Tonight was the second night of four in the Celebration of Light, a fireworks fest/competition held every year from a barge anchored in English Bay. We rarely go down the hill to see it, as I have an unreasoned distaste for crowds, but we do catch bits of it from our window. It's normally quite a spectacle, each performance lasting about twenty-five minutes. The competitors come from all over the world. This year they're from the Czech Republic, Canada (yay!) and China.
We huddled up together on the trunk by the open window in the cat's room, and watched the sparklies shoot up from in between the trees and buildings between us and the barge. It was cozy. Some folks across the way had the music (it's simulcast on radio) turned up and we could hear it pretty well.
At the end, people stream back up along the alleys and streets going past our windows, and overhead the police helicopters go round and round, making sure everyone gets off the beach. (There've been some rowdier groups in past years.) It amazes me that so many people can actually disperse and go their separate ways so quickly and with so little fuss. Heard one girl say, presumably to her companions, "You're pushing me into the curb and the curb doesn't like it!" She sounded quite serious about it, too.
Just now I popped over to whiskey river (recent and very nice site redesign). I like to check it out every few days, as there's always something up worth reading. Tonight, it was this entry. Just below that are a few bon mots from Oscar Wilde, among them Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
Frankly, only a true-blue bastard would say something like that and say it so quotably.
