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to these
Hale dead and deathless do the women of the hill
Love for ever meridian through the courters' trees
And the daughters of darkness flame like Fawkes fires still
Dylan Thomas, In the white giant's thigh
The only verdict is vengeance; a vendetta held as a votive, not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous. Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose, so let me simply add that it's my very good honour to meet you and you may call me V.
V for Vendetta
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Midsummer night
Exile, Fireworks
boom boom boom
even brighter than the moon moon moon
Katy Perry, Firework
Fireworks is a strange word. Works is the same word as the works of a watch. The Japanese word is fire flowers. In Japan there are many large public fireworks displays in the summer. There are famous displays in Tokyo on the Sumida river and in Odaiba on the Tokyo Bay waterfront. Many displays are on water. People sit on riverbanks or shores or around lakes and watch the dramatic displays and reflections in the water. Many people wear yukata - casual summer cotton kimonos. I'm from England so I associate fireworks with crisp November nights and Guy Fawkes.
The same families have sometimes been in the world of fireworks for generations in a kind of iemoto system similar to martial arts. Traditional fireworks are made in the form of balls. They are still measured in shaku, the same measuring system used for sword blades.
I saw a very good Japanese movie called Golden Slumber this week. The title comes from the Beatles song. I don't know if it's available with English or other subtitles yet. Some movies (Aiki and The Hidden Blade, for example - both great movies - I'll talk about them in more detail another time) already include English subtitles on the original DVDs you can rent. Golden Slumber is a conspiracy theory movie. A guy is told that he is going to be the Lee Harvey Oswald figure in an assassination and then he gets framed. Japanese fireworks come into the story.
From the Aikikai hombu dojo in Shinjuku in Tokyo you can sometimes hear fireworks going off in the distance. When I was the uke for Sadateru Arikawa sensei - one of the great aikido teachers of the twentieth century - they would be going off in the dojo too. Boom. Boom boom. Boom. Boom boom boom. Boom.