zooms

Today we started out at the Yas Marina Circuit to join the happy throngs at the most popular race of the year: radical (?) qualifying and the Clio Cup.

Me hanging out with all the other people

My issue with car racing as a spectator sport, besides the complete mockery it makes of the effort to de-emphasize the role of the personal automobile as a necessary agent of personal freedom and agency in an effort to still have somewhere for our species to live, is that the range of risks available for the competitors to take that exist within acceptable bounds of non-lethality is extremely small. In most sports, athletes have the option of making visible, noticable and exciting risks: a high-value move that could result in a fall, an audacious steal of the ball or puck, a breakaway that could win the game or leave you worse off than before. The risks of these moves generally range from embarassment to the potential for minor injury. In motor racing, the potential “loss” outcome of any big move that the audience can actually see is fiery death for you and everyone around you. So while arguably just being in a car going that fast is inherently audacious and exciting, it doesn’t exactly look it to me, a person who has seen cars go before, and when the most exciting crazy move that anyone might pull is to intentionally get close to another competitor, there isn’t a lot of room in the “I want to be excited and impressed but not worried about witnessing horrible deaths” space.

A moment of extreme sporting excitement

Some excitement apparently happened somewhere else

In the afternoon we went to the Louvre Abu Dhabi, which I didn’t take a huge number of photos of, probably because everyone else was. I mean to the point that it was difficult to look at objects, because they were constantly in use as the backgrounds to people’s photos. There was also one of my favourite places, one of the funniest things I have ever seen, one of the many sights of this trip which made me wish David Foster Wallace had lived long enough to see it, which we observed for quite a while whole eating lunch at the cafe: the Hot Girl Observation Deck. The HGOD setup was that a Hot Girl walks out on this runway thing:

A photo captured with difficulty in the brief moment of pause in the Hot Girl lineup

Then, her boyfriend takes photos for her instagram (presumably???) from either the steps or from here:

Then they fight about the photos, and if necessary she rejoins the runway lineup to redo them.

This was obviously the intended usage of this piece of architecture, so I can’t really fault them for showing off how hot they are in the show-off-how-hot-you-are-for-instagram place. However, it would be nice if in front of every single work of art were not ALSO the show-off-how-hot-you-are-for-instagram place.

Showing off how deep I am in front of a different place, I guess