"Groups of young people cruise the streets of Porirua, New Zealand, in the dead of night, their cars and bicycles stacked with high-powered speakers..."

"... designed to emit the loudest, clearest sounds. The groups, known as siren clubs, use late-night musical battles to express their identities and create community... A popular sound... is the voice of Celine Dion.... Siren clubs are made up mostly of young men, many of them in Porirua’s Pacific Islander community, known as Pasifika....They get together to modify cars and bicycles with public-address system speakers, which they call sirens. They spend hours wiring and soldering multiple sirens and amplifiers to car frames or onto bicycles.... Dion’s 'My Heart Will Go On' and 'The Power of Love' are siren club classics.... Residents calling in to report noise complaints often cannot home in on the source. And even when they can, the competitors have often taken off by the time police arrive...."

From "New Zealanders are blasting Celine Dion until 3 a.m., leaving some miserable/‘Siren battles’ in the streets are driving some residents crazy" (WaPo).

Porirua Mayor Anita Baker is quoted praising the Pasifika in the manner one expects from mayors:  “They’re an awesome community. They love music, they love dance, they love church. They’re a really close-knit community … and that’s what we love about Porirua. We have such diversity here.” 

I've got 9 TikToks for you tonight — all things I liked. I invite you to appreciate them too.

1. The crochet genius.

2. A Kardashian Christmas.

3. The joy of Neptune.

4. The importance of routine during the long polar night.

5. The importance of layers when dressing for winter.

6. Let a girl show you how to approach a girl.

7. Celine Dion explains her rare disease — stiff person syndrome.

8. He gets AI to write a folk song about his dog dying.

9. AI envisions the cast of "The Office" as babies.

Celine Dion is a super-hero who bestows gender privacy on babies... with her new fashion line.

This weird commercial is worth watching — if only for the expression of philosophy:



Gender privacy for babies... and older kids... with stuff like this:



ADDED: At the shopping site, called CELINUNUNU, the brand explains itself in the kind of prose I've seen too often on wall cards at art museums:

"I feel like throwing up when I hear it. No, I shouldn't say that. No, actually, I do feel like throwing up."

"I wish I could say, 'Oh listen, everybody! It's the Celine Dion song!' But I don't. I just have to sit there, you know, kind of straight-faced with a massive internal eye roll."

Kate Winslet experiences seasickness on the Titanic... song.