America is maybe feeling a little dazed today, as it sometimes happens in the strange and sudden quiet that follows the whirlwind of one’s birthday celebration. Especially in the wake of the Big Bay Boom, its birthday party in San Diego that didn’t go completely as planned: 

Painstakingly organized to last about eighteen minutes for the hundreds of thousands of people gathered along the bay, the set suffered a technical malfunction, causing the entire fireworks display to explode entirely at once in fifteen short seconds. Ah! That had to have been a big bummer for everyone camped out there all night, but the massive fifteen seconds of pyrotechnics would be a crazy thing to see in itself, I’d imagine.

And let’s take a second to appreciate the person who really got the shortest end of the stick here: that unfortunate friend in every group who, a slave to anticipation and that one extra sip, will inevitably always realize they have to run to the bathroom exactly one minute before the show is starting. “What did I miss?”

So how was your Fourth? 

(Big Bay Boom photos from benballer and Lightning Jeff; James Brown celebrates at the Buffalo Harbor).

- Maggie