The news that Sharper Image, the San Francisco-based gadget-vending chain, has filed for bankruptcy has sparked a wave of premature nostalgia. Naive sorts think that Chapter 11 means a swift farewell to a company. Nothing of the sort. Sharper Image, buoyed by a loan from Wells Fargo, will stay open, continuing to hawk Ionic Breeze air purifiers while it sorts out its finances. Too bad. As a creative concern, Sharper Image went out of business long ago. It fired its founder, Richard Thalheimer in 2006, and is besieged by lawsuits; SF Weekly has an excellent retelling of that tale. The tragedy here is not that Sharper Image will soon roll up its windows; it's that it takes so long for a good idea gone bad to give up the ghost.

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