Abu Dhabi buys New York.

Well here's some good news for those of you who think there isn't any: Abu Dhabi, the massive middle eastern investment firm, has just bought the Chrysler building in New York. Yippeee!!!! There's nothing better than abusive sultans and their buddies who live off oil largesse buying up art deco icons that dominate the New York skyline, while most of their fellow countrymen starve. It's just so thrilling. I hear the next thing they're buying is the Washington Memorial. It will look so nice with an onion head hat on top of it (I always worried that someone would get hurt with that pointy spire).

But, I saw this glorious day coming. The Manhattan GM building was sold off to the Kuwaitis and Qataris weeks ago. I love it. With our real estate slump, these guys are a Godsend. I hope they replace the horse cops in New York with camel cops. That will be great. And maybe they'll sell flying carpets on street corners...and crazy gypsies will tell Shaharazade and her 1001 Nights to passers by. Living the dream New York. Living the dream.

Spiderman!

Spiderman is real. And, he's French. I know that is a blow to some of you, but you're just going to have to deal with it. His name is Alain Robert. He climbs tall buildings with the greatest of ease and he doesn't even need web junk spewing out of his palms. He uses a chalk bag on occasion instead.


Alain Robert has been climbing the world's tallest buildings for some time now. He does not ask permission (because he's Spiderman) and when wants to climb one he simply goes to the city that has the building, finds the building, and up he goes. He generates quite a spectacle, and people tend to gather down below, or stop working to watch him climb from a nearby office building. Typically when he reaches the top the police are waiting there for him. However, to date, no one has prosecuted him (you can't prosecute Spiderman).


So a couple days ago he climbed the New York Times building carrying a banner about global warming, and our impending doom if we didn't do something. The banner read, "Global warming kills more people than 9/11 every week." Well, it's one thing if Spiderman is saving Mary Jane and attacking Doctor Octopus, but when he starts going political I start to lose respect, especially when you start comparing global warming to terrorism. The only way he's going to gain it back is if he carries my banner about global cooling to the top of the Petronas Towers in Malaysia (which, consequently, he has already climbed).