Today’s Report – February 27th
- Crain’s:Forest City Enterprises cuts convention center/medical mart cost estimate. To under $400MM, or about $130MM less than their lowest previous estimate. This is completely predictable. Apparently $55MM of the reduction was due to “market condition price reductions” (because the economy’s so bad, I guess). Wouldn’t MMPI also be able to get those same kinds of reductions at any other site? Anyway, MMPI’s already seen the proposal and, while they didn’t reject it out of hand, what they did say wasn’t very encouraging to Forest City: “It’s really a non-starter… It just won’t work.”
- There have been a bunch of articles lately on Alexander Selkirk, who was the real-life inspiration for Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), one of the oldest novels in English. Selkirk was a “privateer” (basically a government sponsored pirate) who annoyed his ship-mates so much that they ended up leaving him on an uninhabited island 400 miles west of Chile in 1704. He was stuck there by himself for almost five years. The National Geographic Society recently sponsored some archeological digs and did find some sites and artifacts that are likely to be related to Selkirk. Here’s the story from The Telegraph and here’s the slightly spicer version from Der Spiegel.
- BBC: Nature’s Great Events. This is a series by the BBC Natural History Unit, and is apparently quite similar to their earlier Planet Earth. Ned actually used his Netflix queue to rent the first episode of Planet Earth instead of some movie with animated Japanese things. Must mean it’s pretty good stuff.
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