Honestly, Dunkin Donuts has the worst donuts in Massachusetts, but that's not a bad thing.

Don't get me wrong: I'm a big fan of DDs. And their donuts are decent, even good. The thing is, they are so ubiquitous that they form a baseline. If you aren't better than Dunks, you don't get to play in the first place.

It's like jacks or better to open: a pair of jacks is a perfectly respectable hand in five-card-draw. But if you set that as your opener, everything else has to be better. Or the Maxwell House Haggadah: for nearly a century, the coffee company has printed a cheap or even free haggadah (as an advertisement that coffee is kosher for Passover), which isn't a bad one. And it means that, to sell a Haggadah in the United States, you have to be better than that.

So Dunks maintains the minimum donut standard in the Commonwealth.

"Devil Went Down to Georga" question and thought

In all honesty, does anyone ACTUALLY think Johnny won that contest?

Anyway, because I was getting curious about it:

A fiddle weighs somewhere around 400 grams. The specific gravity of the various woods that fiddles are made from are all over the place, but, for sake of argument, let's assume that the average specific gravity of the wood in a fiddle is somewhere around 0.6. So the volume of the stuff that a fiddle is made out of is something like 240 cc.

Gold has a specific gravity of something like 19.25, depending on purity, so a fiddle made of gold would weigh something like 4620 grams, or 4.62 kg, or a hair over ten pounds.

As of today, the price of gold is $41.92/gram; let's just call it $42 -- over the past six months, it seems to have been bouncing around $40 to $44/gram, so $42 isn't a bad number for right about now, which would come to $194,040. Given all the guesses and approximations we've been making, I think we can call it "somewhere around $200,000" or even, "maybe between $150k and a $quarter mil." It CERTAINLY wouldn't be playable.

I dunno. For ME, that'd be a bit light to wager my soul, but I can imagine someone else making a different choice. (For purposes of the argument, we're assuming that the Devil showing up and offering to wager for your soul is convincing evidence that 1. souls exist, and 2. they are alienable and therefore wager-able.)