How fantastic it feels to get your hands on those big petroleum marbles held together with cheap fishing line, to be worn like a diamond necklace for a night, then forever relegated to your bedpost or closet door.

"They're like Super Bowl tickets after the game is over," Dom Carlone, Accent Annex owner and bead designer, told The Times-Picayune. "They are sought-after one day, then their value is suddenly gone."

Why do we do the things we do?

According to Arthur Hardy's "Mardi Gras Guide," the first baubles tossed during a parade came in 1871 from a Santa Claus masker on Twelfth Night Revelers' Float 24.

Could he have had any idea of his profound effect upon Carnival? Without him there would probably not have been doubloons and cups and panties and women baring breasts for these things, and the sort of pandemonium that Macy's parades could never inspire. And from rear-view mirrors would dangle only neckties and fuzzy dice.

Without him, there would be no pregnant eye-contact with satin-clad maskers who hold the power over the masses and you. Please, mister. Please!

"These are not pieces of junk," Carlone says. "It's almost like jewelry." In the dreamy dream state of carnival, maybe this is true.

"I like the way they hang in the trees when it's all over," says Carrie Anderson, a Northern transplant who celebrated her first Mardi Gras several years ago. Dreamy dream kaleidoscope trees. Full of pearls. Big beautiful worthless pearls.