Independence, Interurban Trolleys & Nellie the Nudist Queen

Plenty of meat and colorful explosions over the Fourth of July weekend this year for us, but not so much beer. I don't have what it takes to be a problem drinker, I guess, because I forget to drink alcohol. Days and weeks and months sometimes go by before I remember to take a drink. During the whole of the long weekend, it didn't occur to me once, despite my previous posting.

As for the meat, I prepared that, but the explosions weren't of my own making, due to the misguided ban on recreational explosives in Illinois, which means that I'd have to drive further than I'd like to obtain fireworks. Still, the Westmont municipal fireworks, shot off last night over Ty Warner Park in that suburb, were worth the time and effort to get there.

During the day we drove to South Elgin, Ill., to take a ride on a small remnant on the Aurora, Elgin and Fox River Electric Line that's now known as the Fox River Trolley Museum. It's a museum in the sense that it has artifacts -- train and trolley cars, mostly. It also has about two miles of track. Rides can be had on weekends and holidays during the summer, and on July 4 the rides are only a dollar.

The AE&FRE was once an interurban line. Naturally that brings to mind the line in "Nellie the Nudist Queen" (Stuart Ross & John Sargent, 1933) -- the only song I know that uses the term "interurban." What, that's not the first thing most people would think of?

Nellie was a city gal, more than nine-tenths pure,
Till a country guy came riding by on a ten-cent trolley tour!
His eyes were mean, his heart was black, and this interurban tramp
Beguiled poor Nell and took her back to his nearby nudist camp!

Not to worry, since Nell thrived in her new setting, becoming the nudist queen of the title. Listen for yourself.

The Sparklers of '10

As a firework, sparklers are underrated. Maybe because there's no explosions. I'm all for recreational explosions, but that doesn't exclude sparkler-play now and then. We still had some left over from the summer of 2009 (we bought a lot) and lit a number of them up in the darkened back yard recently.

Or maybe sparklers are dismissed as not XTreme! enough, though of course people manage to burn or otherwise harm themselves every year with sparklers. Mostly little kids, sorry to say. Adult supervision is required, as the package says. It's a task I don't mind doing.

Things That Glow Briefly in the Dark

I was curious today if there were any statistics on the cancellation of municipal July Fourth fireworks displays in this aching year, but I was only able to find anecdotal evidence of the trend after a total of about five minutes at Google News, so I decided the question wasn't worth any more time. The first thing I put into the search was "fireworks" (instead of "fireworks canceled" or "fireworks cancellation"), so naturally all the fireworks accident stories from the holiday weekend popped up, including this ghastly one: "Long Island man blows off left arm while trying to light fuse on fireworks." It seems he was fooling around with an unforgiving mortar. As mortars tend to be.

Northwest suburban Wheeling, Illinois, canceled its Fourth of July fireworks this year. We went there last year and during the mid-2000s for good shows in a spacious park that has a nearby neighborhood in which to park your car. Last year's show was probably already in the Wheeling budget before the Panic of 2008, but when the time came to consider the expense for 2010, shooting off 'works lost out.

West suburban Westmont, Illinois, on the other hand, went ahead with its show at Ty Warner Park, named for the Beanie Baby mogul who donated $3 million for its creation in the late '90s. Ty Inc. headquarters is in Westmont, so maybe he ponied up to help pay for the display this year. In any case, the show was on in our former town, so we went.

We had our Coolpix S200 and for some reason Lilly was possessed to take pictures during the display. Maybe because, astonishingly, the camera has a setting for fireworks. Most of the images look like fuzzy pics of fireworks. But some of them are light traces that cry out for the addition of bogus captions. I'm just the man for that job.

Deep in the Tonga Trench lives a eerily bioluminous Narcomedusa Jellyfish -- only its hair-like protrusions glow against a pitch-dark body -- believed to be a new genus and species discovered and photographed by Japanese scientists in 2002 by remote submersible but not seen since. Jellies happen to be among the least understood groups of animals on Earth.

Captured at the Very Large Tevatron Collider near Stuttgart, Germany (Größtenpartikelgeschlammer), is this image of two Higgs bosons, types W and Z, colliding in a recent test. A supercomputer turned the invisible tracks of the particles into a color-coded graphic representation for further study.

Another computer enhanced image, this one is of X-ray emissions from Eta Carinae, a Peculiar star, taken by NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory. Other stars are in the background.

Pyrotechnical Interlude

It's been a bad summer for celebrities at all levels of fame, dying as they are in multiples of three, it seems. Who among us will ever forget what we were doing when we heard about Billy Mays' untimely passing?

Few outside Chicago may have heard of Dempsey Travis, who also died last week, but I met the man once. I went down to his South Side office late in the winter of 1989 to interview him for the commercial real estate magazine I edited at the time. Our meeting was one of the better interviews I ever did, but not because of much that I did. Travis was interesting. More than interesting. He told fascinating stories of times and places I would never see myself. So RIP, Mr. Travis.

The Fourth of July began around here with rain, but by twilight's last gleaming the skies were clear. We made our way to Wheeling, Illinois, for that town's fireworks, as we did in 2004 and '05, and we weren't disappointed. The pyrotechnicians put on an excellent show, one without someone else's idea of a patriotic soundtrack, and including some wiggling displays I'd never seen the likes of, plus a number of teasingly false endings.

The professional shows need to keep innovating, I figure, because amateurs can get a hold of some sophisticated little rockets and shells these days. Besides the usual bottle rockets and so on, people were shooting off small peonies and loud explosive shells before the professional show.

I also have to wonder whether old fireworks pros can look at a tape of a display, and pin it down to a particular decade or even year. Fashion comes and goes in much else; fireworks too?

Let There Be Pyrotechnics

From the Australian, dateline Sydney, where it's already 2009: "More than a million revellers have ushered in 2009 in Sydney, watching in wonder as spectacular bursts of fireworks lit up the night sky, culminating in a giant glowing sun on the iconic Harbour Bridge.

"With the theme of Creation, the event was 15 months in the making, with a dazzling array of more than 100,000 individual pyrotechnics firing from the bridge, six barges around the harbour and the top of several skyscrapers."

Damn. I would like to have seen that. Why 2009 gets to be the Creation year, I couldn't say, but who cares. Fiat lux.

Then again, New Year's is a summer holiday in Oz, so they might as well shoot off 100,000 individual pyrotechnics. That's lighting a lot of candles against the darkness. Roman candles against the darkness.

Around here, I expect to hear a scattering of private pyrotechnics around midnight. It happens every year. Maybe not as many this year as last, not because of the economy or anything so abstract, but because it's biting cold out there.

Feliĉan Novan Jaron, everyone. Back on Sunday.