This year, I spent Independence weekend in Seattle, Washington. My friend Erik lives in a condominium on Westlake Avenue, affording him an excellent view of one of the city’s two main fireworks displays, set off from a barge floating on Lake Washington. A well-crafted fireworks display can be a sublime and wonderful thing, but my love of the spectacle has been eroded over the past few years by repeated exposure to displays that are far from well-crafted. Since 2003, I have lived just over the border from Oregon in Washington State, where it is possible for civilians to obtain and set match to some fairly serious fireworks. No problem in and of itself, save for a higher-than-normal number of cases of lost digits at the local Emergency Room. But the neighborhood celebrations tend to kick off well in advance of the 4th. Being awoken from deep slumber at midnight on a workday because someone with an extra Franklin decided it was high time they wrapped a pack of firecrackers around a couple of M-80s to see what might happen, is not my idea of fun. But the display set off over Lake Washington that night restored my love in full. The terrific view helped, but the set included some wonderful multi-stage, multidimensional fireworks that were seriously impressive (and seriously expensive, would be my guess). My favorite - an modest yellow projectile that almost disappears at the top of its trajectory, only to explode into a huge sphere of purple fireballs. Impressive, but not the end of the story. Before the sphere has finished expanding, two pink rings explode from the epicenter and race out beyond the boundary of the purple sphere. A purple planet, with two perpendicular orbital rings. Like I said… sublime and wonderful.