JOHN VC

According to the Times this morning, people in the Netherlands are in an uproar about Domino Day. Each year Endemol, the Dutch TV network, rents an airplane hangar and opens the space to competitive domino groups (dominators?) who spend two months standing dominos on end for the big day, wherein Domino Girl ceremoniously nudges First Domino and away they go. Not only in swirls and rows — up one and down the next, how do they do that? — but jumping from one group’s domino domain to the next like Asian flu. They make rows cross each other on little bridges and come looping back. This year they went after the record, with over 4 million dominos, taking 75 minutes – that’s an hour and fifteen minutes — for all to topple. Some dominos are painted so that when they fall they reveal a picture; the scenes this year included Faust’s bargain with the Devil and Noah’s Ark. There are even two towers, some 10 feet high, in which the dominos stand on a spiral ramp — I am guessing that the whole thing starts with the top domino on one of the ramps, but how do they get the dominos on the second tower to fall? They could maybe fall upwards, in the grand finale? There was a picture of the whole scary scene, at least 300 feet on a side, in the paper (but not in the online NYT so don’t bother looking. On the other hand, the online had a link to a wonderful video on BBC.)

Anyway, they keep a couple of exterminators standing by to prevent animal accidents during domino erection, and sure enough, four days before push-off, this sparrow gets in and starts flapping around, and before you know it, 23,000 dominos are down. The exterminators keep chasing the bird around to try to net it, but finally they give up and one of them gets a BB gun and ping, dead bird. Unfortunately the news gets out. Guess what, sparrows are a protected species in Netherlands (there are no trees left for them to nest in, it seems) and hordes of sparrow huggers march in the streets demanding jail time and castration for the bestial domino destructors. One bunch tries to get in knock down the rest of the dominos in honor of the sparrow, and death threats were received. The show, however, manages to go on, but by the time the First Domino falls, half of Europe is shouting at the other half about the desecration of the memory of the fallen sparrow.

Far more interesting than a war, I must say. We have much to learn..

(11/ 28/2005)