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Don't Watch This Video

VIDEO: It won't teach you anything but might leave you in awe.

Geoff D'Auria 24 Feb 2009TheTyee.ca

Geoff D'Auria has never gotten the hang of motorbikes... or the gods.

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Robbie Maddison leaps tall buildings in a single bound.

Awesome: Current sense of "dread mixed with veneration"is due to biblical use with ref. to the Supreme Being. The verb is first attested 1303. Awestruck is from 1634. Awesome first recorded 1598; colloquial sense of "excellent" is from 1980.

-- Online Etymology Dictionary

There's no good reason for you to watch this video.

It won't make you smarter or a better parent or a better friend. It won't improve your love life. It won't help you eat more fibre or less fat or more local.

Nope. Nor will it make you savvy to the next viral marketing schtick. Or understand the Middle East or Bosnia or the mighty pirates of Somalia. It won't help you save the planet, live locally, drive less or plant more.

And, no, it doesn't feature Tina Fey or Sarah Palin or Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. It's not even ironic.

No, in fact, there really is no good reason for you to watch this video. Except...

... it may re-acquaint you with a word too long profaned, a word stolen from the gods and brought to the masses in a fit of Promethean boredom by the Valley Girls in the early '80s.

That word, awesome.

It's a word too often used to describe really great home fries or a new fixed-gear bike or a really nice sweater vest from The Gap -- the minutiae of the everyday, the profane turned hyperbolic. To use that word casually in light of what Robbie Maddison does on a motorcycle in this video is almost an affront.

Not only does he fly, superhero-like, straight up in the air and land on the top of a building. But he then turns around and plunges back into the depths of the inferno that is the Las Vegas strip. It's as if the gods dropped a lazy hand down from the clouds and tapped the man on the shoulder and said, "My son, you can fly."

No, there's no good reason to watch this video. Nor, for that matter, is there any good reason to shoot a motorcycle like a firework 98 metres straight up into the air.

But watch it anyway because it might make you feel that sense of "dread mixed with veneration" that leaves you slack-jawed and momentarily sensing the divine.

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