Rockets' Red Glare

I meant to post these some time ago but...well, you know how it is.

Anyway, while we might not have many family traditions the ones we have are appropriately weird. No, not "rum, sodomy, and the lash" weird, but...well, let me tell you about the 4th of July.

Oregon is one of those lame, namby-pamby, nanny states where fireworks are concerned. Pyro that can fly, or explode, is illegal in Oregon. We're limited to sparklers, fountains, and smoke. "Oregon law forbids possession, use or sale of fireworks that fly, explode or travel more than six feet on the ground or 12 inches in the air. Bottle rockets, Roman candles, and firecrackers are ILLEGAL in Oregon."

See?

Lame.

But the great State of Washington? Boy fucking howdy, you can blow the living shit out of yourself in the Evergreen State. Mortars, Roman candles, parachute flares, white phosphorus...you name it, you can fire it off north of the river.

So, like 99.6% of Oregonians, every July 4th we cross the river to buy a bagful of illegal fireworks.

This year it was no exception. A big part of the reason is that we enjoy the hell out of the brutal free-market in fireworks that reigns in Vancouver. The fireworks vendors are wild, at each others' throats like mad kebab sellers in an Iraqi souq. They don't try and convince you that you want to buy their stuff (probably sensible, since they all buy this pyro wholesale from the same Chinese makers); they try and convince you that the other guy is a big dirty cheating theving bastard who is screwing you like a ten-dollar-a-go-Yokohama-waterfront-hooker.

Like this:

There's no subtlety here. No meeching "You might not find our competitor's product suits your needs" bullshit. It's right out there, man; we rule, they suck, neener, neener. It's the sort of thing I'll bet like hell the Walton kids would love to do to Target but their lawyers talk them out of. Here it's right in your face.

For a change we went to BOTH the TNT tent and the Blackjack "Pirate" store. Both were utter madness, and we ended up spending way too much for shoddy Chinese pyrotechnics. I did appreciate the attempt at topical political comment by some nameless Asian entrepreneur:

We avoided the bouncy houses and the snow cones and the other touristy crap, paid for our illegal fireworks, and left. And when I say we paid too much, well...at least we stayed within budget. This gomer's poor family is probably STILL eating ramen noodles to pay for his ridiculous pallet full of demo:

That evening we proceeded to go out to our little Astor playground and shoot off all the pyrotechnics. It was loud and shiny, it had absolutely no connection with the United States, liberty, independence, or anything else patriotic. It was pure ur-male-dom; making things go fast, make loud noises, and blow up. The Boy commented as he shot Roman candles down the street: "This is just like Gandalf fighting the Balrog!!"

Just what Tom Jefferson would have said about that, I honestly haven't the slightest idea.

Shaken, not stirred

I was driving north on I-5 through Portland just before Christmas when I tried to point out the famous "Martini Glass" light display to my kiddos (whose only experience with that cocktail is the knowledge that it "tastes yucky!" according to the Boy).

But I couldn't spot it.

In my biased and cynical opinion this thing is something of a treasure. The story is that the big martini glass was originally constructed by a homeowner's kid in the West Hills some time in the Seventies, when getting plowed on Christmas Eve was still looked on as a risque Rat-Packesque sort of jest.

At some point in the Nineties (I think) the owner placed the red-ring-and-slash around it either as a reaction to criticism or a personal statement of anti-drinking sanctimony I blame on that MADD-infested era.

But I liked the whole magilla as a deliciously juniper-scented antidote to the usual Christmas kitsch and was a trifle disappointed that it seemed to be gone this year. Like so much adult and iconoclastic (as opposed to simply adult and rude; the difference between the respective works of Ambrose Bierce or Mark Twain, say, and Adam Sandler) it seemed to be just another victim of our general incomplexity.

And it was especially disappointing given that our West Hills are to Portland what Grosse Pointe is to Detroit or Scarsdale is to New York; a rookery for our plutocratic overlords. From there they may literally look down upon the rest of us. Old Portland tales claim that in the early years these aristos would even use their position to toss their garbage down upon their lessers dwelling below them (although I lend no credence to the claim that what reached the valley floor was not further discarded but eaten).

If anyone had a Reason to Toast the Season it would seem to be our own local oligarchs; if the 1% can't sip a martini and advertise that fact then perhaps the Great Recession is indeed bleaker than even I took it for.

No fear; it turns out that the glass isn't gone; it is merely taking a year off whilst the homeowner retools his pricey hillside pied-a-terre.

"The glass's huge metal frame remains firmly in place, and Hall said he plans to keep it that way by requiring in the deed that the glass be lighted at the holidays."

Calloo, callay, oh frabjous day! Let our gin-infused joy be unconfined!

It's good to hear that at least one of our elites is still fighting the good fight against the War on Christmas. Prosit!

Hallalujah I'm a Bum

Just an addendum to the preceding Halloween post, since I was thinking about Halloween in general and my childhood memories of the night in particular.

One constant during the Halloweens of my youth was something we called "Trick or Treat for UNICEF". It was an annual fundraiser for the UN Children's Fund, and pretty much every year one or two of my friends - typically the ones whose parents were a little more crunchy granola than mine - would forego the sweeties in order to solicit coin for the poor kiddies overseas.It was ubiquitous, and most adults kept some change handy by the door for the UNICEF kids.

Several years ago my bride came across a hardbound atrocity entitled "Jack the Bum and the Halloween Handout" deep in the remaindered bin at the local Goodwill. It's a truly appalling confection of late Seventies "New Yorker"-style humor that I'd pitch back to the maw of Goodwill in a heartbeat if I could except that my daughter loves the dickens out of it. But the macguffin in this turkey is that Jack, who is looking for a "hot cup of coffee" (a short dog of wine being, apparently, unappealing to the choosy urban pioneer) finds out that if you say "Trick or Treat for UNICEF" that people will give you MONEY.Mind you, our boy Jack doesn't want to take money from hapless kiddies in India - he just wants coffee. And he's been sleeping under a bridge or something, so he has no idea what UNICEF is, or why people give you money for saying "trick or treat for UNICEF".

I have to stop now or I'll go into a catatonic state like the epileptic scientist lady in "The Andromeda Strain" when the red light flashes. But suffice to say that in the Sixties and early Seventies you couldn't swing a black cat without hitting some costumed kid with one of those little orange UNICEF boxes.

But not anymore.

And I have no idea why.

I haven't seen a UNICEF trick-or-treater for decades. Hell, I honestly don't remember the last time I had one come to the door, and I've been handing out candy on the last day of October since the middle Eighties.For some reason the little people don't come looking for Halloween handouts anymore, and that has me wondering what the heck happened to this odd little part of my childhood; it's not often that something just stops. But this tradition has, and I wonder - anyone out there know why it did?

Nouvelle Cuisine

I think I've mentioned that we're terrible holiday makers here at the Fire Direction Center, and we're pretty bad at being adorable-ex-Chinese-orphan-adoptive parents, too.See, the thing is, we're supposed to be all turning-Chinese when the traditional Chinese holidays come around; giving red-envelope money and blasting fireworks for the lunar New Year and doing moon-viewing and moon-cake eating for the "Mid-Autumn Festival", a.k.a. Moon Festival. It's a total Portland China-adoptive-parent thing and one reason our pictures are on the cover of the Portland FCC's "Busted" magazine as the Worst AP's Evah.

But here's the problem.

We all HATE fucking moon cakes.

Seriously; the greediest of us (Missy) thinks they taste like raw noodle dough. The Peep wouldn't at them if they were the only food in the house and he was starving, and neither Mojo or I really enjoy them, finding the flavor a combination of bland and slightly cloying and the texture pasty and unpleasant.

So.

We've decided that our nouvelle Moon Festival cuisine would substitute Moon PIES for mooncakes.Since we concluded that if the ancient Chinese had had access to Moon Pies, they would have been on them like Republicans on a Second Amendment bumper-sticker.

Lotus seed paste and salted duck eggs versus graham crackers, marshmallows, and chocolate?

Are you kidding? Mmmmm...moon pies!(h/t to Ambassador Doodle for the funny post and the mooncake/moon pie graphic)