After last night's hospital fracas, it was, thankfully, a quiet day. Slept late, ran the vacuum cleaner to get up the birdseed, watched 1776 and the "Making a Revolution" sequence of Alistair Cooke's America, then got things ready for our cookout. The Spiveys and the Elders arrived, we grilled, ate chicken and steak with rice, fruit, and dark chocolate kisses, and talked Harry Potter, required reading (apparently poor Jessie is stuck with depressing summer reading about hopelessness and death), our various medical travails, and the other usual stuff.

Since everyone has work tomorrow, the party broke up about eight. James watched a Mythbusters he hadn't seen while I continued reading Anne Perry's At Some Disputed Barricade, then we watched the Centennial Olympic Park fireworks. The fireworks themselves were great, especially in HD, but something fouled their soundtrack. On the fireworks special they said most fireworks displays these days are synched to computer music. Evidently the Centennial ones were accompanied by a tape recording, because about every 30 seconds the tape would slip and garble the sound. A pity, because the soundtrack wasn't bad.

The Boston Pops fireworks on CBS were...not bad, although it did not appear they were presented in HD (either that or it was all the raindrops on the camera lens, as it appeared to be raining up in the Hub, with Keith Lockhart in what looked like a fireman's waterproof). Fewer long audience cuts, although the cut during the finale annoyed me. They still haven't gotten the message that we're not interested in seeing crowd shots, but they're at least getting shorter. There were some lovely, small multicolor chrysanthemums during "This is My Country," a nice use of pink hearts and "waterfalls" during "Unchained Melody," the "Saturn shapes" (including some that had two rings, one at right angles to the other), and a wonderful finale done to the Independence Day film theme, but my personal favorite was the setup using the numbers "3" and "2" and fireworks looking like cubes during the Sesame Street theme. "Sponsored by the numbers 2 and 3 and the cube." Very clever!

Many thanks to Liberty Mutual for sponsoring the Pops fireworks without interruption!

Labels: holidays

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 10:29:00 PM

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