TheNuze.com

Dubai - The world's tallest building officially opened today in the middle of a desert in the middle of a war-torn region in the middle of a horrendous global recession to great fanfare.  The record setting building, which had been known as Burj Dubai while under construction and was just renamed Burj Khalifa in deference to the hereditary President of neighboring Abu Dhabi who helped bail out Dubai during the economic crisis, is not only the tallest building in the world by far, it even surpasses the tallest non-freestanding structures such as cable-stayed transmission towers.  For comparison's sake, if you stood the Burj Khalifa next to the Statue of Liberty or the Eiffel Tower, it would be taller.  The structure reaches at an astounding 2,717 feet (828 meters) in height and boasts 160 floors.  To put these mammoth numbers in perspective: if each floor cost $1, you would need $160 to buy the massive structure.  Or to look at it another way: if you were to lay the tower on it's side, you would probably need some help if you wanted to stand it back up again -and- if you had enough of them and laid them end-to-end, they would circle the globe.  However, all the furniture would fall to one side, the ones that were laying over oceans would probably sink, and the rest would likely cause serious traffic problems and take days to dispose of.  To look at it's impressive height in a metaphorical light: if the base of the tower were standing at a depth equal to that of the economic hole in which Dubai currently finds itself, the tip of its spire would be just tall enough to constitute a possible hazard for bare-foot pedestrians.  When asked for comment, Taipei 101 said, "Oh ya, well, I was tired of being the tallest building anyway, so there." and the former Sears Tower in Chicago which is now named the Willis Tower quipped, "Whatchu talkin 'bout, Dubai?"