Friday, September 25, 2009

Fireworks Poll

A minor point of clarification: I'm not asking Americans to identify themselves as Red or Blue, but their communities, since I suspect, e.g. Alabama is more likely to have flag-waving in any random civic context than e.g. Vermont. Given that I'm from New Jersey, which is both quite Blue and full of patriotic music during our fireworks, this may not turn out to be the case.

Update: This fancy poll isn't working properly; the "vote now" button leads to the homepage of the poll service. (I guess you get what you pay for with free web apps.) I will tinker with it as much as my (very minor) coding skills allow, but this link goes directly to a page where the poll can actually be taken.




















9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Gah! What's a tree-hugging blue voter in a red state who doesn't like to make trouble, who thinks the poll is mostly fine the way it is, and who loves fireworks and wears earplugs to avoid both the soundtrack and the big booms supposed to do with these questions?

Anonymous said...

American, Red State division, tree-hugging variety, likes making trouble, has technical problems (the vote button takes me to site for adding polls), unsatisfied with the use of the term "nationalistic", and hasn't actually watched a fireworks display in several years.

Anonymous said...

Tree hugging and blue, here. The vote button takes me to www.addpoll.com.

Running a very tree-hugging and blue Mac OS, too. So don't blame the tree bark!

Peter Hollo said...

Tree-hugging Australian thanks you for
a) including Australians in your poll! Aw! :) and
b) linking direct so we can akchewly vote now.

Peggy K said...

I'm not sure how to vote.

I live in a red area of a purple state - California, which is blue in the urban areas and red pretty much everywhere else.

My exposure to fireworks displays over the past few years have been:

- non-patriotic firework displays at Disneyland, which is in the heart of reddish Orange County

- patriotic Fourth of July displays both in red inland SoCal and in the blue San Francisco Bay Area

I would imagine that most Americans typically only see fireworks on the Fourth of July, which is an inherently patriotic holiday (founding of the country and all), so I'm not sure what your poll will show other than that.

Or is that what the poll is trying to determine?

Andrew Wheeler said...

Peggy: I have a feeling that Americans will mostly say that the fireworks they see are patriotic, since they're strongly associated here with the Fourth of July. But you do bring up another point -- the commercial fireworks that various venues do (usually in the summer, in my experience), which might have different themes.

This is a pretty frivolous poll -- I mostly wanted to see if, say, South Africans and Argentinians saw fireworks as an excuse for flag-waving the way Americans usually do.

leonsp said...

Canada, patriotic, both on Canada Day and Victoria Day.

Anonymous said...

Canadian in small city, one of four fireworks occasions patriotic. (Canada Day, fair, handicraft festival,and Bridge festival)

rgl

Bookhorde said...

I don't know how to vote either.
Back in Manila, fireworks are a big thing on New Year's Eve. They are as LOUD, and involve people's thumbs occasionally getting blown off. But not at all patriotic.

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