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Inspired by the guy who executed a chain of trades that turned a single, red paper clip into a house, blogger Matthew Tobey has a grand plan for his used, 20GB iPod Photo. Figuring that if a half-cent paper clip could fetch a Saskatchewan home worth about $119,000, his $150 iPod should net an eventual value of over $3 billion, leaving him to decide on an appropriately pricey final target for his serial swaps:

At first I considered a human being, maybe Steve Buscemi. It seems like I could easily trade up to Steve Buscemi for $3 billion, probably even $2.6 billion. Mostly I'd want him to just hang out with me and buy me cool presents (he'd have something worth around $3 billion, so he could totally afford it). Unfortunately the Emancipation Proclamation went and peed on that parade.

Then I thought I could trade up from an iPod to my very own sovereign nation. Samoa seems affordable, and I could probably get Tonga for an iPod Shuffle. But if I bought the country, I'd have to learn the language, and I barely squeaked by with a C- in high school German, so I ruled that out.

Finally I decided to trade up from an iPod to a company, DreamWorks SKG to be exact. They make movies and TV shows and albums, and I like movies and TV shows and albums, so it's a match made in heaven. Viacom bought the company for $1.6 billion less than a year ago, so I should have no problem at all trading up to it from an iPod that has $3 billion in trading potential.

Skeptics out there might assume that even if Tobey's trades land him in the $2-3 billion range, the company still won't be willing to trade away such a prized asset. But maybe—just maybe—on the day he approaches them with his unconventional acquisition plan, trigger-happy Viacom overlord Sumner Redstone will have just returned from a contentious lunch with DreamWorks execs David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg, and the crotchety octogenarian will find himself happy to swap away "the Gay and the Jew" just to teach Hollywood another lesson about who's really running things.