Burj Dubai
While on tall buildings and putting a nice point on Dubai's collapse and the end of a generally awful decade (thanks George. Thank you, too, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Don Rumsfeld and all you other elderly white, male, privileged fuck-faces who discredit your entire generation and leave the fall-out for me and my kids. Tom Brokaw won't be writing a book about you, for sure. Good riddance. But I digress). Today the Burj Dubai (from here forward known by me as the 'Barf Dubai) opens. Yes, the tallest building in the world, pictured circa mid-2008, offers 169 floors of space (2,683 feet high) which is 1,000 feet higher than the nearest inhabited rival, Taiwan's 101 Taipei because that one not tall enough. These Arabs.
The Barf Dubai is taller then two stacked Empire State Buildings and passes three climates from top to bottom and temperatures 10C cooler at the peak. Pakis and Indians exploited 24/7 at five-bucks a day to make it happen. Insurance or health care - yeah, right. And the air-conditioning - what air conditioning! - the skyscraper melts the equivalent of 12,500 tons of ice a day. It also consumes millions of gallons of desalinated water in a city that already has the world's highest per capita carbon footprint. God bless (data from The Times). There are 900 one- to four-bedroom flats and another 144 apartments designed by Giorgio Armani since this is, like, the desert which is kinda like Italy. Most certainly the schmucks who paid up to £11 million a property taking a bath as Dubai real estate off by 50% (visit "China New Year" below to see where the party is at). There is 300,000 sq ft of unlet commercial space. When the World Trade Center opened, may she RIP, the city depressed and shoved the Port Authority into the towers to avoid embarrassment. Imagine the Barf Dubai completely empty - I will take that bet. So what can we say about all this? Folly.
Monty escapes (now retrieved) and gnaws thru the video cable on the family TV. Eitan: "Can we take her back to the pet store?"
Eitan's year off to the worse possible start as Manchester United lose to Leeds in the Carling Cup Final, which he watches with Luke.
Katie back to America where she meets my father's side of the family in Miami for a cruise.
Madeleine and I feed the ducks and Swanns in Richmond Park. Madeleine hurls bread at her favorite. We play tag-you're-it until the light gone.
And that, my friends and family, is a holiday wrap.
