Nate Silver, on venues where he's frightened of catching COVID-19:
LOL the Louvre's only crowded in the one spot pic.twitter.com/tGfkE9tRcP
— Per Yaspera ad Astra (@Yastreblyansky) March 7, 2023
While just across the room... pic.twitter.com/UuYQCm7AOx
— Per Yaspera ad Astra (@Yastreblyansky) March 7, 2023
I don't know how commonplace this knowledge is, but in my younger years, when I had a number of opportunities to visit the Louvre, I learned that you shouldn't bother to try to look at the Mona Lisa, because you won't be able to. There are too many bourgeois there with their checklists of things you have to do in Paris, and looking at the Mona Lisa, the all-time no. 1 greatest painting ever, is the thing they need to do, and be photographed doing, when they go to the Louvre, and they've always got it surrounded, whenever you can get into the museum. The biggest and most ironical thing being that right there in the same space was a spectacularly complicated and gorgeous Leonardo that nobody was looking at, depicting a Virgin sitting on her mother's lap as the baby Jesus plays with a baby lamb, and these fantastical landscape configurations, that you can stare at forever.
