聲 - Sheng1 - Sound, Tone, Fame

I like my fireworks very 大聲 - Da4 Sheng1 - Big Sound — Loud. The Hartford ones are sometimes loud, sometimes not. We did our normal thing, stopped for Pho on the way, brought it down the the river directly across from the barge where the fireworks are lanched from, ate, sat, waited. In retrospect, the combination of hot sun and hot, spicy soup might not actually be optimal. Anyway, the fireworks show started off slowly, and was one of those silly ones where they try to set it to music. (why bother?) In between each song there was some sort of voiceover, we couldn’t hear what they were saying but did notice that one of them was spoken by George W. Bush. How unamerican… and on the fourth of July!

The show plodded along, more about prettiness and finesse than raw destructive power. Oh look, that one looks like a star. Great. Just when I thought this year was a bust, the finale hit. Wow! I think it was… wait for it… “BEST FINALE EVER”! They used a simple and effective technique: just launch a million of those ones that go up a short distance, and then explode with a bright flash of light and a huge BOOM, surrounded by a constantly refreshed field of colorful ones. It started at machine gun speed, and went up from there until all the blasts ran together, like static but with explosions, and the sky became a sea of fire. Even the finale had a finale, an important point that many fireworks-show-planners miss. Just when you think they’ve already got the volume up to eleven, there is a brief pause and they turn it up to one hundred and eleven, launching still even larger shells at ten times the previous rate. Jenny put her fingers in her ears, the ground shook, children cried out in pain, it appeared as if the world was ending. Excellent!

On the way back home, I told Jenny that in the future, there’d be video games so good that when you kill the end guy, the explosion would be just like that. She told me no, that will never happen. That made me really angry.