Sunday, April 01, 2007

The week in review by gimleteye


The scent of desperation

Monday
. The Commerce Department reports that sales of new single-family homes fell by 3.9 percent last month… the slowest sales pace in nearly seven years. The national decline in February followed an even larger 15.8 percent drop in sales in January, which had been the largest one-month plunge in 13 years.

Tuesday. The Miami City Commission meets for nine hours and postpones its vote on a permit to build new towers on 6.7 acres of prime waterfront land overshadowing the historic Vizcaya. After 11 PM, Miami’s local billionaire Jorge Perez takes the podium and offers to shave two more stories off the condos he plans to build whose units will sell from $3 million to $15 million apiece, if the permit is approved.

Wednesday
. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman writes, “Off all the people in the Bush team would let edit its climate reports, we have a guy who first worked for the oil lobby denying climate change, with no science background, then went back to work for Exxon. Does it get any more intellectually corrupt than that? Is there something I am missing?”

Thursday. The Miami Herald prints a 5 month report card for the Carnival Performing Arts Center showing a 1,865 percent higher deficit than originally projected.

Friday
. Fife Symington, former governor of Arizona, claims to have seen an UFO while governor but kept quiet for fear of arousing the public.

Lennar’s begs prospective buyers to check out its Miami development called Fiji at the Isles at Oasis. Whoever reads its appeal is “invited to ‘fill in the blank’ with an offer they can’t refuse on homes available for immediate move-in.”

Saturday
. “Just two weeks ago,” water management director Carol Wehle said, “no one could have predicted the precipitous water level drops we’ve seen recently.” That would only be true, if you completely ignored the warnings about climate change.

Sunday
. Polluted waters encircle the state of Florda, so agency managers want to give new definitions to pollution. Carl Hiaasen writes an editorial blasting the spin masters for attempting to reclassify Florida waters as ‘splashable’ and ‘swimmable’ and “boatable but unswimmable”. “The state of Florida has more rigorous aquatic health standards for oysters than for humans.” Which is great if you are an oyster visiting Florida but not a tourist.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

If I were an extra-terrestrial, cruzing thru the universe and its different planes of existance, and happened upon Earth... I'd scan what's going on down here, shrug, and boogie out. All we got going, here, is a wildly successful monoculture (that would be, us) that is going the way of all monocultures who wreck their habitats... how are we different from an algae bloom? if an extra terrestrial is smart enough to build a spaceship to get here, why would our influence on earth impress them?

Anonymous said...

We oysters love Florida's water...!