$15 million for baby pictures? Say what?!

I’m sure we’ve all had experience with baby pictures. I get them occasionally, and my reaction is almost always the same: “Cute baby.” Once in a huge while, I’ll have a Kramer moment — “She looks like Lyndon Johnson” — but most of the time babies are babies, little bundles of joy wrapped in blankets, with confused looks on their faces and maybe some dribble on their chins.

Then, unless the baby in question is a blood relative, I wait a respectful few days and then flip it into the trash. (The picture, not the baby.) What am I going to do with baby pictures?

But if I happen to get one sent to me from Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, I think I’ll save it. Maybe I can trade it for a yacht, or sell it and take one of those space flights that only a Google executive can afford. I could even donate the proceeds to a charity and cure a disease.

Right now, Angelina and Brad are reportedly in the south of France, where the rules against paparazzi intrusion are much more stringent. If they were ensconced in Beverly Hills, Calif., they’d have photographers scaling their walls in much the same way that the guys in “The Dirty Dozen” invaded a German stronghold.

The price tag on their baby photos is so preposterously large that retired paparazzi are probably coming out of retirement to make one last killing, like Clint Eastwood did in “Unforgiven.”

What $15 million can buy Numbers are approximates based on average cost: — 6,912,442 dozen grade A eggs — 5,016,722 Big Macs — 3,713,790 gallons of gas — 1,153,846 packs of Pampers diapers — 75,000 iPhone 3Gs — 67,567 years of Netflix — 12,500 37" flat-screen LCD TVs — 8,333 bullet-proof vests — 4,838,710 tall lattes — 882 2008 Honda Civics — 115 4-year Harvard degrees

No one really knows how much photos of Angelina’s twins will go for. The couple sold baby photos of Shiloh, now 2, the youngest of the couple’s four kids, for a reported $4.1 million to People.

So you have to figure, “Twins? Must be at least twice that.” Some have speculated a bidding war would bring it to somewhere around $10 million. Others have suggested even more — $15 million, even $20 million.

Suffice it to say that it’s in the comfortable seven figures and probably into eight figures — even if both babies look like Lyndon Johnson.

Let’s just say $15 million. That’s a nice, conservative number for an outrageous purchase. You go by the $4.1 million People shelled out for Shiloh, double it for twins, and then factor in another $7 million as the cost of celebrity-baby photo inflation.

Fifteen million dollars. For baby pictures! Do you know what that could buy?

It should be noted that Angelina and Brad reportedly donated the $4.1 million from Shiloh’s pictures to charity. And they have shown a social conscience many times in the past, so it’s likely they’ll donate the proceeds from the twins’ photos to a good cause, also.

But $15 million for baby photos? Fifteen million could buy:

• Health care for about 1,250 families of four for a year.
• Approximately 12,500 tanks of diesel fuel for 18-wheelers (based on 300-gallon tank).
• One worthless New York Yankee, and change (Carl Pavano makes $11 million).
• About 1,875,000 bushels of corn.
• Almost four Kobe Bryant forgiveness rings.
• Approximately 75 three-bedroom homes in Stockton, Calif.
• Approximately seven three-bedroom homes in Beverly Hills, Calif.
• About 13,600 Apple laptop computers.
• Five 30-second commercials during the next Super Bowl.
• Approximately seven to 15 blast-resistant vehicles for soldiers in Iraq, depending on size of the vehicles and how they are equipped.
• About 220 new public-school teachers in the state of South Dakota — and that’s if you doubled the average salary for a teacher in that state, which is the lowest in the nation at roughly $34,000.

• Slideshow   Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt (and their growing family) travel the world for worthy causes. more photos

  About 1,500 bottles of 1966 Domaine de la Romanee Conti Romanee St. Vivant.
• Somewhere between 4.28 million and 7.5 million bottles of Charles Shaw, depending on the region.
• One year of tuition, room and board, and books for 333 students to attend Ivy League universities.
• A two-week supply of Plumpy’nut peanut food paste for about 2,142,857 malnourished children in Africa.
• Angelina Jolie to star in your film, depending on the project.
• Average weddings for between 300 and 750 couples, depending on area of the country.
• Slightly less than one-third of the breeding rights to Kentucky Derby and Preakness winner Big Brown.
• Roughly 11,540 seven-day Hawaiian cruises.
• About 105,633 bottles of Viagra (90 pills in each bottle, 90 mg).
• About 412 new firefighters in New York City.
• About 349 prisoners kept behind bars for one year.
• Approximately 7,500 babies provided with disposable diapers from birth through potty training.
• One anchor for the “CBS Evening News” for one year.
• The care and feeding of 15,000 dogs and 15,000 cats for one year.
• The annual salaries for just over 88 U.S. senators.
• Somewhere around 25,000 pairs of Jimmy Choo pumps.
• About 2,500 Gibson Jimmy Page Signature Les Paul Custom guitars.
• Approximately 20 cities hosting the Olympic Torch (with costs coming mostly from police overtime).
• The training of 10 Air Force pilots.
• Breakfasts for roughly 11,111,000 school children nationwide for one school year under the federal government’s School Breakfast Program.
• One year of cable television for about 300,000 people.
• Knee-replacement surgeries for approximately 882 patients performed in top-tier U.S. hospitals.
• Knee-replacement surgeries for approximately 3,000 patients performed in top-tier hospitals in India.
• Subscriptions to People magazine for about 131,578 new subscribers (based on 45 percent discount off the newsstand price).
• Live-in nannies for 288 couples with newborn twins for one year (based on fee of $700 per week for one baby plus another $300 per week as a twin supplement).

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