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The 2004 Neiman-Marcus Christmas Catalog is out, and with it comes this year’s crop of insane multi-million-dollar gifts (say, a $10MM, 230′-long zeppelin, or a $1.5MM bowling alley — real-estate not included). This stuff isn’t even drool-over material; there’s no world in which I would buy a bowling alley, even if I were richer than god. No, the attraction here is more about finding out what the retail cost of building a bowling alley from scratch is, or what the zeppelin manufacturers are charging these days. Like idly looking up the cost of a hundred-mile run of suboceanic fibre-optic or a Rosicrucian mummy (one of the mummies in the San Jose Rosicrucian Museum came out of an old Neiman-Marcus Christmas Book).

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