Thought for the Day - May 23

Subject: RE: Thought for the Day - May 23
From: katlaughing
Date: 24 May 00 - 12:39 AM

What, Ebbie? He doesn't believe in leading up to the big climax...no foreplay?**bg**

Gervase, thanks for posting the excerpt.

Micca....you reveal yourself, darlin'....*smile*

katlaughing

Subject: RE: Thought for the Day - May 23
From: Ebbie
Date: 24 May 00 - 12:06 AM

I have a friend who says he can't understand why the fireworks are not all set off at once- he says there'd be this tremendous explosion of noise and color and everyone would go AAAAAAHHHHHHH and then they could go home. He has such romance in his soul. Ebbie

Subject: RE: Thought for the Day - May 23
From: SINSULL
Date: 23 May 00 - 09:54 PM

The ultimate firecracker scene: Chinese movie with subtitles "Red Firecracker, Green Firecracke" in which the hero must perform dangerous stunts with firecrackers to win the fair maiden's hand. It ends with the fireworks and family jewels exploding all over the place. Ouch.

Now what did Shakespeare have to say?

Subject: RE: Thought for the Day - May 23
From:
Date: 23 May 00 - 09:12 PM

This from Keroac's "On the Road:" The only people for me are the mad people. The one's who are mad to talk, mad to live, mad to be saved. The one's who never say a dull or commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous roman candles exploding like spiders across the skies and in the middle you see the blue center-light pop, and all the people go "ahhhhhhhhh." (committed to memory 37 years ago and still alive in the old brain)

Subject: RE: Thought for the Day - May 23
From: Little Neophyte
Date: 23 May 00 - 06:45 PM

Peter T, life is kind of like a slow fireworks show but I have a feeling that the waiting room for sentient beings is pretty amazing too. I think the fireworks up there are nonstop.

Little Neo

Subject: RE: Thought for the Day - May 23
From: Mbo
Date: 23 May 00 - 06:14 PM

Did you know that at the debut of Handel's "Royal Fireworks Music" in London, the newly-finished building the music was commissioned for, fell down during the performance?

--Mbo (BOOM!)

Subject: RE: Thought for the Day - May 23
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 23 May 00 - 06:05 PM

Oooh! Aaah... OOOH! AAAH...

The sound of a crowd watching a firework display.

Subject: RE: Thought for the Day - May 23
From: Mbo
Date: 23 May 00 - 05:52 PM

"The finest rockets ever seen
They burst in stars of blue and green
Or after thunder golden showers
Came falling like a rain of flowers"

--J.R.R. Tolkien

--Mbo

Subject: RE: Thought for the Day - May 23
From: JenEllen
Date: 23 May 00 - 03:10 PM

Flowers in the sky.....

Actually, my favorite part is the smoke of a dying firework being lit again by the next explosion. Brilliant and fluffy at the same time.....post-explosion bliss. :)

Subject: RE: Thought for the Day - May 23
From: Micca
Date: 23 May 00 - 03:10 PM

How do you tell the Chemist at the fireworks display?
Hes the one muttering, Copper, Barium, Strontium, Calcium, magnesium as the colours appear....

Subject: RE: Thought for the Day - May 23
From: wysiwyg
Date: 23 May 00 - 03:01 PM

pfut pfut pfut PFOOOOOOOM!

flitter flicker flitter scatter glitter glow bright bright brightly flower glower pink flicking red scatter purple popping blue shooting green echoes yellow spark spark golden golden falling silver twinkles ashes fluttering ashes....dowwwwnn........

Subject: RE: Thought for the Day - May 23
From: Wesley S
Date: 23 May 00 - 12:13 PM

There is a radio station here in Texas that provides a running commentary during the fireworks displays on the Fourth of July. You tune in and listen to someones comments while the fireworks are going off. I find to rather sad that people don't even know how to watch fireworks without being told what to think. They play a lot of Sousa and "patriotic" songs also{ Lee Greenwood - "God Bless the USA } . As much as I love music there are times when I don't need to listen to anything. This is one of them. It is far more delicious to listen to the silence while waiting for the next loud explosion.

Subject: RE: Thought for the Day - May 23
From: Peter T.
Date: 23 May 00 - 11:54 AM

Yes, Gertie was on my mind, yes. There is also a nice sexual fireworks display in one of Aldous Huxley's short stories -- not "Those Barren Leaves". Drat, can't think of the title. Gervase?
yours, Peter T.

Subject: RE: Thought for the Day - May 23
From: Gervase
Date: 23 May 00 - 10:26 AM

For a wonderful fireworks/sex analogy, see the chapter in Ulysses where Leopold Bloom sits on the strand and fantasises about young Gertie McDowell and her frilly bloomers while, as it were, taking himself in hand. I wouldn't mind betting that the way Joyce uses the bursting of the fireworks in that piece was the template for just about every other literary and filmic firework/sex reference since. It's a longish piece, but, if it attracts anyone to read Ulysses, (IMHO the most moving and wonderfully human novel ever written)then all to the good....

The eyes that were fastened upon her set her pulses tingling. She looked at him a moment, meeting his glance, and a light broke in upon her. Whitehot passion was in that face, passion silent as the grave, and it had made her his. At last they were left alone without the others to pry and pass remarks and she knew he could be trusted to the death, steadfast, a sterling man, a man of inflexible honour to his fingertips. His hands and face were working and a tremor went over her. She leaned back far to look up where the fireworks were and she caught her knee in her hands so as not to fall back looking up and there was no one to see only him and her when she revealed all her graceful beautifully shaped legs like that, supply soft and delicately rounded, and she seemed to hear the panting of his heart, his hoarse breathing, because she knew about the passion of men like that, hot-blooded, because Bertha Supple told her once in dead secret and made her swear she'd never about the gentleman lodger that was staying with them out of the Congested Districts Board that had pictures cut out of papers of those skirtdancers and highkickers and she said he used to do something not very nice that you could imagine sometimes in the bed. But this was altogether different from a thing like that because there was all the difference because she could almost feel him draw her face to his and the first quick hot touch of his handsome lips. Besides there was absolution so long as you didn't do the other thing before being married and there ought to be women priests that would understand without your telling out and Cissy Caffrey too sometimes had that dreamy kind of dreamy look in her eyes so that she too, my dear, and Winny Rippingham so mad about actors' photographs and besides it was on account of that other thing coming on the way it did.

And Jacky Caffrey shouted to look, there was another and she leaned back and the garters were blue to match on account of the transparent and they all saw it and shouted to look, look there it was and she leaned back ever so far to see the fireworks and something queer was flying about through the air, a soft thing to and fro, dark. And she saw a long Roman candle going up over the trees up, up, and, in the tense hush, they were all breathless with excitement as it went higher and higher and she had to lean back more and more to look up after it, high, high, almost out of sight, and her face was suffused with a divine, an entrancing blush from straining back and he could see her other things too, nainsook knickers, the fabric that caresses the skin, better than those other pettiwidth, the green, four and eleven, on account of being white and she let him and she saw that he saw and then it went so high it went out of sight a moment and she was trembling in every limb from being bent so far back he had a full view high up above her knee no-one ever not even on the swing or wading and she wasn't ashamed and he wasn't either to look in that immodest way like that because he couldn't resist the sight of the wondrous revealment half offered like those skirt-dancers behaving so immodest before gentlemen looking and he kept on looking, looking. She would fain have cried to him chokingly, held out her snowy slender arms to him to come, to feel his lips laid on her white brow the cry of a young girl's love, a little strangled cry, wrung from her, that cry that has rung through the ages. And then a rocket sprang and bang shot blind and O! then the Roman candle burst and it was like a sigh of O! and everyone cried O!O! in raptures and it gushed out of it a stream of rain gold hair threads and they shed and ah! they were all greeny dewy stars falling with golden, O so lively! O so soft, sweet, soft!

Then all melted away dewily in the grey air: all was silent. Ah! She glanced at him as she bent forward quickly, a pathetic little glance of piteous protest, of shy reproach under which he coloured like a girl. He was leaning back against the rock behind. Leopold Bloom (for it is he) stands silent, with bowed head before those young guileless eyes. What a brute he had been! At it again? A fair unsullied soul had called to him and, wretch that he was, how had he answered? An utter cad he had been. He of all men! But there was an infinite store of mercy in those eyes, for him too a word of pardon even though he had erred and sinned and wandered. Should a girl tell? No, a thousand times no. That was their secret, only theirs, alone in the hiding twilight and there was none to know or tell save the little bat that flew so softly through the evening to and fro and little bats don't tell.

Subject: RE: Thought for the Day - May 23
From: GUEST,Mrr
Date: 23 May 00 - 10:23 AM

Fireworks are definitely best seen with children, although one's own might serve as well as the neighbors'... Anyone ever been in the Far East for Chinese New Year? Nice as the fireworks here are, Boy do the originators put us poor imitators to shame!

Subject: Thought for the Day - May 23
From: Peter T.
Date: 23 May 00 - 09:59 AM

By odd accident, Canada's spring holiday is named after Queen Victoria (yesterday was Victoria Day), and it is associated with fireworks. Went down to the lakeshore in the cold with a couple of neighbours' children (the best way to see fireworks) and watched the night sky sprinkled with bits of exploding light. On these occasions, my perverse mind goes in many directions -- first to the scene in "To Catch A Thief" with Cary Grant and Grace Kelly, where the fireworks going off are (surprise, surprise) substitutes for sex. This is an old and not exactly subtle connection -- colourful explosions in the dark.

Second, fireworks are so obviously beautiful -- as Romeo says of Juliet, she shines like a rich jewel in an Ethiop's ear -- colourful brightness in unexpected patterns against pitch blackness. It must go straight to some deep part of the brain.

But another part of my mind thinks that one of the reasons why people are drawn fireworks is that life is like slow fireworks -- that we come into existence surprisingly out of a black background, shimmer and grow, and then disappear to be replaced by another spray of atomies. It is curious to look at people between bursts of patterned fire -- quiet, anticipatory, talking to each other about the last explosion, and then looking up, waiting, in expectation. If there is a waiting room for returning to earth for a next lifetime, I am sure that the look on the faces of the expectant returnees is like this.