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I was driving East on Broadway, coming home after a day on the fireworks barges, when I saw a bicyclist traveling along Broadway in the curb lane. This in itself isn’t unusual, but let’s add a few things to the mix:

The part that’s the most relevant to this scenario is the way the hockey stick was being carried. I don’t have an overhead image of a bicycle so I shall use this giant letter T to represent the bike, with the top crosspiece as the handlebars:

Instead of trying to carry the hockey stick along the length of the bike, the cyclist was holding onto it across the handlebars like so:

The cyclist was in the right (curb) lane, staying as far out of traffic as possible, but as we approached the intersection I could see there was going to be trouble because there was a lamp post on the corner. Consider, if you will, a stickless cyclist approaching an intersection where there’s a lamp post:

Now think of what is likely to happen when you’re carrying a hockey stick across your handlebars, you’re approaching an intersection with a lamp post on the corner and you’re not paying attention to your surroundings:

Sure enough, the stick connected with the lamp post and the cyclist performed an involuntary dismount at a 45 degree angle onto the road. Fortunately for him, he escaped without apparent injury because:

He got up and recovered his bike and hockey stick, and judging from his facial expression any physical pain he might have been feeling was no match for being publicly embarrassed in front of a group of pedestrians and other cyclists that saw him perform his little stunt.

Thank goodness he wasn’t a bicycle courier because the sidewalks of downtown Vancouver would have been littered with the unconscious bodies of countless pedestrians.

I hope he made it home okay, but I suppose it depended on whether or not he learned from what could have been a serious mistake that turned out to be nothing more than a relatively minor inconvenience.

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Since I have some breathing room between Canada Day and Celebration of Light, I thought I’d take time to post some pictures and video of my Canada Day show.

For the third year in a row we had two barges - one in Vancouver, the other in West Vancouver - firing simultaneously which involved using iPods to run music and a total of 59 cues fired “by hand,” which means that one person on each barge was listening to the cues and pressing the buttons when required. I fired the West Vancouver show.

First, some pics of the barge before the show (click on each image to see the larger version):

After we finished setting up, I mounted a small video camera on a railing so I could get footage of what a show looks like while it’s being fired; there’s lots of video of the fireworks themselves but I thought people might like to see what it’s like when the shells are being launched.

Once everything was set up and we were towed into place, there was nothing to do except look at the scenery:

If you click here you can watch the video (31MB, approx. 20 minutes) of our show…and if you listen closely at the beginning you can hear the first audio cue.

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