Mike insisted on taking us to the Reata Restaurant, in the old Caravan of Dreams owned by the Bass Brothers. It's the Reata now but everyone still calls it the Caravan of Dreams because we always liked the name. Ed Bass created the Caravan and planted a terrarium bar on top of it, complete with a little geodesic dome. That was the first sign of the madness.

Ed is kind of a weird billionaire hippie who lives with a bunch of people who sound suspiciously like a cult in an arrangement that sounds a lot like a commune. However, every time he adds a new fabulous piece to Sundance Square, he dresses up in a suit, looks normal, and wisely avoids talking too much to the local press. Personally, I kind of like the idea of being an eccentric tycoon.

The terrarium on top of the Caravan wasn't enough for Ed, who spent two hundred million bucks building a three acre glass and steel terrarium north of Tucson, Arizona and filled it with a miniature tropical rain forest, oceans, savanna, and marsh in an attempt to emulate the complete ecology of the Earth. He called it Biosphere 2. The Earth was Biosphere 1, get it?

The Biosphere 2 Biosphere 2 was a sort of sandbox for Ed to pose as scientist playing with different New Age ideas about recycling and planting manned environments on the moon and Mars. It opened in 1991 when eight people were sealed inside. Some called them biospherians.

It wasn't quite self sufficient as they thought. They had to open a window pretty quick to get some air. Secret shipments of food were smuggled in when the crops failed. The biospherians got on each others nerves pretty bad. The biospherians were all gone after a couple years.

I don’t begrudge Ed Bass his Biosphere. Sure it's crazy but it's just the kind of crazy thing I'd do if I had a billion bucks, except my biosphere would be stuffed full of hot chicks in bikinis, with airworthy WWII fighter planes parked outside, and the occasional use of high explosives for entertainment.