Submitted for your approval (can’t help it, I saw five hours Sci-Fi’s Twilight Zone marathon yesterday), some images from the Fourth of Jul-Ivar’s.

Thanks to decent weather for the first time in the past ten 7/4s, the crowds at Myrtle Edwards Park (not to mention the sailboats and yachts just offshore) were even larger and swarmier.

What they saw and experienced: The usual all-white boogie blooze bands, the usual curly fries and kettle corn, the usual vintage-aircraft flybys, a strange promotional touring-van exhibit called “The National Peanut Tour,” a woman in a Bugs Bunny suit handing out samples of banana flavored milk to the kiddies, and a 50-foot inflatable figure of a cartoony bodybuilder guy bearing the name “Ironman.”

Then, just after 10 (well after the kids had gotten pooped and suburned while the adults had gotten drunk and hazy), came the big blast-o-rooney (seen here from upper Queen Anne).

In short, a perfect normal Fourth; a holiday almost completely free of any patriotic or other official reason for its existence other than the universal need to gather and see stuff blow up. A ritual of lowbrow mechanized “fun” every nation oughta have at midsummer, under one excuse or another.

ELSEWHERE:

Can anyone or anything stop the major labels’ legal putsch to stop Internet music?

The old joke is that the British created such beautiful dinnerware in order to distract attention away from British food. Yet the U.S. holds enough expatriates and Anglophiles for several companies, including “Expatboxes.com,” to specialize in importing hard-to-find Brit packaged food products, from Marmite yeast spread to McVitie’s Digestive Biscuits and Heinz treacle sponge pudding.