Antique Talk Top Twenty List:
Why Osama Bin Laden Hates Antiques
20. Being a successful heroin dealer and political blackmailer Osama doesn't need to buy antiques. He can afford to steal new, unused things.
19. 18th century bonnet top highboys with pinwheel drawerface carving and original brass and surface don't display well in a cave.
18. Looking to raise money after his bank accounts were frozen, Osama was dismayed to return home and learn that his mother threw away his collections of Mickey Mantle baseball cards, first issue comic books and Bakelite/Catalan plastic radios, explaining they were, "decadent symbols of popular western culture."
17. Tiffany lamps don't store well
when you are being cluster-bombed.
16. Antiques remind Bin Laden of his capitalist relatives in Saudi Arabia who naively believe that building up is holier than tearing down and healing is superior to killing. Kinfidels not totally in compliance with Osama's new "improved" edition of the Qur'an.
15. Osama doesn't like ornately carved Victorian furniture because anthrax dust keeps getting in the cracks.
14. Military relic collectors keep asking him if he's going to sell his Kalashnikov rifle on eBay.
13. Displaying the Taliban's most sophisticated armaments on the internet as a way of terrorizing Western Forces, those same collectors asked Bin Laden if he was going to auction the "whole pile at once or offer the collection piece by piece?"
12. Sotheby's and Christie's do not offer secure lines for phone bids.
11. Osama was unnerved to learn that his most trusted officers who pledged to stand beside him until the end of time were all running tag sales last weekend. A proselyte explained that he and his neighbors' "Moving-Everything Must Go!" signs were just clever marketing tools for disposing of excess furniture, toilet paper, firewood and other things they didn't need.
10. Bin Laden was even more perplexed to return home and discover that three of his wives had were also running tag sales except their hand-drawn signs read, "Going Away Soon."
9. When Bin Laden raised his hand at a Kandahar auction fifteen of his most devote followers dropped to their knees and returned his gesture, straightening their right arms and crying out, "Sieg Heil!" Flustered, the Al-Qaeda leader then explained in his native Arabic he was just bidding on a foot-warmer.
8. In Afghanistan, flea markets really do have fleas.
7. Bin Laden was crushed to discover that the "200 year old, hand-tied antique palace size Kazak" carpet he bargained away for a mere $150,000 from trusted dealers in Iran was in fact a contemporary American machine-made Karastan, color enhanced with magic markers.
6. Oprah always outbids him at auction.
5. Attempting to build a historic museum in Afghanistan, the Mujhahideen architect of extremist Islamic fundamentalism learned that the only antiquated thing left standing in his decimated homeland is his own brand of paternalistic religion.
4. Phony Carnival glass.
3. In Afghanistan, everybody is interested in selling these days and nobody's interested in buying. Bin Laden's wives complain that it ruins the sport of bargain hunting amongst the peasants.
2. Bin Laden is unhappy because he can no longer pick up the "Antique Roadshow" or Leslie Lindman's, "At the Auction" on Al Quaeda any more. In fact, he can't pick up anything on his TV.
1. And finally, the number one reason Osama Bin Laden hates antiques: Despite company claims to the contrary, Osama was disappointed to learn that his collector grade Timex Indiglo watch does not keep on ticking after taking a licking. Not after being impacted head-on by a satellite guided 5000-lb. titanium tipped incendiary bomb.
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