Lofty Matters

Attending the Wimbledon Tennis tournament would be an exciting experience. I am not the greatest tennis player but I do love to watch it. My mother-in-law and her husband love the game and play several times a week. Watching the pros live at Wimbledon would be an amazing thing to do and some year I hope to be able to attend.

There are still some great Wimbledon debenture tickets available on this site to be had. If you have the opportunity to go, this would be a great place to find tickets.

In Wimbledon 2007 Roger Federer won his fifth title in a row and Venus Williams was the ladies champion for the fourth time in eight years. The total attendance for last years tournament was 444,810. A record was set for the day on July 7. It was 30,173.

Wimbledon 2008 is coming up soon (June 23 through July 6) so it looks like I won’t be attending this year. Perhaps you may be more fortunate! Anyone who loves this game would love to attend Wimbledon in person, I am sure.

If you go, would you let me know how great it was? I?d love to hear all about it.

An ancient gold cup is expected to sell for close to a million dollars at auction after hiding for years in a shoe box under its current owner’s bed.

Owner John Webber says his grandfather gave him the mug to play with when he was a child in 1945.

He assumed the cup was made from brass. It is decorated with the heads of two women facing in opposite directions. Their foreheads are garlanded with two knotted snakes.

He decided to get it appraised when he was moving last year and was told then that it was a rare piece of ancient Persian treasure.

Experts said the method of manufacture and the composition of the gold was “consistent with Achaemenid gold and gold smithing” and date it back to the third or fourth century BC.

The Achaemenid empire was the first of the Persian empires to rule over significant portions of Greater Iran and was wiped out by Alexander the Great in 330 BC.

Auction house Duke’s will auction the cup on June 5 and it’s estimated it will sell for 500,000 pounds (630,000-euro, $988,000-dollars).