What with la crunchie taking a bite out of our collective wallets I thought now would be a good time to look at some ways that vast sums of money have been frittered away, or overspent, or just spent on what turned out to be a waste of time. We all waste money, I'm doing it right now as I type this. I'm smoking a cigarette made from $100 bills while buying every season of 80s soap opera Dynasty online on HD-DVD, and getting it shipped twice around the world to get to me...before sending the entire thing up into the cosmos on a diamond encrusted spaceship as the first boxset in space. The only thing that would make me feel better is if there was a homeless orphan sitting next to me starving to death while I was eating a McFeast. I kid! I'm not really like a Russian oligarch whose just discovered an oil field in his underpants and bought a British football team like some drunken people get tattoos. No, I'm as frugal as Ebenezer Scrooge skinning some flint, in recession time. So have a read, get angry, and remember if you think you wasted money on that rotten expensive meal for that girl that never called you back, you ain't seen nothing yet...
10. Brewster's Millions/The Dark Knight
These two share this spot because they're both fictional and one of the ways the money's wasted is repeated, in real life. First up the 1985 film with Richard Pryor, Brewster's Millions, where he has to spend $30 million in 30 days so he can get his inheritance. Now that's a lot of money to fritter away in 30 days - you do the maths. So, well done Monty you've made the list, in true style. Another more recent example of money wastage on screen is in The Dark Knight. When the Joker steals that money at the beginning of the movie Lau remarks that a relatively small amount' of $86 million has been stolen - that's relatively small. Later on the Joker burns the lot in a menacing act of anarchic showmanship, and $86 million goes up in flames. Makes the KLF in the next entry look like a pair of conservative pansies.
9. The KLF burn £1m
This is at No.9 because it's the least amount of money, but it's tricky because while the others have been spent (arguably) in earnest trying to at least achieve something tangible (not that it gives them any more legitimacy), this money literally went up in smoke. It was the heady Britpop days of 1994 and they went to a Scottish island called Jura and burnt £1 million, which they recorded on video. You may scream "AS FAKE AS A PR0N STAR'S FUNBAGS!!!" but the two gents responsible, Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond, still claim they did it. It was either a subversive act of genius highlighting our worldwide obsession with money or a massive abysmal waste by two deluded popstars. Still, The White Room is a f#cking classic.
8. Guns N' Roses' Chinese Democracy
Well, what can someone say about the mighty GN'R? Slash maybe, and I'd nod my head in approval, but waiting this long, with vast sums of money spent, year after year; that's 15 years he's getting paid for one album's work. Come on! A thousand monkeys could compose a thousand GN'R albums in those years! The cost - which Axl has disputed - according to that bastion of truth, the New York Times, was $13 million just in production. This was in 2003, but there was still no album at the end of that year...finally last month, November 2008 it was released. Obviously a fan would say this isn't a waste of money but unfortunately I'd class myself as a disinterested observer rather than a fan, so $13 million and counting 5 years ago, no. No album is worth that much, especially not one from a leather-trousered, leather faced abomination. The album's currently sitting at No.2 in the UK album charts and debuted at No.2 in the Billboard album chart, so it still holds true that a fool and their money are soon parted. Still, that's just nostalgia buying those records; it stopped being about the music after Appetite for Destruction.
7. Heaven's Gate
Not the suicide cult, but the film of the same name made by director Michael Cimino. This not only went way over its initial budget of $11.6 million (this was 1980), ending up costing more than double at $40 million (about $200,000 a day!), but also brought about the demise of its studio, United Artists, and destroyed the director's career. It's made the list because, although films have cost much more than this, it was panned on its release and has been called both the 'worst movie ever made' and 'the most scandalous cinematic waste I have ever seen...' by critics Joe Queenan and Roger Ebert, respectively. It also caused a major shift in filmmaking, away from the director driven film production of the 70s that had given us maverick classics like Taxi Driver moving towards greater studio control. Nice one Mike.
6. 2008 US presidential election
No doubt this'll upset a few people, but hey, go suck an egg. The estimated amount spent, which comes from the Centre for Responsive Politics (CRP), is $2.4 billion, that's just on the US presidential election race alone. I know, that's a sh#t load of leaflets. To get the Gimp Chimp from power it was worth sacrificing a small child, but damn, that's still a lot of pies. This isn't the total cost either, the cost of the whole election campaign rises by another $2.9 billion to bring it to $5.3 billion!! That's BILLION!!! About $1 billion more than the total cost of the 2004 election, and the most expensive election in US history - and a staggering amount of money by anyone's standards. You might say you can't put a price on democracy but tell that to the people whose houses are being repossessed, while their starving children gnaw on the decomposing flesh of dead estate agents.
5. Electronic voting system in Ireland
Now I could make a cheap joke at the expensive of the Irish here, but I'm not going to, because they gave us James Joyce. But while that worked, this little dream ended up costing 52 million euros, that's 1 billion in potatoes. Spent on machines that not only don't work properly, but can be interfered with, like some Pedobear electorate is going to come along and molest them, and the software is insufficient. I could say only the Irish will spend that much public money on an inefficient and unusable product and then spend a further 800,000 euros a year to store those impotent machines. But I'm not going to.
4. Betamax beaten by VHS
The losers in battles of competing technologies are always going to have big losses, but there's something about this one, maybe because it endured for so long. A battle waged over 12 years at a cost of god knows how much to Sony has got to hurt. I bet there are Sony executives from that period sitting in white padded cells somewhere, cuddling a Betamax tape, rocking backwards and forth, mumbling about one-hour limitations and only having 30% of the market share. Video war fail.
3. Keeping the Queen of England
The cost of keeping the Queen in cucumber sandwiches and crown jewels is £40 million a year, that was for the financial year ending in March 2008. £40 f#cking million! For a woman whose face looks like a prune sucking a lemon and who looks like about as much fun as a corgi chewing off your balls, spitting the remains in your face, while Prince Charles defecates in your mouth, and the Duke of Edinburgh rapes your pet cat. Ugh! People are going to moan and say, 'But but she brings in tourism and ...' Well so does Tower Bridge and that doesn't get paid £40 million a year. Best thing we can do is kill her, feed her remains to her precious corgis, then kill them and feed them to Prince Philip. Then sell all their possessions and with the money everyone gets a state of the art flat screen TV with surround sound, which we can use to watch a live broadcast from St. James's Park of Princes William and Harry getting strung up by their over-privileged testicles while the poor of England queue up to piss in their eyes.
2. Pork barrel project the Big Dig
An ill-begotten, colossal sh#t storm of a project, in Boston MA, aimed at re-routing the Central Artery (Interstate 93), the chief highway through the heart of Boston, into a 3.5 mile tunnel under the city. So a little complicated, but you know, it's no Hanging Gardens. Guess how much? In total, with interest, it'll end up costing $22 billion, which is just over $6 billion per mile. $6 BILLION PER MILE. That's more expensive than Bill Gate's driveway.
1. Iraq War
And the clear winner by millions (Drum roll, please...no, that's gun fire!?) is this little war. What can you say about this one? As of March this year the Pentagon were tagging the cost at $600 billion so far, that's the Pentagon, and that's obviously still rising, after Bush predicted it would cost $50-60 billion 5 years ago. Yeah, good one, you nearly got it right, only $550 billion out. Not that much then. Don't worry he might make it back, or by God's sacred scrotum he'll sink the free market economy trying. Some analysts, including the Congressional Budget Office, are estimating the potential cost will be a mind-boggling, soul-destroying, let-me-claw-out-Bush's-eyes-and-shit-in-his-ravaged-sockets amount of $1-$2 trillion. A Nobel Prize-winning economist and critic of the war, Joseph E. Stiglitz, claims the long-term costs could be as much as $4 trillion - all, obviously, depending on how long it drags on for. And now Bush is off to enjoy his delightful retirement while troops fight on in a seemingly endless war, and the Iraqi people live in chaos. I think we should catapult him into the moon as punishment.
User Comments / Add a Comment »
Strictly Kevblog, yeah spunk sum of those millions Kontraband pay u on some beers for da lads! oi oi!!! haha
Added: 347 days ago by jox mcrox
Kevin not sure on this one - You put the Irish Electronic voting system at number 5 and forget to mention the Millenium dome costing a cool £789m......the cost of building a football pitch (yeah the one at Wembley) £975m....
Added: 347 days ago by paddyd
[link deleted] should be No.1....i can't see how thats gonna be beaten for sum time!
Added: 348 days ago by wesbo
Kewl blog!
Added: 348 days ago by AlphaDog
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