Ballard Street by Jerry Van Amerongen for March 04, 2008

Another day, another dollar…or so they say. I’m but an unpaid worker bee, in the vast hive that is “CLEO and COMPANY.”

Please post your comments here for the March 4th  2018 strip which you will find on Sherpa!

http://www.comicssherpa.com/site/feature?uc_comic=cscwy

 

 

Meanwhile…. you know why, Reggie.

You can’t hunt for your own yak or beef…. or cook it yourself.

You can’t drive the car, or turn on the television.

 

And let’s face it…. it’s embarrassing, but you kinda… well…. love them.

You’re a dog. You just can’t help it.

Reggie thinks “Not gonna be suckered in to this trick again. The last time they put a cone on me it didn’t turn out well.”

A chocolate diamond by any other name would (not) smell as expensive.

I’m with Claude. There is a huge supply of diamonds of all colors in the ground. The marketing has been incredibly successful in creating a pretense of rare jewels. My dog poops diamonds too.

Anyway, we all know Superman can create diamonds from coal. And what does he create chocolate diamonds from?

I know I posted a little rant about so-called “chocolate” diamonds when this first ran….

pretty sure it was before January of ‘17… so it’s beyond retrieval.

 

So, to reiterate, sort of…

in spite of all the ads, and even the article Alexi linked to, which is written by a diamond dealer, after all….

Chocolate diamonds are a new category of what used to all be lumped together as “brown” diamonds…

the most common diamonds on earth, far outnumbering gemstone quality white ones….

they’re the low-quality, industrial stones….

ground for edging saw blades and such…. chips are put into watch movements…. they’re used for their hardness, not their appearance.

 

Somebody at a company called Viansa had the clever marketing idea of pulling out the clearest and most fiery they could find….

out of what is still a batch of unsaleable brown diamonds,

cutting and polishing them, and calling them “rare” when they are anything but.

 

The writer of that article says you’re paying a lot because they’re “designer” gems….

and you shouldn’t be concerned about intrinsic value.

You know what I call that… but I can’t say it here.

 

Yes, they’re way cheaper than white diamonds… but we’re still talking thousands of dollars.

Prices like that are supposed to be based on rarity.

White diamonds are somewhat artificially rare because mining is controlled by De Beers…. a whole different story of corruption and other nasty vices.

Industrial brown diamonds gave the Viansa company a way to circumvent that controlled market,

and produce “gems” from widely available leftovers…

and create their own “rarity” by owning the trademark.

 

You can buy a nice brown topaz for very little.

Yes, brown diamonds if carefully selected can be prettier…. but NOT thousands of dollars prettier, IMO.

Those 2 are a couple of shady characters.

Never mind. I wouldn’ buy chocolate diamonds any more than I would diarhea diamonds.

Good Golly! Chocolate USED to be my go-to snack/desert!

I think poor Clara believes all the advertising poop about brown diamonds. I’ll bet she’d be interested in that bridge the jeweler has for sale, too.