Hasta La Ideas

Yesterday, when we said we were finally putting the Apple vs. Georgetown story to bed, now that it’s finally been resolved, we thought we were telling the truth. But sometimes we’re nothing but big ol’ liars. We just couldn’t resist after seeing this piece over at Fortune‘s Apple 2.0 blog that takes a look at each of Apple’s design proposals, which had been shot down, one after the next over a two year period, until this most recent plan was finally accepted. It’s a great look at the whole process and shows just how bizarre this whole fight was (you see that, essentially, the first and last designs are the nearly identical). Also, beyond the images, there’s some great commentary in there and some of the reasoning behind the Old Georgetown Board‘s decisions for each rejection. It also hints that Apple finally won out just because the board was tired of talking to them.

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We here in the US have now found ourselves in the middle of a financial mess and we’ve been really interested in reading pieces like George Packer‘s “The Ponzi State” about foreclosures spreading like a virus throughout Florida (we can’t recommend this essay enough and do so to everyone we’ve been talking to of late). But while that’s all well and good, it’s nearly impossible to stay away from the more juicy doom and gloom of what’s happening in Dubai. What just months ago the epicenter of grand new architectural plans and sure fire money multiplier, just officially came to a mess of a crash at the start of December (we reported on a couple of stories back then) and since then, stories like this incredible piece by Robert F. Worth have been published, showing what an absolute disaster things have become. Foreigners are abandoning their lives there and fleeing, building has all but stopped completely, and those modern marvels of architecture, like the fake island hotel are being described as such:

Lurid rumors spread quickly: the Palm Jumeira, an artificial island that is one of this city’s trademark developments, is said to be sinking, and when you turn the faucets in the hotels built atop it, only cockroaches come out.

While we’re sure some of that is exaggerated, with the actual reportable stories as they are and with the knowledge that Dubai’s excess wasn’t built upon something with some stability like oil revenues or any form of relative financial security, we think you’d be hard pressed to find a better metaphor for why the world is in this economic mess, we’d love to hear it. And what better time than now to search “Dubai” in our archives to see how this situated moved from A to B.

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We’re off for our usual pre-Fashion Week week of Pilates and sartorial palette cleansing (also on our to-do list: processing for future posts the mounds of interesting merchandise we encountered at the New York International Gift Fair), but one more bit of news before we leave to you in the nimble hands of guest blogger Mary Beth Klatt. It’s a story we’ve dubbed “Andre Balazs and the Mysterious Chlorine Cloud,” which only sounds like a lost Tintin adventure. Earlier this month, reports of noxious gas swirls seeded fears of a terrorist attack in downtown Los Angeles. Turns out it was a nearby storm basin bubbling with chlorine courtesy of the rooftop pool-endowed Standard Hotel, explains today’s Los Angeles Times:

Hotel maintenance workers initially admitted pouring a small amount of chlorine down a rooftop drain. But investigators did not believe that would have accounted for the noxious cloud. An FBI agent, who specializes in environmental crimes and who is known for her pit bull-like tenacity, conducted follow-up interviews in which employees eventually acknowledged emptying the majority of two 50-gallon drums of muriatic acid and chlorine into the drain, the complaint alleges.

Andre Balazs Properties, owner of The Standard, has been charged by the U.S. attorney’s office with knowingly disposing of hazardous waste and could be fined up to $500,000 if convicted. Assistant Attorney Joe Johns, who is prosecuting the case, told the LAT, “The law does not discriminate between hazardous wastes generated by chic hotels or foul junkyards.” We hear that chic junkyards, elusive as they are, get a pass.

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