I was a my parents house for (e:Mike)'s birthday and he brought out his first Nokia cell phone from 1999. This thing was huge and did just about nothing. What a world of difference. What will 10 more years bring.

I hope now that your birthday has arrived, our allergies can depart.

No seriously, have a great year in your new apartment in the city!

So, in relation to my last entry. Petra Ecclestone also recently picked up the Candy Spelling Mansion for $85 million. It was one of the most expensive real estate transactions in the US but it was almost half off as it originally had a $150,000,000 asking price. She is clearly a bargain shopper as I already pointed out.

According to the LA times, Petra wasn't into all the antiques in the 120+ room mansion, so some antique dealers came in to bid on the stuff. Discussing a chandlier one dealer said:

"It's a $10,000 investment just in order to get it ready for sale," Boltiansky said. Anticipating a price in "the low six-figure range," the antiques dealer will not discuss exact figures until after the sales and then only with buyer permission.

Boltiansky is the president of Jan & Company in LA. And the LA times article links to their website: On the site it says, "Our 24,000 square foot showrooms in Los Angeles, California is filled with furnishings acquired from some of Europe's most prestigious residences."

But does this seem like the website for a place selling six figure chandeliers? Maybe they are just 100% committed to antiques of all genres, after all I would argue that the site qualifies for status as an antique web site.

Its so old it still has the inline dreamweaver javascript detecting netscape navigator 4 which was released in June 1997

function MM_reloadPage(init) {  //reloads the window if Nav4 resized
  if (init==true) with (navigator) {if ((appName=="Netscape")&&(parseInt(appVersion)==4)) {
    document.MM_pgW=innerWidth; document.MM_pgH=innerHeight; onresize=MM_reloadPage; }}
  else if (innerWidth!=document.MM_pgW || innerHeight!=document.MM_pgH) location.reload();
}
MM_reloadPage(true);

Poking around on the site I found this page which had the dates for the aquisition html templates:

Which brought me to the spelling mansion one.


Wow, that is one seriously impressive residence. Imagine greeting people at the front door.

Back to the site. Clearly managing the site involves a lo of copying and pasting template html pages and FTPing them back to the server. It seems like they could really benefit from something a little more automated. Something more 2011. Something with 3d views of the antiques. Maybe its time to re-invest some of that money in an upgrade of the web presence.

Clearly, those people are experts in antiques but web design - not so much. Maybe its a case of reaching out to student grandkid who didn't follow through with that career path.

On the upside they do have a very interesting glossary you budding antique enthusiasts

The world's richest bride Petra Ecclestone got married this weekend in Rome . Her father is billionaire Bernie Ecclestone -

They got married at the same castle as Tom and Katie Cruise. Everyone tacky and famous was there. Fergie with the Black Eyed Peas, Alicia Keys and Eric Clapton played. Paris Hilton was there, sigh. The only thing missing was that (e:mike) and I were left of the guest list as an apparent oversight. Someone needs to get fired.

But really oversights like that are to be expected on such a shoe string budget -- it only cost $5,000,000.

At first that figure seems shocking. Like $5,000,000 could feed or blow up a small country (depending who is doing the spending and if we deem the inhabitant terrorists or underprivileged). I know, I know - "its too much excess", "the rich gets richer while the poor get poorer" --- blah, blah, blah but then when you really think about it $5,000,000 seems really like a dollar store wedding for a father with a billion dollar fortune.

I mean guys making $40,000 give their daughters $10,000 - $20,000 weddings. I would expect this guy to at least throw a $20,000,000 wedding and that still really kind of thifty for his fortune. Maybe the problem is really just that nothing is expensive enough.

Sure every guest had Chateau Petrus wine at $6,500 a bottle but any self respecting billionaire dad would have had each guest a personal kegger of cristal.

In a way, the rich splurging like this is a good thing. Think about all the money that changed hands, how many people got paid. Its like we are finally seeing trickle down economics really pay off.

Could it be true, researchers in canada have come up with a Cat allergy vaccine I am not going to bother with weekly painful shots, if this kind of thing might pan out in the near future.

Researchers have developed a new vaccine to desensitize people with a cat allergy that is faster and safer than traditional immunotherapies, according to a study in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology. Cat allergy affects up to 10% of the general population and is a key trigger of childhood asthma. Standard treatment involves weekly injections of cat allergen in incremental doses for a year or more, but severe allergic reactions are a risk. The new vaccine, developed in Canada, uses synthetic versions of short peptides from the protein responsible for most cat allergies. The peptides are 1,000 times less allergenic than traditional cat allergen, researchers said. The vaccine was tested on 66 volunteers; another 22 received a placebo. Skin responses, an indicator of the severity of an allergy, were measured after eight hours and compared with reactions to cat allergen. Adverse responses in the vaccinated group were reduced by 40% and 10% in the placebo group. Researchers said the results are comparable to a year of traditional immunotherapy. The vaccine, which is in the final stage of development, is expected to require four shots at the same dose.

I think this is the study here