell, he’s just shooting the shit about what he’s up to and his life now.
And it’s selling out!
And you can buy a limited edition signed poster commemorating this tour. From tomorrow (Thursday) at 10 am PT, you can purchase one of only 250 copies of the beauty above. Furiously smash the refresh button here.
Also, I mostly mention all of this as an excuse to embed a compilation of HR’s performance in The Chase. Enjoy!
What a great film.
Someone bought a missile silo in Kansas
How much does it cost to buy an 11-acre missile silo in Kansas? (It’s less than you might think.)
Two weeks ago, someone picked up this beauty for the low low price of $380k.
Loads of people all over my twitter feed are looking to buy / build compounds:
I'm looking to build a ranch compound on 10-30 acres in North Carolina & looking for inspiration.
— Michael Karnjanaprakorn (@mikekarnj) January 29, 2022
It'll be a place for our family & friends w/ homes, studio, sauna, gym, etc.
Share any good builders or design inspiration.
I'll start w/ some of my favorites 👇
What’s a better / more secure spot for a compound than a 10k sq. foot bunker in the middle of an 11-acre missile silo complex?
I thought vineyards were beautiful?
Between killer frosts and nuclear herbicides, it’s been a tough spring for vineyards in Oregon and France.
Willamette Valley, the Oregon wine region ravaged by fires just two years ago, has seen a spell of sub-zero temperatures that have killed off around half this year’s harvest.
Not to be outdone by nature, the Champagne region of France has decided to take vineyard destruction into its own hands.
Reneging on a decade-old prohibition of herbicides in the region, local growers have done this to their acreage.
I’ll be sticking with Spanish wines this year.
Bored Apes Broke Crypto
If you’re into crypto and NFTs, you know there was a huge mint last week.
Yuga Labs, the company responsible for all those ape jpegs, sold off $300m worth of virtual ape land (imagine reading this sentence two years ago).
But it didn’t go smoothly… At all.
Yuga broke Ethereum and cost its members over $100m in gas (transaction) fees because demand was so high. It was not well-received. You can watch this guy with a slightly weird voice inflection pattern describe what happened.
Yuga then issued an odd sorry/not sorry/flex where they sort of made it known that “if you want something done right, you’ve got to do it yourself” or something.
We wanted to say a few words about the mint tonight. 🧵
— Yuga Labs (@yugalabs) May 1, 2022
Growing pains.
Stefan’s on holiday this week, but that won’t stop him from writing this week’s Sunday edition.