Fourth of July / The West Side Blows Up

I watched the home grown West Side (Buffalo) fireworks from the top a friend's building a block from my house. This year things were relatively tame, in past years the rockets have come dangerously close to the roof top party.

4th of July

I spent the evening of the 4th at a marina in the Buffalo harbor where a friend keeps his boat. It was a real Yacht Rock scene, and a nice way to escape the mortar fire in my neighborhood.

A Couple of Items

On Monday I expressed my dislike for the amateur fireworks that are so popular in my neighborhood. On Tuesday I got a chance to see the negative consequences firsthand. I left my house in the early afternoon and saw black smoke billowing into the sky three blocks away. I went to take a closer look and found a house completely engulfed in flames, the houses on either side (only about eight feet from the house on fire) were also burning. The whole neighborhood was gathered around watching. I found out later from the news that the fire was started by a 6 year old boy lighting firecrackers in his bedroom. The Police arrested a man who had been selling fireworks in the area from his car.

I got a Google Alert that my name was mentioned in an article about Shopping Carts in the Orlando Sentinel, apparently the Orlando City Council is going to consider requiring stores to implement "cart retention systems." Anyway, they tacked on some shopping cart trivia at the end which included my book and website:

Did you know . . . ?
*The shopping cart was invented in the 1930s by Sylvan Nathan Goldman, owner of the Humpty-Dumpty grocery chain.

*In 2007, Arkansas passed the Health-Conscious Shopper Act, which encourages businesses to provide sanitation wipes for shopping cart handles.

*Julian Montague, author of The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification, developed a classification system for stray carts. There are false strays and true strays and 33 subtypes, such as bus-stop discard and transient impostor. Check out strayshoppingcart.com.

Apocalypse Niagara Street / I Hate Amatuer Fireworks

The people in my neighborhood go nuts with the fireworks on and around the 4th of July (fireworks are illegal here). Last year we went around the corner to watch the amateur activities from the roof of our friend's three story building. We had a bird's eye view of what ended up being a three hour blitzkrieg of rockets, fire crackers and god knows what else. It was amazing how much money had been spent on fireworks by people who don't seem to have very much money. I was also surprised that people weren't at all bored with watching the exact same pyrotechnic event happen over and over again for hours. Random explosions continued until about 3 am, some of them were so deep and loud it was hard to believe they didn't leave craters in the ground. I absolutely hate being around these kinds of fireworks.