Hong Kong's fireworks extravaganza

Every year on the second night of the 15-day Spring Festival (which is today), Hong Kong puts together a prodigious fireworks display at Victoria Harbor. The bombardment of the night sky is an attempt to slug melancholy back into its corner, to bury the blues in its earthy burrow and exterminate all that is not right in the world.

I was there last February and blogged the day after: "I have more to say about this soon." After a much belated "soon"...

It's impossible to convey through a video, but there's a palpable sense of joy. "Palpable sense of joy" is a bad, bad, un-writerly phrase, like "jolt of electricity," but it's the right choice of words here. Light, fire and thunder maraude the parts of our brain able to perform higher-level functions, and left with a husk of ourselves, we are children again with our heads raised in pure bliss. For just an hour or so, our worries are blasted into a million shards to the accompaniment of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture. There's certainly no room for our very adult cynicism.