Blowing of mind

I've heard about Dubai in passing but I've never really dug into it. Then I looked through this to get a little perspective. Scroll down to the pictures and read the captions. I'm not really one for excess, and I don't feel a strong need for desert heat, but the shear scale of everything makes a certain impression. It's hard not to want to go and gaze slack-jawed at the sheer scale of everything.

Of course, if I want to go somewhere to make myself feel poor, I can just hop on a train and go to Manhattan. Or, indeed, hop on my bike and ride into Princeton's "Western Section," sprinkled with more fancy private schools than you'd think they could find rich kids to fill. But Dubai is pretty over the top. Soon we may be all commuting to there using some sort of molecular dust reconstitutor like they had back in the sixties... as in this rare historical footage from back in the year of my birth, 1966: