Rose Parade

Here's one last photo posting before I go back to more technical material. This new year, my in-laws decided that they wanted to see the Rose Parade, and brought us along with them. So here are my photos of the parade. It's a bit of an extravaganza of corporate advertisement and conventional sentimentality, but fun anyway. It's impossible to pick a representative sample from so many images, so here's just one, of one of the less conventional elements of the parade.

My friend Tyler was outraged at the way the Stanford Band strolled through instead of marching in lockstep. He felt it was an insult to all the other bands that had practiced hard to be in the parade, and a serious enough insult that they should be banned from the parade (in fact they have been banned in the past). I could quibble about his reasoning: several of the bands are in it by virtue of geography or a good football team rather than effort, the Stanford Band clearly puts in plenty of practice in their musicianship and scatter-formation, and in any case why interpret their performance by how it reflects on someone else rather than taking it for itself? But my own reaction is instead one of pride in my alma mater's continuing support of nonconformity and boundary-pushing.

(The Hawaii all-state band also did their fair share of boundary pushing by making their whole show into a tribute to the rainbow flag and by making their underdressed eye-candy male instead of female. Props to them for it.)