Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from June, 2007

Connectedness

The other day I woke up and look across at my dear wife who had a baby a year ago -- our son Emil. There she was, and she looked like the Venus of Urbino. It hit me like a bolt out of the blue. Then later that morning, I was reading my favorite dear Neva, and she writes: Standards of feminine beauty have changed through the ages, duh. We know this. Rubens' reclining, fleshy lovelies fade beneath a flourish of lithe, neo-romantic redheads. Marilyn Monroe goes on a crash diet to become Twiggy, who gets breast implants and collagen injections and becomes Pamela Anderson. Kate Moss staggers through it all, looking asymmetrically perfect and collecting paychecks and cute, drug-addled boyfriends. Yes, we know this. But occasionally something comes along that gets us talking about the female ideal's changing face as if it were a fresh discovery. What Dear Neva was writing about was a morphin' thing on youtube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUDIoN-_Hxs or click here. . I didn

The Place to Buy?

The SF Chronicle reports -- Apartment titan Zell buys in Berkeley . The Chronicle goes on to describe Chicago developer Sam Zell's Equity Residential as "the biggest apartment owner in the country," noting the firm has now "acquired seven apartment buildings near UC Berkeley for a reported $150 million." The seven buildings were erected by developer Patrick Kennedy, Panoramic Interests. The buildings were erected between 1998 and 2004 by Kennedy and UC Berkeley Professor David Teece. The City of Berkeley will get a one-time windfall of about $2.1 million in property transfer tax payments as a result of the sale, according to Calvin Fong, an aide to Mayor Tom Bates. The 1.5 percent fee indicates that the seven properties sold for about $150 million. The future home of the MAGNES is like two blocks away, by the way.