After years of spending billions on rare and highly expensive artifacts of American culture to display on its walls, the T.G.I. Fridays restaurant chain announced Wednesday that it had declared bankruptcy. We have always believed that authentic, priceless treasures of Americana were necessary to create the Fridays dining experience, but in retrospect buying game-used, Babe Ruthautographed baseball bats to display in each of our 900 locations was probably a mistake, said company president Ricky Richardson, who confirmed the casual dining establishment had laid off more than half its staff, beginning with the thousands of full-time curators it employed to maintain its massive collection of memorabilia. Showroom-condition 1957 Chevys are expensive enough to begin with, and by the time you pay to saw them in half and have them mounted on the wall in every restaurant, it costs a fortune. I suppose part of the blame falls on me for signing off on the purchase of every trumpet Louis Armstrong played during his 50-year career, and for outbidding the Smithsonian Institution on those propellers from the original Air Force One. Richardson went on to apologize to all Fridays shareholders, offering them each a copy of Action Comics #1 for their trouble. 