Downtown El Paso seems to have been set up to serve Mexicans who came over for a day of shopping and then returned over the bridge. Here’s what it would look like to arrive from Ciudad Juárez:
After our brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters from south of the border get through the 1950s-style shopping district, they arrive at the Square of the Sacred Rainbow Flag:
On the way they might pass this multi-story mountain lion (64 feet high!), fashioned from recycled trash by Bordalo Segundo of Portugal:
Inspired by the street art, it was time to duck into the (free) art museum. Meanwhile, I checked the radar to see whether we’d made a good decision (“sunk cost fallacy”?). From 2:30 pm:
Here’s another temporary installation, a sculpture by Vanessa German:
Black Girl on Skateboard Going Where She’s Got to Go to Do What She’s Got to Do and It Might Not Have Anything to Do With You, Ever, 2022. Lemony things: vintage French beaded flowers, a yellow skateboard like I never had when i was a fat little Black girl in Los Angeles when riding a skateboard meant that you could fly, Capidomonte Ceramic Lemon Center piece, a dance in my thighs, high yellow so-flat paint, porcelain bird figurines, decorative resin lemons, papery yellow flowers, meanness transmuted, love, oil paint stick, rage, self-loathing transmuted, a joy-bitch, masturbation, plaster, wood glue, black pigment, giddiness, freedom in the body, freedom in the Soul, wood, tar, wire, a distinct and purposeful healing, hope, yellow flood light, heart, yellow decorative ceramic magnolia figurine, acceptance, abandon, not being afraid to be full of your own self in your own divine body, divinity, fear transmuted, plaster gauze, magic, silicone, tears, epoxy, water, tomorrow, now, yes.
Wandering around after the art museum, we happened on the Paso Del Norte, a hotel that put our Marriott to shame:
Some images of downtown, including the very first Kress store (part of the fortune built turned into the art museum and its collection). See if you can spot the Science-following photographer:
We enjoyed dinner at Tex-Mex institution L&J Cafe (1927), preceded by a walk in the grass-free graveyard:
Then it was time to enjoy El Paso by night, including a minor league baseball game (packed with enthusiastic spectators) and fireworks from our hotel’s pool deck:
The next morning I did my annual visit to the gym and also looked out from the pool deck:
Speaking of the gym, they still had their coronapanic signs up. Is there any kind of procedure for taking these safety notices down?
To undo any negative effects from the gym, we hit the Glazy Donut on the way out of town. Note how easily Internet content can be corrupted:
Then it was back to the airport where the skies were clear at least to the next stop (Van Horn, Texas) and forecast to improve beyond Van Horn:
Our story picks up again on an April Saturday morning in Tucson. When checked the previous night, the forecast weather beyond El Paso was a combination of ugly and iffy. Despite the weather forecast and having flown 5 hours (collective-cracked time, so closer to 6 hours of rotor-spinning time), we were at the airport a little after 7:00 am.
After weight gained via the previous night’s Sonoran hot dogs it would have been nice to steal this civilian Blackhawk with which we shared the ramp (they were dropping supplies into the forest for powerline construction):
Here’s Interstate 10 climbing over some of the hills in southern New Mexico. It is possible to do the trip at 5,500′, the highest elevation that we must fly in order to bring a helicopter from coast to coast along I-10:
We stopped for the bathroom and found some porn for pilots:
Due to a slight headwind, we couldn’t make it to El Paso on one tank. We stopped in Las Cruces for fuel and on-airport bbq:
Once we arrived in El Paso, just after noon and having flown only three hours from Tucson, we discovered that the forecast wall of bad weather in Texas was, in fact, impenetrable by prospective helicopter migrants. My copilot wanted to press on, pointing out that conditions weren’t so bad at various airports to the northeast, e.g., 1200′ ceilings were available in Carlsbad (elevation 3295′). I reminded him that we’d have to climb above 8,000′ to clear the mountains between El Paso and Carlsbad and that the 1200′ ceiling wasn’t going to follow the terrain. It hadn’t occurred to him that airports tend to be built at the lowest elevations in a region, not on hilltops or mountaintops. (He had more than 500 hours of airplane time and nearly 200 hours of helicopter time so I can’t explain this gap in knowledge.)
Million Air KELP is a favorite spot for military instructors and students. It’s also a great place to make sure that you don’t get sunburned when transferring from your pavement-melting SUV into your Greta Thunberg-approved Gulfstream:
We headed downtown:
More about El Paso in our next thrilling installment…
We actually did this before landing in Tucson and enjoying Sonoran hot dogs at “EGC”… an orbit of Davis–Monthan Air Force Base. The military wasn’t doing any flying at 5 pm on a Friday afternoon, so I figured that the tower controller would either tell us to stay out or invite us to come in and do whatever we wanted. Instead, the controller approved one orbit of the famous boneyard. Why not two orbits? I should have summoned the courage to ask!
Here’s the part of the base that supports actively flying aircraft:
And then your choice of aircraft for any size family:
Note the A-10 Warthogs at bottom right if there is any need for domestic violence.
If you believe in “Peace, the old-fashioned way”… the B-1 bomber (sad about the reflection; it would have been better to land and take the door off and then take off again and yet better if Robinson would add a sliding photo window to the piston-powered machines that are now up to $750,000):
Not sure if this one is coming in or going out:
An overview…
And another wide image…
Tune in next time to see what we did about the following:
Formula 1 is an all-day three-day event. Consequently, a seat in a grandstand will become more like a prison after a while, unlike if you were attending a 2-hour game. In Las Vegas (see Nine minutes of Formula 1 glory at the Las Vegas Grand Prix) our ticket gave us access only to a small area where we could get food, use the waterless porta-potties, or walk to the grandstand. In Miami, a standard ticket gives the holder access to an entire campus (albeit only one grandstand) and thus there is a lot more to see and do. having the massive football stadium at the center of the campus is valuable because it is possible to ride an escalator up to the third floor of the stadium, walk around, see the track from above, eat from a non-temporary kitchen, use a non-temporary bathroom, etc. (Even the temporary rest room facilities in Miami, unlike in Vegas, were water-based and had water for handwashing.)
Despite my fears of being roasted and steamed to death, the weather forecast for the weekend was highs of 83 degrees and partly cloudy.
Given the inevitability of traffic and high-cost parking, the obvious way to get to the event is Lyft/Uber to the front door. However, it turns out that these services dump people a 20-minute walk from the stadium on big event days and may not be easy to find afterwards. I paid $84 for a resale Saturday-only parking ticket on the north side of the stadium, of which $25 was in SeatGeek fees:
I told my companion “I guarantee that, after parking, we will walk by businesses and individuals selling parking for less than half of what we paid.” Sure enough, the modest neighborhood to the north of the stadium had families selling driveway parking for $35-50 (see below). Lot 34 still ended up being a good choice because they open an exit at the NW corner. Although we left at the precise peak time, right after the final qualifying round, we didn’t wait to get out of the parking lot and suffered through no more than about 10 minutes of additional traffic compared to a best-case scenario.
It was a 20-minute walk to the entrance gate from Lot 34. If one were headed back toward Miami, probably the smart thing to do would be independent parking on the south side of the stadium (lots of businesses there with big lots) and, if departing at a peak time, stop at a restaurant for dinner before heading out on the road.
Security check (no bags or food allowed, basically, and we heard some vague mumbling about camera lenses no longer than 6 inches) and ticket check was quick. Bring in a sealed bottle of water and then there are free refill stations all over the venue. Also bring earplugs for the Porsche races and for the F1 qualifying (you can just put your fingers in your ears as the pack of cars goes by in an F1 race).
I was instructed to pick some drivers to root for. After hearing their biographies, I decided that my loyalties are to Logan Sargeant, a 23-year-old Floridian who drives for Williams, Yuki Tsunoda, a 23-year-old from Japan who drives for Red Bull’s second team (“RB”) because I love Japan, and Max Verstappen, the 26-year-old champion who reminds me of my Dutch friend Max (he’s against big government and low-skill migrants).
The “West Campus” features about 15 restaurants and a popular F1 merchandise store. People actually waited in line for the chance to buy $75-100 T-shirts:
The shopper in the middle photo told me that everything is cheaper online and, in fact, the orange T-shirt above for which people were paying $75 at the event was quoted at $42, not on sale, on the official F1 store web site. The $80 black shirt, however, wasn’t available online when I checked, so maybe that’s why people are desperate to shop at the event. The truly great hat shown below wasn’t for sale:
There was quite a bit of shaded seating for eating and drinking. My Twitter post, which nobody thought was funny:
Nearly 100,000 protesters have gathered for a second day here in the Miami encampment, which is complete with temporary restrooms and humanitarian food organizations. The demonstrators say that if their demands aren’t met they are coming back tomorrow. pic.twitter.com/T0ao56VvOC
Here’s a view of the grandstand taken from the 3rd floor of the stadium:
Our Turn 18 grandstand seats ($180 resale plus a forest of fees) weren’t all that interesting. We never saw a change in position, an accident, or anything else other than people decelerate (far away) and then come slowly out of tight turn (close). Row M is the best in this grandstand due to being shaded and yet just in front of the columns that hold up the shade structure. Later in the day, at least six rows below M will also be shaded on the west side of the grandstand. Here are photos at noon showing that L and M are shaded followed by two photos at 4 pm showing that the west part of the grandstand has a much more favorable angle than the east part (by 2 pm, even row I was shaded on the west side):
The aviation story for the event is a temporary flight restriction from 0-1000′, which is perhaps just as well considering the proximity of 1050′-high towers right next to the stadium.
An AStar (“Airbus H130”) flew tight maneuvers, often substantially sideways, over the more important races. I’m surprised that this made more sense than using drones to get dramatic aerial footage of the race. A drone operator on top of the stadium would have been able to see the aircraft at all times and a camera operator could have manipulated the camera angle. Maybe the camera in the ball underneath the AStar can be heavier, but is a huge sensor and lens necessary for taking pictures under the bright Miami skies? A Robinson R44 also flew over the course from time to time and the Hard Rock’s Sikorsky S-76 ferried VIPs in and out. I’m sure the folks in the AStar got some better images that we did from our seats! iPhone at “3X”:
I’m not sure why Ferrari wants to participate in Formula 1. Isn’t the main take-away “A beverage company makes faster cars than we do and, also, quite a few cans of energy drinks”? Also, the Ferrari team is now sponsored by HP, which leads to a color clash and confusion in my brain. Why do tech companies get so much value out of F1 sponsorship? Shouldn’t it be consumer products companies that could get the most return on investment? How many people at a Formula 1 event are in the market for something from Oracle, Cisco, or HP? Who decides to use Oracle instead of SAP or SQL Server because Oracle sponsors the Red Bull team?
The restricted-by-gender-ID “F1 Academy” race was more exciting than the standard F1 open-to-all-genders events. The drivers all have the same car model and, therefore, nobody has a technical advantage. This makes it tougher to forecast the winner in advance. The lack of experience among the female-identifying drivers also makes the race more exciting. In the 13-lap race that we saw (drivers who fail to identify as “women” are forced to race for 19 laps (sprint) or 57 laps (full F1 race)), there were stalls during the start (failure to use manual transmission properly), sideways departures from the track in curves, and at least one crash against the side wall (nobody injured, fortunately). Despite the low level of experience among the drivers, big companies such as Cisco and Google pour in sponsorship money. The announcers give the drivers credit for every action, even if the action is a mistake, and note that “they’re learning so much.” Chloe Chambers, age 19 and born in China, was given credit for being adopted and also for living in a “multi-racial” family. Wikipedia says that in an all-gender Formula 4 contest she finished #26 (perhaps she was the top driver who identified as “female”?). Drivers who don’t identify as “female” at the Formula 4 level would be lucky to enjoy 100 spectators at an event, but the “F1 Academy” race was watched by tens of thousands, sandwiched as it was between all-gender F1 events.
The lines for food seem to get long from 1-3 pm as fan hunger overpowers resistance to paying $30 per person for lunch. Here’s the line for $23 personal-size pizza:
Frosted lemonade was $12, a burger $20, and tacos were $10 each. As noted above, the ability to walk around inside the stadium is valuable and offers fun views of racing and the fan zones:
Some car dealers brought their wares. Here’s a Koenigsegg:
Some porn for Californians from the drive back… gasoline at $3.46/gallon right next to the Palm Beach International Airport:
It was a good day and wasn’t too brutal for either sun or noise, but I wouldn’t have wanted to go back the next day for the real race (better to watch on TV). Although the crowds were managed well, it was still a crowded environment from the moment you left your car to the moment you got back. One day wasn’t quite long enough to explore all of the fan areas, but it was still enough for one year. Maybe I would feel differently if they used a Honda Odyssey as a pace car.
Nutrition is critical for any coast-to-coast helicopter flight. I loaded up on dim sum at Din Tai Fung in a Costa Mesa mall, then paid only $13 for a few strawberries at Hannam Chain in our inflation-free economy. The folks who run the supermarket are Korean and had neglected to boycott the Zionist entity:
I decided to skip the rainbow flag worship at the liquor store next door to the supermarket:
Our machine was waiting for us on the Robinson ramp in Torrance (KTOA), but the marine layer prevented departure prior to 11:30 am. Note the new horizontal stabilizer, not in any way resembling a Bell 206…
That gave us time to stock up on snacks at the nearby Whole Foods. The scene out front showed California at its best: outdoor maskers and a planet-saving Tesla.
In the rare moments when they de-mask, the Followers of Science detoxify their body with alkaline water in front of this Whole Foods:
We fly out of LA by following CA-91 and I-10, a route prescribed by Robinson that is the lowest path out of the mountains (the Banning Pass is at 2,200′ above sea level). I keep a cheat sheet of radio frequencies for the control towers and/or common traffic advisory frequencies (CTAF) of the 7 airports we will fly by. In the middle of the day (not rush hour) it’s up to a 4-hour trip by car, according to the Google, but we’re there after 30 minutes:
If one were tempted to complain about the R44’s 110-knot cruising speed, this sight in Carson, California (near Long Beach) is a good reminder to count one’s blessings:
As soon as we get to Banning the skies turn blue. We transition through Palm Springs and land at the Bermuda Dunes airport. After consuming all of the FBO’s Cheez-Its, it was time to continue climbing into the hills via I-10.
Blythe, California is a generally terrible airport where you need to park at the fuel pumps and where the “courtesy car” comes with precious little courtesy. We skipped it and continued across the Colorado River into Arizona.
Some more mountains before arriving in Metro Phoenix to land at the Goodyear, AZ airport:
One way to look slim:
More coffee and snacks at GYR before proceeding on toward Tucson. The Pinal, AZ airport is notable for Army helicopters and washed-up airliners:
Maybe a sharp-eyed reader can figure out what the coal-fueled facility below is. I don’t see huge powerlines coming out of it so my guess is “not electricity generation”. Also, a nice quarry:
We arrived in Tucson about 1.5 hours before sunset. If we couldn’t make it all the way to El Paso it probably made sense to shut down because southern New Mexico does not have a lot of services.
Then it was time to shop for microfiber cloths (clean the bugs off the bubble) and eat Sonoran hot dogs at El Guero Canelo (“EGC” to the locals):
As noted in How’s your eclipse viewing?, I wussed out on the Fredericksburg, Texas eclipse plan in favor of hitting the shorter-totality Northeast where the forecast was for clear skies. As with nearly all of my decisions, this one turned out to be bad because the friend I had planned to visit/join in Austin ended up having a perfect view of totality (the clouds disappeared due to the cooling effect of the eclipse somehow).
The day started with pocketing snacks at Jet Aviation in Bedford, Maskachusetts (Hanscom Field):
We loaded up the plane with three generations of my friend’s family and had an uneventful VFR flight at 17,500′ to KHUL (Houlton, Maine). The FAA had issued a cautionary NOTAM:
To assist FBOs with staging aircraft and to ease ramp congestion, aircraft departing airports along the eclipse path are strongly encouraged to coordinate their departure times as early as possible. There may be a higher traffic volume than normal anticipated at airports along the path of the eclipse. Traffic should anticipate delays during peak traffic periods. Aircraft parking may be limited, particularly at the smaller, uncontrolled airports.
And, indeed, many airports in Vermont had instituted a prior permission required (PPR) policy. Watching the eclipse while celebrating social justice and Bernie Sanders in Burlington, VT, for example, wasn’t possible last-minute. Despite this somewhat dire forecast from the FAA, we had no trouble getting VFR advisories from Air Traffic Control all the way into KHUL and there was no shortage of parking.
The town-run airport had plowed out its crosswind runway and had that available for parking, but used it for only about four larger planes.
2700′ of parking is a lot of parking!
They were short on fuel, but we managed to 50 gallons of Jet A in order to keep Greta Thunberg happy. Speaking of Greta T, here’s a Citation Sovereign that came in from Minneapolis. The forecast for much of the Midwest was clear, but apparently not clear enough for these (12?) Heroes of Climate Change (1,700 gallons and over 30,000 lbs. max takeoff weight!):
Some images need to be repeated from the earlier post. A partial eclipse of the sun by the moon(-ey):
The town set up a “star park” adjacent to the airport and organized a two-schoolbus shuttle between downtown and the airport:
As noted previously, downtown was hosting a lively party with music and dressed-up characters and a commitment to social justice (“All Labs Matter”):
The George Washington statue was augmented, Elizabeth Warren’s cousins danced, and costumes were worn:
All of the parks in the downtown area were filled with viewers, but never unpleasantly crowded. Note the logging truck crossing the Meduxnekeag River:
Quite a few NASA and NOAA employees seemed to be enjoying a taxpayer-funded vacation trip to see the eclipse and some of them gave talks or organized events:
I thought that these folks with a Pennsylvania plate won the award for longest drive to Houlton, but apparently someone drove more than 1,400 miles to Houlton from north of Chicago.
There were lines for most of the restaurants in town, but food trucks had come in both on Main St. and at the airport. More important, the local Amish were selling donuts for $2 each:
The Amish grow potatoes, of course, but also have quite a few greenhouses. Speaking of religion, the official established U.S. religion is observed in Houlton:
At 1:45 pm we caught the shuttle back to the airport in prep for totality at 3:32 pm.
The ramp was lively, but nowhere near as crammed as a typical South Florida airport in the winter:
Edward Tufte tells speakers to arrive early because people wander in gradually and then leave suddenly. Thus, it is better to be available for questions before a talk! It wasn’t a mad rush for the exit, but the airport and airspace was at least 5X busier for departure compared to arrival. It didn’t seem practical to get advisories from Boston Center until we were well southwest of Bangor and on a different frequency from the airspace over Houlton. The NetJets crew couldn’t depart for quite some time because they had trouble getting ATC’s attention for an IFR clearance and their ops specs prevent them from doing the obvious and departing VFR.
The Science education didn’t stop in Houlton. When returning to the Land of Science-denial via Logan Airport, I learned that an N95 mask works great when loosely arranged over a full beard. Also that healthy young females face maximum risk from SARS-CoV-2:
Some nice views of the city courtesy of Delta Airlines:
Conclusion: We should pray to the omnipotent God of the Sacred Trans-Enhanced Rainbow Flag to arrange all future eclipses so that they pass over Houlton.
Let’s close this out with some porn for aircraft owners:
(Big city airports are now at $1,000/month for a long-term lease on a hangar for a little Cessna or Cirrus. In post-Cuomo South Florida, now home to half of what used to be New York’s planes, you might pay $1,200-1,500/month to store a plane that, pre-Biden, was worth $80,000.)
Related:
“Massachusetts family among Tesla owners who waited hours to charge car after total solar eclipse” (WCVB): When the Livesey family found a charging station in St. Johnsbury, there were lines of electric vehicles dozens deep. “I got there with one mile only to find out there were about 60 cars waiting to be charged,” Livesey said. … The Livesey family waited more than four hours to charge their Tesla and the last ticket they handed out before leaving was No. 189, and they saw more vehicles pulling up to the stations. [A friend missed totality due to EV charging delays. He tried to get his kids up to northern Vermont from Boston and a combination of traffic and the time required for a mid-trip charge of his electric Ford pickup meant that they couldn’t get far enough north in time.]
I had some worked planned in Austin, Texas over the weekend, which dovetailed nicely with the predicted eclipse and the generally clear skies in this dry part of the country.
Inmates at a New York prison who sued the state corrections department over a planned lockdown during the Monday total solar eclipse will be able to see the celestial event after all.
The lawsuit filed Friday in federal court in upstate New York claimed that the lockdown, which would have prevented many statewide inmates from witnessing Monday’s solar eclipse, constituted a violation of religious rights.
“For many, this eclipse is a moment of monumental religious significance that cannot be overlooked or dismissed out of hand,” according to the lawsuit, which listed six plaintiffs of various religious faiths.
Corrections officials agreed Thursday to permit the plaintiffs – a Baptist, a Muslim, a Seventh-Day Adventist, two practitioners of Santeria and an atheist – to view the eclipse in exchange for the lawsuit’s dismissal, department spokesman Thomas Mailey told USA TODAY.
Practitioners of Santeria also trace historical ties to chanting rituals performed during a solar eclipse. For atheists, an eclipse may not be a time for worship, but it’s still a time to marvel about the natural wonders of the universe, the lawsuit contended.
)
Nervous nail-biting began on Wednesday, April 3 based on the cloud forecast at https://eclipseweather.info/eclipse/. It appears that God loves Bernie Sanders and fellow progressives in and around Burlington, Vermont. God also loves folks in Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana. Why does God hate Texans?
I’m testifying as a software expert witness in Federal District Court in Newark, New Jersey on Wednesday. Getting to EWR from Austin on Tuesday was $2,000 in economy. Flights to JFK were about $1200, with no difference in cost between economy and first class. But it would have been well worth it (to the client!) if the weather had been clear.
https://www.pivotalweather.com/eclipse2024/ is also an interesting site. The “NWS Blend” cloud cover forecast as of the evening of April 4 wasn’t promising for just west of Austin:
Pivotal displayed a tempting map of Vermont and Maine:
Based on these forecasts, I canceled the Austin flights and booked a trip into Boston. From there we departed to Houlton, Maine on the Canadian border (passport and blackface kit packed just in case). The terminal forecast from 8 pm Sunday:
The relevant part is that from 15Z (GMT; subtract 4 hours to get 11:00 am EDT) on the 8th the wind would be from magnetic 300 (NW) at 7 knots, better than 6 statute miles of visibility, and a few clouds at 25,000′ above the airport.
Who has plans for North Dakota or Greenland in 2044? Don’t want to wait that long? Looks like Spain is the smartest place to be (the weather in western Iceland is not reliable!) on August 12, 2026. Has inflation gotten so severe that hotels won’t let people book more than a few months in advance?
Readers: let’s hear your heroic eclipse-viewing tales!
Post-trip update: The weather was just as forecast. We had severe clear weather and a great view of totality as well as all phases of partial. The town organized a warm welcome for thousands of visitors.
This is a report on a Thanksgiving Week trip to Montreal. I arrived on a nonstop flight on Lynx after Nine minutes of Formula 1 glory at the Las Vegas Grand Prix. Being a flight attendant on Lynx is a relaxing job because they don’t serve anything other than water. Seats don’t recline, so there are no passenger fights over space for the FAs to break up. I texted the sign to a friend and he responded “If Joe Biden had ridden Lynx he would say ‘I know how people in Gaza feel about food and water shortages because I spent a few hours on Lynx.'” (“Almost lost my Corvette”)
Once we arrived at CYUL, however, nobody was available to drive the “mobile lounge” out to where we were parked. The excuse was that it was raining. About 45 minutes after landing, we finally entered the terminal. Clearing immigration was quick, but it took another 30 minutes to get my suitcase (I had some actual suits as part of my software expert witness slavery so couldn’t do carry-on). After that, it was a 21-minute C$52 Uber ride to the downtown DoubleTree Hilton (there is a bus, but no train).
Considering that recreational marijuana has been legal in Canada since October 2018, a shocking difference between the Montreal highway and a Boston-area highway is the lack of marijuana billboards. This continued once on the city streets; there were no street-corner advertisements for weed delivery. I asked Professor ChatGPT about this:
In Canada, advertising marijuana is subject to strict regulations under the Cannabis Act, which came into effect on October 17, 2018. These regulations are designed to protect public health and safety, particularly to prevent young people and others who are vulnerable to cannabis-related harms from being encouraged to use cannabis. … The promotion of cannabis, cannabis accessories, or services related to cannabis is generally prohibited unless it is presented in a manner that cannot be seen by a young person. This means that many traditional forms of advertising, such as billboards or television commercials, are often not permissible.
The view from the 37th floor of the downtown tower where I was kept:
I escaped Dame Gothel for a Sunday morning walk around the city. Here’s La Joute, in front of the convention center:
A closer look:
I eventually made my way down to the science museum, where they also have a section on religion:
I’ll save the obligatory Notre-Dame pictures for later in this post.
Montreal is great for outdoor light displays and indoor shopping malls.
The Time Out Market has great food, a lively atmosphere, and four great-condition new Stern pinball machines. What’s not to love?
What about those who don’t have C$25 to spend on dinner at the market? It’s not San Francisco, but there are definitely encampments and homeless people in the city.
Although notable for churches, the city’s religious future seems Islamic. You might see a covered woman every minute or two when walking downtown. Arabic was a commonly overheard language. I wonder how long French can survive in Montreal. Spanish, Haitian Creole, Bangla, and Arabic were all languages that I heard. People with whom I spoke who’d immigrated 10 or more years ago said that they hadn’t learned to speak French and were not interested in learning.
Intersection of Islamic and Western culture: the Uber AI geniuses assign the pronoun “they” to a person named Mohammad:
It is unclear for how long the Rainbow Flag religion and Islam can coexist, but for now they seem to both be popular:
What about Christianity? I went into a few churches and saw only a handful of people doing anything related to this religion. Here’s Notre-Dame:
What about the temples of commerce? Montreal retail seems to have suffered much less from online competition than U.S. urban retail. Much to my delight, there were quite a few old-school camera shops and photo labs!
In addition to my brief stop at the contemporary art museum’s temporary space (see Pussy Riot in Montreal), I stopped into the main art museum. As in a US art museum, Kehinde Wiley is the first and most prominently displayed artist:
Another painting on the important subject of BLM (Beavers’ Lives Matter):
Speaking of Capitol Hill, a Mountie meets Elizabeth Warren’s cousin (by David Garneau):
Visitors carefully study how to paint like a 3-year-old who got into all the Halloween candy:
No Greenspun trip report post-2020 is complete without masketology, right? When downtown, I saw someone in a mask roughly every two minutes (including outdoors; #BecauseScience). The people most likely to wear masks were young women, i.e., those whose risk of being injured or killed by COVID-19 is the lowest. Here’s one at CYUL:
After landing at PBI, a family on their way back to New York sports the “adults masked and kid unmasked so that the kid can get infected and then transmit it to the adults a few days later” technique.
The Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art was ordered shut by Covidcrats in 2020 and allowed to reopen in February 2021. Just a couple of months later, the museum closed for a renovation that was supposed to be complete in 2024 but, according to the lady who sold me a ticket to the temporary exhibit space in a nearby underground mall, is now on track to be finished in 2028.
What’s in the temporary space? “Velvet Terrorism,” an exhibit on the decade-long protest by Pussy Riot against Vladimir Putin and Russia’s military operations in Ukraine.
From the brochure:
The first couple of rooms:
What was one of the punishments that a Pussy Riot member suffered? She was unbanked, exactly as the Canadian truckers who protested forced Covid-19 vaccination were unbanked by Justin Trudeau using “emergency powers” (NYT). (Separately, I met a Canadian who had gingerly approached some of the truckers at the time. “They were the nicest and most peaceful people you ever met,” he said. “I was afraid to stay too long, though, because I didn’t want to become a target myself.”)
Pussy Riot’s war under the sacred Rainbow Flag was covered:
(It is unclear to me how Putin can be considered responsible for “killings and kidnappings of gay, lesbian, transgender and queer people in Chechnya“. Russia has had tremendous difficulty in its attempts to control what happens in Chechnya, resulting in at least two full-scale wars.)
The public were invited to write down and post their thoughts in response to the exhibition. Most seemed to have been written by Anglophones. Almost nobody seemed to be thinking about Vladimir Putin, Ukraine, the lives of 2SLGBTQQIA+ Russians, or any of the other issues raised by Pussy Riot. Here are some of the notes that were off the main topic:
What were a plurality of the signs about? Here’s a sampling:
Although the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”), which is the elected and overwhelmingly popular government of the Palestinians, is not famous for celebrating Rainbow Flagism, there was the inevitable…
If Al-Shifa Hospital gets fixed up, the Montreal museum visitors are imagining gender affirming surgeries happening there:
Those who identify as feminists also want to see a corner of the world ruled by the guys who raped, maimed, and murdered women on October 7 (nearly all women who were born long after the events of 1948 that is the root of Arab grievance, so it is unclear how they can be blamed for the Nakba):
Ironically, after viewing an art show about criticism of Vladimir Putin, patrons were motivated to trumpet their alignment with Vladimir Putin’s position regarding Hamas (it is unclear that Putin supports “river to the sea liberation” (i.e., the elimination of Israel) but he is more supportive of Hamas than the typical national leader in Europe or North America).
This is a report on the spectator experience at the Thursday evening Formula 1 practice session in Las Vegas 2023.
My friends had $1,500 three-day tickets in the West Harmon bleachers (the cheapest seats; the average price paid was, supposedly, $7,000). One week prior, I bought a Thursday night resale ticket for $180 plus $35 in Ticketmaster fees, managing to get into the same row as my friends.
The obvious hotels were Planet Hollywood, Paris, and Horseshoe, which are walking distance from the West Harmon entrance. These were available in the $100/night range (plus fees!). However, I was concerned that my flight from Burbank, California might be late and didn’t think that it would be possible to get from the airport to a hotel inside the track after 7 pm. (In fact, we saw cars and taxis going in and out continuously. There is at least one temporary bridge that was built over the track to allow access to hotel-casinos inside the track.) I booked a Hilton near the convention center for a slightly higher price and took the monorail with my friends.
How could hotel rooms during this event have become so cheap? Las Vegas has roughly 150,000 hotel rooms. “F1 claims a healthy 315,000 fans attended the grand prix over four days” (ESPN). That’s only about 100,000 people on any given day. If the predicted traffic and hassles scared off non-F1 tourists, the inevitable result was a lot of empty rooms.
The F1 hype began at the airport:
Our ticket enabled us to go in at 6 pm and begin eating the included Wolfgang Puck food and drinking the included non-alcoholic beverages. We arrived just after 7 pm to poke around the fan environment. A big screen displayed a pre-race TV show. There were a few fun activities for fans, but most had long lines. The food options included a weak hot dog, too-far-from-the-grill grilled cheese, a strange dry ramen box, chicken and waffles (cultural appropriation? they were good in any case), a purportedly Chinese-style chicken salad (more cultural appropriation), cider donuts (terrible), and churros (did not try). Lines for food were reasonable to non-existent. There were huge lines at the store until quite late:
Our bleacher seats had a good view, but the legroom was tight for anyone over 5’6″. The temperature was about 55 degrees. Here is what it looks like (1) walking up the stairs (note portapotties in the background; they really needed people to perform hourly cleanings on what became disgusting environments), (2) the (distant) environment for the rich and famous, and (3) the view of the track from near the top of our bleachers (we were actually sitting quite a bit closer).
When the cars began zooming by at 8:30 pm, it was impressive to see the showers of sparks from cars scraping minor bumps in the road in front of us. At around 8:39, however, the race was halted because, we were told, a manhole cover’s concrete frame had failed. I was deeply confused by this because the course is on a public street. If trucks drive over the manhole daily and don’t break it, how could an 1,800 lb. F1 car, even with a downforce multiplier, break it? I haven’t figured out the full story. The F1 folks say that a concrete frame failed, but not whether it was a new concrete frame installed for the race or the standard frame put in some years ago by the city. I think that the answer to the “why didn’t it fail when a truck drove over it a week ago?” question might be that the F1 car broke the cover/frame with force in the opposite direction. I.e., the cover was sucked up rather than pushed down. This is a force direction for which manhole covers aren’t normally engineered.
The second practice was scheduled for midnight. Quite a few people stayed to drink $12 beers and $39 LED-lit trophy-style glasses of booze:
We walked out to the nearby Horseshoe casino (formerly Bally’s) and relaxed. Even with the track being hot, people were getting in/out via taxi:
My friends went back to their apartment around 11 pm. They were unconvinced that the midnight practice would happen on schedule and were planning to return for Friday and Saturday. I decided to reenter the fan zone. The monitors displayed messages saying that there would be an update soon. There was no longer a line for podium photos, so I got a picture to take credit for winning the race on the damaged track via rugged Honda Odyssey:
At 12:30 am, the monitors promised that the next practice session would start at 2:00 am. I bailed out because I needed to get on an 11:20 am flight from LAS. What happened to the diehard fans who stayed? The organizers kicked them out of their seats at 1:30 am, then ran the practice beginning at 2:30 am with no spectators. It was like a CIA torture scheme in which the enemy is kept awake for hours and then denied what was promised.
I’m glad that I didn’t buy anything at the store because everyone received a follow-up apology email from the F1 folks with a $200 coupon for merchandise as compensation for the missed hours of racing action. Which two hats will I be able to get with this $200 coupon plus $50 for tax and shipping?
The next day I went past the Greenspun College for Urban Affairs and very nearly found the DEI gates:
Inside the terminal, I found Sainz’s car after the manhole cover encounter:
Would I go back? Even with the monitors provided, it was much more confusing to try to follow the race live compared to watching on TV and having things explained. For Jho Low types who don’t mind spending $10,000+ on a three-day ticket, I’m sure that the luxury zone with pit tours is fun and comfortable. It’s a permanent building so probably they have some decent bathrooms at least. I guess it would be worth it if you’re plugged into the international set of other people to whom $10,000 is pocket change and the event would be a chance to see a lot of your friends.
For everyone else, perhaps a last-minute ticket to the Friday evening event would make sense followed by watching the main race on TV in order to (a) save money, and (b) learn what was happening. It is straightforward to go in and out by monorail. If there is a long gap between races, it is easy to go out of the event, find a relaxing place to sit at a restaurant or in a casino bar, and then return.
Readers: Who understands the mechanism via which the manhole cover failed? Also, who enjoyed watching the race on TV?
