Van Cleef & Arpels

 Van Cleef & Arpels is a jewelry company that is apparently more expensive than even Cartier, Rolex, and Hermes, which tells you everything you need to know why I haven't heard of them before, and when on Jeopardy the other day the clue was about a "jeweler who bears the name of a diamond broker and the daughter of a dealer in precious stones," I drew a blank but MJ dug into the back of her mind and thought of the most expensive brand she could.....but was timid and didn't think Jeopardy would even ask about such a highbrow brand that's fitted the likes of Grace Kelly and Elizabeth Taylor. It was like a Voldemort situation, "the brand that shall not be named." In a sort of Baader- Meinhoff Phenomenon, though, I was reading the NY Times for Wednesday, January 3, and there on the back page was a full-page ad for Van Cleef & Arpels, as if they were supplementing their marketing campaign on Jeopardy with getting their name out there on another publication with high-IQ (and likely higher average income) patrons. 

I've noticed for sure that some names are just "stickier" than others; some names just have the right combination of quarkiness and uniqueness and certain letters just fitting together that make them impossible to forget, like the Susquehanna River, or the King Tutankhamen. It's also possible it's because we say those names so often that we get used to them and they just feel right off the tongue, something in our mind likes the physical repetition of saying that name. I can say Imelda Staunton all day, for instance, especially after seeing her performances in Harry Potter and the Crown, but I have a devil of a time remembering her show-husband on the Crown, playing Prince Phillip, Jonathan....Pryce. That's a rough name to stick out in your mind, because there are so many Jonathans in the realm of history and the world, and so many Prices. Could it be Jonathan Majors, the villain in the recent Ant Man: Quantummania? Or Jonathan Rhys Miller, the Irish actor? Or possibly Jonny Lee Miller, former spouse of Angelina Jolie and who portrayed John Major (a Jonny playing a John!) on the Crown, or could it even be Jonathan Lipnicki, the little kid in the Jerry Maguire movie? But there's only one Imelda Staunton. I actually suspect that's what Van Cleef & Arpels and a number of other brands are going for: a strong and prestigious name, but one that hasn't been used before so that it gets confused with something else. Elon Musk understood that: I FINALLY finished his biography by Walter Isaacson and he prided himself on making strong names and also having an "X" in them like Exa Dark Sidareal Musk. Also he once was with Amber Heard. Also he has 11 children (geez), many through IVF; also he can be very angry and upset about something and tell his subordinates to do something, but 3 hours later he'll just forget about it like he never said any of that, so it's better just not to do the thing he said. I can relate to that; I often finish a task and just completely shut it off from my mind. 

Ending the first post of 2024 on a bit of a sour note: reading the NY Times also exposed me to the horrors of what happened on October 7, 2023: no matter if you're pro-Israel or pro-Hamas you have to be appalled at what happened to the innocent civilians who were attacked by terrorists, especially the women who were raped and tortured and then killed for the crime of going to a rave that night. Pure evil is often justified by war, one of the worst things about war, that almost anything can be justified as the cost of doing war, but the things done to the women (cutting off breasts, stabbing them before performing sex acts) were all captured on video and shows some of the worst things that humanity can do to each other. It certainly makes me wonder that despite so many good people in the world and genuine acts of kindness that you see, does the human race deserve to exist if it has people like that to stoop to those levels? Elon Musk is trying to save our planet from extinction due to AI and any other number of existential threats....but is that even a worthy battle if people are capable of doing what happened on October 7 to each other? America's greatest tragedies are 9/11 and various other deaths, but I'd argue 10/7/2023 was worse: the kind of torture and brutality and things done to harmless women before they died is beyond just killing a large group of people: it's pure evil.