That is a nasty aftertaste

I know I've been mentioning this, but the event left a mark on my spotless brooklyphile record:

Apart from my new perverse relationship with the Food Network--folding cake batter, oh my, Nigella!--Sunday's real estate section in the New York Times is the basest consumption I do. I love its voyeurism, the way you suspend your own poverty and dismiss the shabby 2.2 mil brownstone on Baltic in favor of the 2.5 on the corner 8th and Union. I blame this snooty-licious behavior on my mother, a realtor to the stars for 30-odd years.

Sunday's times featured a profile of the most indulgent, revolting, arrogant display of excess income i have ever seen. A couple is building a behemoth for the luxe lifers on west 15th street. They paid 1 million dollars to buy out the former tenants alone. Please, for a moment, indulge the description of the couple's current home:

"Long before they began the current project, the couple spent five years creating the apartment next door — a place like no other in the city. It contains a two-story-high waterfall that flows into an 18-inch-deep river set into the living room floor.

The river, which is home to 10 large koi, follows the outline of the Yangtze, a feat the Raths accomplished by building a Styrofoam model (following a National Geographic map that they enlarged), setting the model onto the building’s foundation, and then pouring the concrete floor around the model. (The final step was using gasoline to dissolve the Styrofoam, Mr. Rath said.)"

This made me so sick that I wanted to turn Giada off, and may have dulled my invasively-dirty passion for real estate in New York, and at large, forever. I find it tasteless in the most gauche and frivolous way, and I am fast becoming bitter about a paper and a city that would elevate this couple as a symbol of who it is or who it wants to be.