Independent Thoughts:
- “Mage Against the Ravine.” It’s a fantasy role-playing game about magical/theological/astrological bridge-building (depending on the latest gamer-accepted definition of the word: mage (or magus). Plus, the soundtrack possibilities are endless.
- “That about floats my goat.” — or — “Your goat can be used as a flotation device.”
- Remember when using your camera used to be like handling a gun? Snap! Shotgun reload sound to advance the film. (I’m talking pre-winding advance wheel, I mean the little pump-action slide bar). Snap! Reload film. Snap! Then, oh no, we’re out of flashes! Pull out the flash cube clip, flip it, ram home the other end of the flashbulb clip. (Like two magazines taped together in any popular action movie). Glorious! Sadly, it’s all gone digital. Now anyone can take a photograph, not just us strong hulk Rambos. Next thing you know, they’ll let girls become photographers. Yay! A chauvinist joke. Wooo!
On the 4th I watched Letters from Iwo Jima as my Netflix movie of timely queue delivery. What did you do before fireworks? I watched a film that celebrated independence and the fight for it. Just… not American independence. Still, an excellent film. And I feel a perfect film for the day. I did take a break for fireworks, just after General Kuribayashi said “things come in threes” prior to a little Saito-General heart-to-heart. Boom goes the dynamite.
San Francisco’s Pier-some-number-fireworks-extravaganza was a bit blasé. Nothing amazing. Nothing like the spectacle of the transport chopper and the 3 bajillion square foot flag ala Seattle’s Lake Union blowout. There were some super loud cubes, smiley faces and your usual planets with rings and plenty of sparkle sparkle. The best shells of the night were the toadstools. They had a blue hemisphere shell blast of glowing motes on one end to provide the cap. The stem consisted of five to six sparkling tracer shells fired the other direction from the original burst. Those were pretty nice. The best part of the evening was the barrier of fog overhead. The highest shells went up, exploded, and their uppermost flares expanding up into the bank to be lost from view. The colors radiated across the fog’s face below. That was nice.
