Here are the City’s fireworks FAQs. For a week now, we’ve been hearing reports in the middle of the night. This morning’s newspaper brought the Black Cat ad supplement, complete with a map to the locations of the sponsoring stands. The names of the selections featured are a testament to the faith placed in the power of nomenclature as a marketing tool, especially the appeals to Texas and Longhorn pride. Here are just some of the packaged selections: Texas Stampede, Lone Star Assortment, Longhorn, and Spirit of Texas. In the general catagory my favorite is King of the Block, for delivering Global Warming, as the package all but guarantees. Here, we’re law-abiding types, igniting nothing more awe-inspiring than sparklers, although there is a little paper-packaged Hen Laying Eggs (still sold by the local fireworks stands), which is 25% of the modest decorative-only poultry collection that also includes a wind-up tin pecking-chicken toy (courtesy of Atomic City or Terra Toys), an old yellow plastic hen complete with eggs, and a wooden Plymouth Rock hen handmade by the Terra Toys folks in an early incarnation, perhaps even when it was downtown on the Avenue before moving to Congress south of the river. Those who like their fireworks to be spectacular and legal are waiting for the First Night display over Town Lake at midnight as the old year becomes the new one.