It is just possible that the Beatles might not be the coolest thing about Liverpool, England. Certainly, they are not the only cool thing, though I suspect your list might run dreadfully short after the Beatles and… Gerry and the Pacemakers. Don’t feel bad- few Liverpudlians could come up with a long list of cool stuff about Rochester. Sure, Liverpool is doubtless a lovely place in a post-industrial way. But now you can take the high road and add the Williamson Tunnels. That’s right- Liverpool is swiss-cheesed with man-made tunnels.

Joseph Williamson, a co-founder of Leigh & Williamson, made a lot of money for himself around the beginning of the 19th century. He started building in the Edge Hill District: houses, gardens, and tunnels. Then, he kept digging tunnels. Some of which were huge as banqueting halls. Some dead-end. Some are beautifully finished with stone work. Not being the record-keeping type, no one really knows what Williamson was thinking, but the most popular theory is that he was providing unskilled work to soldiers freshly returned from the Napoleonic Wars. Suggestions of more unsavory pursuits are less likely when considered against the fact that the tunnels were never made secret. No one ever liked using them, however. By the 1990’s, virtually all the excavations were filled with trash and debris.

Nowadays, when you make your pilgrimage to the Cavern Club to see the place where the Beatles got their start, you can spend spare time touring some re-opened passageways, courtesy of the Friends of Williamson’s Tunnels. And while you’re standing there in the Cavern Club, soaking up the atmosphere, you can lean over to a companion and say, “You know, this used to be an air raid shelter. And before that, it was a man-made cavern…”

February, 2007

This fireworks factory sat up the road from my high school about a mile. A series of red wood shingled buildings scattered across the property. Upper classmen reveled in describing how the buildings housed small crews who assembled the various products. The layout was in case something went wrong- then only the crew was blown up, not everyone else. I always wondered why the buildings looked so well-maintained since they seemed intended for self-destruction.

Apocryphally, some cook somewhere two thousand years ago mixed saltpeter, sulphur, and charcoal and exploded something for dinner. Experiments over the succeeding centuries revealed that color could be incorporated into the explosions: copper salts make blue; sodium salts make yellow; barium salts make green; etc. Moreover, titanium adds excellent sparks and zinc produces smoke clouds.

The center of world fireworks fabrication remains the Hunan province in China. Firecrackers emerged in the region a thousand years ago as a method for scaring away evil spirits. European traders and crusaders brought the technology home where pyrotechnics became a centerpiece of public celebrations.

Shortly before my high school matriculation, President Nixon normalized trade with China; American makers visited for the first time in the modern era. Still, that factory loomed just up the road, a potentially tantalizing spectacle in the mind of a teen-ager. We received news only sporadically, so we were doubtless unaware that the fireworks industry was migrating out of our little hamlet even then.

Early in 2005, the United States Department of Justice Office of Consumer Litigation sent letters to fireworks hobbyists throughout the country, notifying the recipients that they were under scrutiny for having their names on invoices at various fireworks outlets.

I remember riding in a friend’s car one spring Saturday as we passed the fireworks manufacturer. One little red building near the road was a shambles.

December, 2005

The Dai Pool at Toho Studios has been demolished and an era has ended. You probably don’t recall this huge, shallow pool, but its pop culture rating is somewhere between 50 and 400 meters high for this was the frothing sea that birthed Godzilla, that ill-used avatar of nuclear apocalypse. The terrible “Whale-Gorilla” captured the popular imagination at a time when life had proven appallingly fragile on a massive scale.

In 2004, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the first Godzilla film, Toho Studios released Godzilla: Final Wars and announced that it would be the last movie to feature the great and powerful Godz’. Even on the off chance that the monster would return at some future date, a man in a rubber suit would no longer portray the beast. Whether cinematic luddite or CGI geek, we should all mourn the day that an actor can’t make a decent day’s wages by sweating profusely and stomping his way to heaven.

‘Zilla (real name: Gojira) began busting blocks and taking names in 1954, when Steven Spielberg was less than knee-high to Mothra. American distributors fretted that domestic audiences would not appreciate such a film without sympathetic American characters, so Raymond Burr was hired for a day’s work and the character of American reporter, Steve Martin, was added to the U.S. version, turning a tragic horror story into a disturbed and fractured tale.

After showings at a smattering of West Coast monster movie festivals and little else in North America, the DVD for Godzilla: Final Wars is due on July 22. Many, many sequels were produced during the preceding fifty years. As Marcel Proust once said, “Everyone needs to eat madeleines and watch Godzilla at least once in their life.” The original Godzilla from 1954 is worth seeking out. Under no circumstances should the American-made Godzilla of 1998 be considered a reasonable substitute. Almost thirty sequels are available to the undiscerning viewer. Godzilla vs. Space Godzilla is representative. On the other hand, Godzilla vs. Bambi ends predictably, but has high entertainment value.

July, 2005