Extreme Christmas Lights In Orlando

tripmine writes "The Orlando Sentinel has a story about a geek who can't get enough Christmas light. 'This Christmas, tech-savvy people such as Hansen are increasingly building the biggest, most elaborate holiday lights in neighborhoods across Central Florida and throughout the country. They typically work in fields such as computer programming, Web development, engineering or audio and visual services and are armed with a technical knowledge that the average person lacks. They trade tips and stories on message boards and set up Web sites with step-by-step descriptions of how they installed their lights as well as pictures and videos of the finished product.'" Many cities have neighborhoods where the spectacle takes up blocks at a time, not just individual houses, too, as anyone who's strolled down Austin's 37th Street can attest. Links invited (in comments) to the best / worst light-spectacles you know of.

Amazing dedication, big fat wallet?

[dada21]

Who has money for the energy bill from Christmas lights? Our household is very financially secure, but I'm not looking to spend thousands over the season to run the lights. My neighbor, who isn't really decked out as much as some, said his bill will be over $600 more this months for his lighting scheme. OUCH.

I'm sure the environmentalists will cry foul, and I understand that philosophy, but for me, the lights are putting more demand on electricity, which means I'll pay a higher bill myself.

The wife and I do like to see the more extravagant lighting setups out there, but we have noticed that some homes aren't running them 7 days a week. Wonder if its an electrical bill concern.

Story time kids

[Yusaku Godai]

Back when I was in high school, my family lived in southern Florida. Miami, specifically. This kind of crap is extremely prevalent around there, and I'm not sure exactly why. At any rate, one year our neighbor, as usual, had up several thousands of lights, along with the usual array of motorized reindeer, inflatable Santa Claus, and of course a big plastic glowing Jesus (what Jesus has to do with a pagan/capitalist holiday I'm not sure).

Anyways, a huge ugly array of crap that probably took a lot of work to put up--a perfect target for neighborhood hooligans looking to spoil peoples' hard work, right? Not so. The neighbor's display remained untouched. Meanwhile over at our house, we had simply arranged some lights in the shape of a peace sign over our garage door. Within two days all the lights had been torn down and stomped on. Ah, America...

You too can do this

[YrWrstNtmr]

Computer controlled, fully programmable.
Lite-o-rama [lightorama.com]

If you're insane and anal enough to do it right. Some of the displays are pretty impressive [lightorama02.com], though. In an over the top, freaky, kind of way.

Lights? Call me when you get a pair....

[PhreakOfTime]

Thats not creative at all. its just plain old boring.

Now, THIS [youtube.com] is original and creative. Id love to see the neighbors faces when this thing fires up on the front lawn! If some pinheads flashing lights annoy you, just pay them back with the wonderfully tuned sound of static discharge! Enjoy!

Re:Global warming

[orclevegam]

You know, the the celebration Jesus's birthday?

Interestingly enough there is no record of when Jesus was born. One of the original dates that early Christians believed was March 25th, which also corresponded with the date he was believed to have been crucified. Early Christians also did not celebrate the birth of Jesus because they believed saints didn't celebrate their births. The Christian church however has never been one to pass up an opportunity to subsume a competing religions holidays, and late December was a time when almost all cultures celebrated some kind of festival (Yule, Saturnalia, Sol Invictus, etc.). It made it much easier to convert people to Christianity if they got to keep most of their old holidays (see also Easter, corresponding to the Summer Solstice and many cultures fertility holidays [ever wonder about easter eggs?]).

I bet this guy drives a Prius and

[melted]

I bet this guy drives a Prius and talks about reducing his carbon footprint all the time, too. ;-)

are so doomed

[tero]

I don't think the human race will survive the coming global warming and after watching that video, I don't think we deserve to either.
The display gets full points for not having any taste though..

Re:So 90's

[Belial6]

When I first read your comment, I though you were just one of those people that just like to complain. Then I saw the video, and had to completely agree with you. The display shows little to no creativity, and seem to be just a "I bought more lights" display. We used to have a house here in Santa Rosa, Ca that had a big display every year. It had a tenth of the lights, and was dramatically more impressive. It had spinning carousels, elves making toys, and various other animated displays. Buying more lights isn't impressive. Show me something I haven't seen before if you want to impress me.

Re:Global warming

[Rich0]

Uh, the New Testament wasn't authored in Hebrew - it was originally written in Greek, which was the common language of the day (owing to Alexandar the Great's March across most of Western Europe/Asia).

What you are probably getting confused over is the fact that Matthew quotes from Isaiah - which was written in Hebrew originally. Matthew translated it when he quoted it (since he was writing in Greek - not that he was the first to translate the Hebrew bible to Greek).

The word used in Isaiah is probably best translated as young maiden. In using it to refer to the virgin birth Matthew translates it to Greek as virgin to go along with the rest of his account. It is obviously a more recent phenomenon than Isaiah, but it dates back to the first century - it isn't like this was a mistranslation from the middle ages. Matthew's intention of communicating that Mary was a virgin is very clear from the lengthy account of the whole story.

Now, if you think Matthew was full of it I suppose that is something else, but this isn't some invention of modern translators or anything like that.

How about an analogy (since this is /.): The US Supreme Court issues a ruling in English based upon some treaty written in French. It turns out that the supreme court choose to use a less-common translation of a French phrase in the treaty as part of its ruling, and quotes it in English. In the USA the only binding law would be the Supreme Court's ruling, based on the alternate translation from French. The Supreme Court's ruling isn't really a translation-error per se since it is also an original creative work, and the Supreme Court's intention wasn't to just translate the treaty, but it chose to quote a part of it in English to further some larger purpose. You couldn't look at the ruling 100 years later and say that the Supreme Court didn't mean what they said because the translation of a line of French was debatable - the Supreme Court clearly meant what they said in the bulk of their ruling, and the translation was in support of the larger work. Now, you could choose to disagree with the Supreme Court, and that is neither here nor there.

So, while Isaiah is likely to have meant "young maiden" it doesn't really change the fact that Matthew was trying to communicate "virgin". And if you really are just interested in historicity then you'd probably tend to put more stock in a document written after Jesus's birth than 600 years before it when trying to figure out what happened.

Re:Global warming

[Simon Brooke]

Uh, the New Testament wasn't authored in Hebrew - it was originally written in Greek, which was the common language of the day (owing to Alexandar the Great's March across most of Western Europe/Asia).

Saul of Tarsus was (probably) a native Greek speaker. Iesu ben Yussuf - the guy Christians refer to as 'Jesus' - was well educated and probably spoke some Greek. Everyone else in the New Testament story spoke Aramaic [wikipedia.org], a language closely related to Arabic; and that is almost certainly the language that Matthew's gospel (and Luke's and Mark's) was first written in.

The word used in Isaiah is probably best translated as young maiden. In using it to refer to the virgin birth Matthew translates it to Greek as virgin to go along with the rest of his account. It is obviously a more recent phenomenon than Isaiah, but it dates back to the first century - it isn't like this was a mistranslation from the middle ages. Matthew's intention of communicating that Mary was a virgin is very clear from the lengthy account of the whole story.

'Virgin' and 'maiden' are exact synonyms. 'Virgin' has latin roots, 'maiden' germanic; but they mean exactly the same thing. 'Girl' or 'Young woman' might be a different thing...

Yes, obviously, the early Christian writers were trying to make the strongest possible claims for Jesus, and, obviously, the fact that he seems to have been a bastard was an embarrassment they had to deal with.