So we all know that Versace is cool, but cold enough to be refrigerated? And that too an entire frickin beach? The Times Online, UK reports that fashion house Versace is going to create the world’s first refrigerated beach so that hotel guests can walk comfortably across the sand on scorching days.

The beach will be next to the the new Palazzo Versace hotel which is being built in Dubai where summer temperatures average 40C and can reach 50C.  The beach will have a network of pipes beneath the sand containing a coolant that will absorb heat from the surface.  The swimming pool will be refrigerated and there are also proposals to install giant blowers to waft a gentle breeze over the beach.

There’s already one five star luxury Palazzo Versace in Australia’s Gold Coast (www.palazzoversace.com/), and this one in the UAE (www.palazzoversace.ae/) is the second Versace hotel.

I can only imagine the obscene amount of power that will be needed to keep an entire beachfront area air-conditioned. There’s lots of over the top consumption going on in the middle-east, but this one is way, way over the top. Keeping beaches cool by using refrigeration coolants is just the first step towards cooling the entire area surrounding the Versace hotels, and then they’ll move towards the popular streets and shopping districts, and so on. I mean, what’s to stop them from eventually extending the darn pipes to the entire city?

These petro-dollar fuelled nutty billionares need to put a cork in it. I mean, most everyone in the world is suffering from a downturn. Such decadence is a sure-fire way to tick off a major part of the world. The day the world stops needing their oil, the El Dorado’s of liquid gold will turn into desolate ruins with camels pissing in the sand to keep it cool.

Since we’re on the subject of over the top weirdos, India’s film industry, Bollywood, seems to have discovered that there’s more to the U.S. than just New York. To date, most Indian films set in in the West have been either New York or London. But now, there’s a new Bollywood film, Dostana, which explores the attractions in Miami Beach.

The film itself has a storyline which goes way beyond the realms of possibility, but the film has hot Indian superstars dancing around trees and cavorting on the beaches in skimpy outfits and stuff like that. Photo by Bollywood Buzz via Cheekopek.

And that’s with the Miami Skyline and the beaches of South Florida as backdrops, so the Greater Miami tourism bureau says that the film is one big postcard promoting Miami Beach vacations to Indian tourists who generally make a beeline for New York or Los Angeles.

Posted on December 20th, 2008 by Thomas
Filed under: News, movies