vovat | Entries tagged with cartoons

We saw Kevin Geeks Out at the Nitehawk in Prospect Park the Thursday before last. The theme was sidekicks, and there were several presentations on that topic. One interesting thing is that two of these were Christmas-themed at a time way out of season, one about Krampus and another espousing the possibility that Hermey from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer could be a psychopath, comparing him to Norman Bates. Also addressed was how sidekicks are often framed in ways that diminish them, even when they're technically more competent than the heroes. A discussion of the Lone Ranger and the Green Hornet (the latter canonically being the former's nephew) pointed out how calling the character "Lone" when Tonto does a lot of the work isn't really fair, and that Bruce Lee's Kato was the one who did most of the fighting. There was also a mention of Dick Tracy's racist sidekicks from the sixties animated series, Joe Jitsu and Go Go Gomez. Not that I think these characters were intended to be offensive; that's just how it comes off with how they're written. The Kindest Cut was of a movie called Sidekicks, described as a combination of The Karate Kid and Walter Mitty, as the boy in it is constantly daydreaming about fighting alongside Chuck Norris. The game we played was about who out of two characters is the sidekick, based on the opinions of ten people, and some of them were ties.

The other day, we went to a Franz Ferdinand show at the Brooklyn Paramount. We'd gone there a few months ago for Ben Folds, but that time they had chairs, and this time it was standing room only. The opener was a band called Telescreen, and I had no strong opinion about their music, but they seemed to attract some obnoxious fans who yelled a lot. I don't know how many of them were the same ones who insisted on moshing during the headliner. What's weird about that is that I noticed a sign at the entrance that forbade moshing, and I didn't think it was anything we'd have to worry about. I've never understood wanting the possibility of being seriously injured or doing that to someone else at a concert. I'm lucky nothing worse happened than a guy stepping on my foot. The performance itself was good, though, with all the hits and everything. The set did not include "The Fallen," which normally wouldn't merit a mention, but I had just mentioned to Beth recently that they should have changed the lyric to "Who gives a damn about the profits of Tesla?" Alex Kapranos still has a lot of energy.

I know he had a kid recently, which is what one of the songs on the newest album is about, but he didn't say anything about that onstage.

Last night was a Bruce McCulloch show at the Bell House. I think it was pretty similar to the last time we saw him. I can't remember for sure, but some of it was definitely familiar, and some not. It was a combination of monologues, songs, and just jokes. He quoted a newspaper review of an earlier performance in Wayne, New Jersey, about how it (or possibly the Kids in the Hall in general?) had a narrative that even Frank Zappa couldn't understand, then he kept calling back to that.

There's something else I wanted to get off my chest, which is that I saw a post on the OzCon International Instagram about how Emma Ridley, who played Ozma in Return to Oz, although her voice was dubbed by somebody else. I had followed her on social media for a while, but she turned out to be a fervent Trump supporter, and I don't know whether this is a relatively recent development or not. I know some people who have met her before have mentioned her being really friendly, but that doesn't preclude awful politics. She's shared some really obvious lies about how he's actually trying to help people, and fight child trafficking and bring about world peace, which makes no sense if you know anything at all about Trump, and of course he's been well nigh impossible to avoid for pretty much my entire lifetime. While I don't recall seeing anything specific about it, she's apparently also transphobic, which is kind of ironic if you know about the character she played. So some people called out the post, and it looks like it's just been deleted.

Current Mood: irritated
Current Music: Mountain Goats: Foreign Object

Beth and I saw Rufus Wainwright at Tarrytown Music Hall on Thursday the 6th. His sister Lucy was the opener, and she also sang on a few of his songs.

He's a great musician, but so many of his songs are depressing. I guess it runs in his family, since I remember my dad having an album by his mom and aunt, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, and those were also good songs that were pretty much all downers, and often about death. Rufus even made a joke about a Leonard Cohen cover actually brought the mood up a bit. The song in question was "So Long, Marianne," although he also did "Hallelujah" as his last song, with Lucy on backing vocals. His second to last was "Going to a Town," which was also the name of the tour, and he wore a T-shirt with some lyrics from it. He also played another political song that he wrote at seventeen, called "Liberty Cabbage."

Last weekend was Monster-Mania in Cherry Hill. The first panel we saw was with Dana Kimmell, who was in Friday the 13th Part 3. We watched most of those movies in quick succession and I tend to forget which one was which, but the stories from people working on them are still interesting.

Then came Lauren Lavera and Elliott Fullam from the second and third Terrifier films.

Roger Jackson's main reason for being at a horror convention was that he's the voice of Ghostface in the Scream series, but he's also Mojo Jojo on Powerpuff Girls and a lot of other voices.

He said that Mojo was originally intended to have a Peter Lorre kind of voice, but Craig McCracken suggested throwing in a bit of samurai. He also gave some examples of when he voiced a whole bunch of cats and dogs for some video games. The first evening panel was with Eli Roth, who mostly talked about the company he's founding that allows for investment from fans.

And there was someone in the audience who yelled every time he mentioned one of his movies. And from The Return of the Living Dead were Miguel Nunez, Linnea Quigley, Thom Matthews, and Beverly Randolph. Miguel was very talkative, but the others had some good anecdotes as well.

I probably don't need to mention that the political situation in this country seems to be pretty much hopeless at this point. I'm still trying to wrap my head around how people can still support Trump when he's constantly bullying and threatening people. Yeah, I know about the leopards eating faces and how his supporters think it's only going to be other people who get hurt, but isn't his attitude off-putting anyway? I feel like that kind of behavior has been normalized way too much, and a lot of people just expect it. I guess at this point it doesn't even matter too much whether he still has supporters in the populace in general when the Supreme Court is on his side, and the Democrats seem eager to maintain a status quo that doesn't really exist anymore.

Current Music: Minus 5: Blow in My Bag

Christmas is over now, so I should probably write something about it. We were at Beth's mom's house again, and the cats came with us. It was the first Christmas Felix spent with us, and he seemed to enjoy it, except when he hit his head on the coffee table because Nellie popped out of some wrapping paper and surprised him.

They were also playing with one of the bags.

Not all of our presents had arrived by Christmas Day, but between then and now, I received the Dragon Quest III HD remake, Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime, a book publication of the Super Mario Adventures comic that ran in Nintendo Power, The Annotated Phantom Tollbooth, Volume 2 of Kirby Manga Mania, Andy Partridge's My Failed Songwriting Career Volume 2 (I don't have the first one yet, but I don't think you have to be familiar with that to listen to the second) and My Failed Christmas Career, a movie-style Cat Mario figure, a T-shirt with Bowser from a series where I already have the Luigi and Yoshi ones, a soft Koopa shell, a Ruby Slippers mug, and some Marvin the Martian socks.

I was trying to make a Bowser face, but I suck at imitating facial expressions.
I also gave Beth a similar big, soft Mario-related thing.

I ended up getting some duplicates, but I supposed that's likely to happen when you send the same list to different people who aren't coordinating with each other. I feel like there was a lot of stuff I wanted to do but didn't, and I know it's the same way with Beth. It seems like a lot of my holiday memories, even dating back to childhood, are of things I thought of but never did. I'm a procrastinator in general, and it's hard to get in the mood to prepare for Christmas when both of our birthdays are in November. Aside from the new Ben Folds Christmas album, I didn't even listen to holiday music from my own collection (as opposed to the stuff on the radio and in stores; I heard plenty of that). We did do our annual rewatch of Home Alone, as well as seeing the original Grinch, Frosty, and Garfield Christmas. A lot of the latter is the Arbuckle family doing the same stuff they do every year, even if it's silly and doesn't make sense, because that's just what they do. I can relate to that to an extent. It's not like Home Alone is even that great of a movie, but it's become what we do.

In other news, we bought a new car, as our old one seemed to be on its last legs. The new one is a Hyundai Venue in a color called green apple (not to be confused with candy apple red with a ski for a wheel), and we had to wait extra time to get it. Next year's green is a different color that looks more like gray, so there weren't a lot for sale. It's technically an SUV, and I've generally been kind of against those, but it seemed the most practical choice. It's not much wider than the Honda Fit, and our parking space in the garage is pretty narrow. It wasn't a Christmas present and didn't have one of those giant bows from the commercials, but I did want to buy one before I had to get another emissions inspection on the Fit. We'd had the Honda since 2009, so the Venue has features that are new to me but probably pretty standard now, like a backup camera. It also has a moonroof, which Beth is excited about.

Anything else I should mention? We did go to the Nintendo store in Rockefeller Center and saw the tree there, although we planned it poorly and had to go around the block to get from one to the other.

It's now that weird period between Christmas and New Year's that doesn't entirely feel like it should exist. It was one thing back when I was in school and had the whole week (and change, depending on when the holidays fell) off, but working over this period makes me more aware of it.

Current Music: Tori Amos: Daisy Dead Petals (live)

23 November was the beginning of Great Adventure's Holiday in the Park. They were only open for seven hours, but we ended up coming in about an hour after they opened and leaving before closing. We were both really tired towards the end.

A whole section of the park was closed, but we did go on nine different rides.

I believe Kingda Ka and Green Lantern are closing for good, and the Skyride is no longer operational.

The Teacups were decorated as Gingerbread Twist, but they weren't playing holiday music on the Carousel.

It did play "Dixie," a song that would be fun if it weren't for all the historical baggage. There were several spots where you could take pictures with holiday-themed characters. The ones I had pictures of were the Snow Queen and King and the Poinsettia Prince and Princess, not exactly holiday heavy hitters, but their outfits were cute.

We spent Thanksgiving at Beth's mom's house, as per usual. We didn't really do anything on the day other than have dinner, or at least I didn't. On the following day, we went to the Creamy Acres Night of Lights, which was pretty much the same as usual, although they might have made it a bit longer. We rode in the wagon, and it was colder than I expected it to be. They still had Santa firing a pretzel from a cannon into a bag, which seems like an inefficient way of loading things.

He was also riding in a hot air balloon, playing baseball, and ski jumping.

The guy has a lot of hobbies. There were also some indoor displays, but when I say "indoor," the doors were open and it was cold.

These nutcrackers were certainly feeling it.

This section had a bunch of characters from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and A Charlie Brown Christmas, and a lot of stand-ins (apparently what those pictures with the holes for faces are called).

They were made with little kids in mind, however, so we had to duck down for some of them.

They had some cows and a goat, but they stayed inside their shelters, which was a good idea on their parts.

On Saturday night, we met up with Stephanie, who was in town between flights, and ate at a place called Lulla. I had the agnolotti, which was pasta stuffed with cheese, covered with bolognese sauce. Then we saw a late-night showing of Gladiator II, but I already wrote about that.

We don't have the cats with us here this week, which is weird and kind of sad.

It does mean I don't have to refill the food or water for a while, though. I'm anxious about how many things we have to do in December. On my calendar, I have two doctors' appointments, Kevin Geeks Out, They Might Be Giants, and Micky Dolenz. I also need to get a new car, and while there isn't a particular time period for that as I don't drive that much, it would be nice to do that before the inspection for my current car is due. And that's not counting shopping, or getting a tree, or watching relevant media. Yes, some of those things are for fun, but there's still hassle involved. I've been playing Octopath Traveler a lot recently, but most of it has just been leveling up. There are some major difficulty spikes in that game. I did finally beat Miguel, but most of the other third chapters haven't been working out for me.

Current Mood: anxious
Current Music: Decemberists: The Reapers

I'm sure it's not polite to mention it, but today is my birthday. Guess how old I am.

I've written before about L. Frank Baum's recurring usage of that number. Unfortunately, it's also the number of our president-elect, because for some reason the precedent was set by Grover Cleveland for non-consecutive terms to count as separate presidents, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Beth's birthday was on Friday, and we spent a lot of it driving.

On the Saturday before last, Beth wanted to go to a place she'd just found out about on the Internet, the American Treasure Tour in Oaks, Pennsylvania. We drove there with her mom and uncle. It's located inside a warehouse building, and is the collection of one particular person who prefers to remain anonymous. It fills two rooms, one for musical instruments and one for toys, although there's a lot of overlap and a fair amount of stuff that doesn't fit either category. Much of the music room is dedicated to self-playing instruments, like player pianos and band organs.

One organ played "Dancing Queen," and I would have thought their era would have been largely over by the seventies, but I think I've occasionally heard even newer stuff on carousel organs.

It also has a lot of dolls and dollhouses, and some miniature sets of scenes from movies, including a few Oz-related ones.

The toy room also has a Tin Woodman and Munchkin Mayor.

One part of the music room had a lot of phones.

There's a lot of old advertising stuff, and items and displays from stores, restaurants, and circuses.

A giant jack-in-the-box from Kay-Bee Toys contains a soldier who calls himself Mr. Kay-Bee, and sings songs. Kay-Bee was still around in my younger days, and they still used toy soldiers as mascots, but I didn't know any of them had names.

One part has a bunch of Coca-Cola polar bears, and another some RCA Victor dogs.

And there are some interesting pairings with stuffed animals in the seats of cars and motorcycles, some toys and others ones made to drive on actual roads.

Could you really trust Foghorn Leghorn to drive a tractor, or Dopey from the Seven Dwarfs to fly a plane?

Did Yoshi run away, so Mario had to ride a horse instead?

And what do Kermit and Petunia think of Miss Piggy and Porky Pig taking a drive together?

This car with the Burger King and Ronald McDonald (or at least their heads) hanging out together does look official, though.

An early Chuck E. Cheese animatronic gave the mouse a gruff New York accent, which I don't think he had in the more recent commercials I recall seeing.

And R2-D2 was hanging out with some cotton candy and popcorn robots.

There's a tram tour around much of the toy room, and the driver has to turn very sharply in narrow passages, so I'm glad I'm not in charge of that. This lumberjack and giraffe were in a different part of the warehouse complex.

Last Tuesday, Beth and I saw Ben Folds at a venue near where I work, which was convenient for me.

His opener was Lindsey Kraft, who also played piano and had a pretty similar style.

Her performance was pretty loose, with her telling the story of her relationships and other life events, sliding casually into the songs.

Ben played one set, and then had another that was all requests delivered by paper airplane. I know not all of them made it to the stage, as I saw a few lying on the floor, which is a shame. I threw one of them that landed near me, but not hard enough to get it to the front, and I don't know whether anyone else passed it along. Ben commented on how a lot of the requests were for mellow songs, and there were also several for stuff he did for movie soundtracks that he couldn't remember anymore, including the cover of the Clash's "Lost in the Supermarket" for Over the Hedge. At one point, he attempted a Bruce Springsteen cover that turned into "Sweet Caroline" when he thought his voice was sounding more like Neil Diamond. They do both have similar vocal tones. This show was seated, but it was all folding chairs. We have tickets to see Franz Ferdinand at the same place later on, and it's standing room only.

This past weekend, we went to Pennsylvania to see my family. Before we got to my dad's house, we ate at Fuddrucker's for the first time in a while. There used to be one near Beth's mom's house, but it closed down years ago. On Saturday, we went with my dad and his wife to Columbia, and visited a museum that used to be a church.

They had a large train set, and a guy working there told some ghost stories.

Another place nearby was showcasing some sculptors from Baltimore.

And we drove to a nearby overlook above the Susquehanna River.

That evening, we had dinner with my brother and his wife and son. It's my nephew's seventh birthday tomorrow, and I don't see him very often. He's still very energetic, and I don't think he gets that from our side of the family. I still need to get him a present. The next day, we got frozen yogurt with my sister, and I briefly saw my mom, who's not doing very well right now. My brother gave me a Baby Fozzie Bear from McDonald's in the eighties, and my sister a pack of Wizard of Oz trading cards and the Switch version of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. I have the GameCube version of that, but our GameCube is still at Beth's mom's house. And this morning, Beth gave me Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age, also for Switch. Not all of my presents for Beth have even arrived yet, and her birthday is over already.

Current Music: Don't Let's Start Podcast

Beth and I did some other things in California besides OzCon, so here are a few of them. We flew into LAX on Tuesday, and stayed at a motel within walking distance of Knott's Berry Farm, which we visited on Wednesday. The park is surprisingly close to Disneyland, and not far from Kellogg West. Too bad we had to go to Culver City in between the two. It's very common for amusement parks to have an Old West area, and at Knott's, it was probably the biggest section in the park.

You could even sit on a bench with some hookers. Well, dancers, anyway.

They also had parts with fifties and Mexican themes, as well as Camp Snoopy for kiddie rides. I think it might have been the first park to license the Peanuts characters, although they're at a lot of them now. The only berry-themed ride was the seemingly obligatory one where you shoot stuff on a screen, in this case to help bears get stolen pies back from some coyotes.

The guns had pull strings, and it was hard to tell what you were shooting. I kind of wonder why the bumper cars weren't called Traffic Jam. They had several roller coasters, including the Pony Express, the surf-themed HangTime (which included a part where we were suspended at the top of a hill for a little while), Silver Bullet, Xcelerator, and the wooden GhostRider.

That was our last ride of the night, and we were on the last train they ran that day, about an hour after the official closing time. Another coaster, Jaguar!, was closed. The carousel had a lot of unusual animals. We rode ostriches, but I was also fascinated by the cats with fish in their mouths.

The Calico Mine Ride was pretty cool, featuring old animatronics. That was also the one with the know-it-all kid in front of us in line. We rode the Calico Railroad, and a guy dressed as a bandit called me "Bowser" because of my Super Mario hat. We did not, however, have a chance to ride the stagecoach.

On Thursday, we ate breakfast at Denny's, then went on the Sony Pictures tour, checked in at Kellogg West, and ate at a fast food hot dog place called Wienerschnitzel. We also went to a Circle K for the first time in our lives. After OzCon, we met with Stephanie and her dog Chelsea on Sunday and went to the John Waters exhibit at the Academy Museum, which had a good collection of props and memorabilia, including stained glass pictures of some of his characters.

After that, we went to the Oracle Mystic Museum in Burbank, which had an interactive exhibit with moving parts based on horror movies.

The neighborhood where it was located had at least two year-round Halloween stores that didn't allow photographs, and also this elephant.

I wonder if they know Kabumpo.

Before catching our plane back east on Monday night, we stopped at two other museums and a mausoleum. The Bunny Museum in Altadena was something Beth found out about on Reddit, and someone there said they found it disturbing.

It's a small building, but it's absolutely packed with stuff, all rabbit-related. Of course, it came nowhere close to being exhaustive, as bunnies are very heavily represented in our culture. I think humans are genetically inclined to find them cute. One room was all holiday stuff, including Hocus Pocus from Frosty the Snowman.

A kitchen and patio had relevant stuff, and another room had creepier and more adult stuff, like Frank from Donnie Darko, Playboy Bunnies, and weird old masks.

I particularly liked the red guy with horns. Another reminded me of my mom's rabbit mask that I wore when I dressed as Wag for the Munchkin Convention, which apparently Johnny Galecki also owns.

This might have been why the museum was listed as unsettling, although when you're dealing with old toys, some of it is going to be disturbing to modern audiences even when it wasn't intended to be.

Upstairs, they had some original art.

Bugs Bunny, the Trix Rabbit, the Quik Bunny, My Melody from Sanrio, the Energizer Bunny, Harvey, Rabbit from Winnie-the-Pooh, Roger Rabbit, the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland, and the bunny suit from A Christmas Story were all represented as well.

And they had two sets of the Uncle Wiggily Game, which I played a lot as a kid, and which is similar in structure to the Wonderful Game of Oz.

There were also some informational signs, on such topics as rabbit-related expressions, anthropomorphic bunnies, the origins of magicians pulling rabbits out of hats, someone in a bunny suit who followed David Bowie around in 2004, and the meaning of the name of Spain.

I would have liked to have seen some of John R. Neill's rabbit pictures, but no such luck.

After this museum, we visited the Mountain View Mausoleum, which had some cool art and a pretty garden.

Both that and our next destination, the Museum of Death in Hollywood, were suggested by a couple we met at OzCon.

The Death Museum didn't allow pictures, so you'll have to trust me when I say it was very graphic. It included exhibits on serial killers, death cults, taxidermy and preservation, car accidents, and cannibalism. They had a taxidermied dog who had died with Jayne Mansfield. One of the employees had a lot to say about Heaven's Gate, and another was impressed that Beth was able to correctly identify the film Orozco the Embalmer.

That's mostly what we did in California, but I'm also going to include our activity from yesterday, Kevin Geeks Out at the Nitehawk in Williamsburg, which is difficult to reach from where we live and work. We actually ended up being a few minutes late. The theme was twins, also including doubles, doppelgangers and clones. David Gregory (not the one from XTC) talked about the many Bruce Lee imitators who starred in rip-off movies, and co-host Chris Cummins discussed the various imitations of Archie Comics. Tenebrous Kate discussed the Barbarian Brothers, twin bodybuilders who were somewhat popular in the eighties and nineties, including starring in a movie that was largely a Conan rip-off. Another presentation was on Waluigi, and what the deal was with him, which I don't think anybody knows for sure. He's pretty much only ever around for sports and party games. There was a mention of how, according to Nintendo, he and Wario aren't even related, although since Nintendo went back and forth on whether the Koopalings were Bowser's kids, who knows what their current story is? He does seem to have gained a certain amount of popularity, although that could be BECAUSE of how bizarre and relatively obscure he is. One bit was on Alice Cooper, and how he criticized conformity and then became pretty conservative. I'm not sure I knew that he recently made a transphobic comment, but I do remember him speaking positively of George W. Bush. And Kevin Maher showed clips of characters realizing they were clones or duplicates. The Kindest Cut for the night was of Big Business, a twin mix-up comedy starring Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin, which Beth saw when Clementon Park was closed for rain.

Current Music: Sparks: I Wish I Looked a Little Better

On Saturday, 16 September, Beth and I made our third annual trip to Dorney Park, where they had just started their Halloween thing. None of the waits were bad, but they did close some of the rides early, and we hadn't been aware of that ahead of time. They also closed off some of the paths through the park after dark, and there were a lot of kids running around recklessly. I don't think we rode anything new this time, except for the Cedar Creek Cannonball, which wasn't running on our previous two trips.

I might have ridden it as a kid, but I can't remember for sure. The park has two train rides, but I've never been there when both were operational. I did get a little sick, not seriously so, but my stomach felt uncomfortable. I think one of the worst rides for my general health is the Revolution. They had a lot of advertising for the Iron Menace, which is scheduled to open next year.

Last Saturday, we visited the Creamy Acres Night of Terror again.

The Moon was pretty cooperative. I understand we missed the Harvest Moon by one day.
It was mostly the same as last time, with a hayride and three walkthroughs, including one with 3-D glasses. The ground was muddy, but that wasn't anyone's fault. They had a flood warning in New York the day before, but fortunately Beth and I were both working from home. We posed for some pictures with a skeleton, who was pretty big, but not quite in Gashadokuro territory.

We also went to a Spirit Halloween, where the main things I wanted to photograph were costumes with off-brand names.

I don't even really understand the Serpent Queen, since I'm pretty sure "Medusa" and "Gorgon" aren't trademarked. We bought some T-shirts there, but haven't worn them yet.

Monday was Kevin Geeks Out at the Nitehawk in Prospect Park, which is a lot easier to get to than the one in Williamsburg. It was on fast food, and included a good mix of stuff. Emily Menez talked about vegetarian options at fast food places (there aren't many) and compared them to ones in fiction. Michael Williams did a pre-recorded bit on Australian fast food, and how it's common to have beetroot on burgers there. Sounds gross to me, but I usually get fast food sandwiches without any of the vegetables anyway. KFC in Australia tried having cartoon mascots for a brief time, a fox and a chicken hawk with Southern (American) accents.

And I really don't know why Burger King is called Hungry Jack's there. Audrey Lazaro discussed Jollibee's and its mascots. Mr. Yum struck me as being similar to Wimpy, with his suit and tie and association with hamburgers.

They kept the character, but made him younger and less formal.

Wimpy does have his own restaurant, although I've never been to one. Popeyes, the chicken place, was apparently not named after the sailor, but did use him in advertising up until 2012.

Watch on YouTube

Co-host Camila Jones did a match-up between pizza chain founders. Burlesque dancer Perse Fanny did a McDonald's themed striptease. And Max Bank did a bit as advertising executive Donny Deutsch, whom I'd heard of because he used to have a talk show on CNBC for some reason, which included a part about coming up with Uncle O'Grimacey. The Kindest Cut this time was the 1978 movie Starhops, which not only has a title presumably inspired by Star Wars, but even opens with a parody of its crawl. There was a bit about how Clara Peller from the Wendy's "Where's the Beef?" commercials did a rap with Coyote McCloud that seemed very similar to an earlier song using Rodney Dangerfield clips, and Adam Bernstein recorded his own parody for this show. And Kevin made a non-canonical but valid point about how Ronald McDonald is Grimace's best friend, but Grimace isn't Ronald's. The Grimazuzu picture is from a bit that was never fully developed, but I have written about both Grimace and Pazuzu pretty recently. We didn't actually eat fast food that day. The grilled cheese sandwich I had at a nearby café was made pretty quickly, but I don't think it counts. But then, Pizza Hut qualifying must be a pretty recent thing, as I remember having pretty long waits there when I was a kid. Or maybe they just felt long because I was impatient.

Current Music: They Might Be Giants: Hell Hotel

We visited the Brooklyn Botanic Garden the Tuesday before last, and Clementon Park that Saturday. There wasn't much new at the former, but they did have a sign about how inaccurate the term "horsechestnuts" is.

So much of the latter is the water park now, and we didn't go on anything there, so it left us with only a few rides.

The Tilt-A-Whirl and the Hellcat weren't running, but I didn't mind that with the latter, as it's very rough.

The sign does not lie.
Some other people at the park were obsessed with the eagle at the top of the roller coaster, and I don't know how long it's been there.

We rode the Ring of Fire for the first time, and it was the first time I'd ridden a Super Loops sort of ride at all. I think I first saw one of them in the movie Big, and wondered if it was like a coaster loop without the coaster. I guess it's a little different, because it builds up momentum before going all the way around. While it didn't burn, burn, burn, it was uncomfortable.

The C.P. Huntington train was taken out of service a few times, although we did ride it twice. I get the impression they had to overhaul the engine, as it's now noisy and smells of gasoline, and it was sometimes difficult for the engineer to get it started. And I rode both the zebra and the dragon on the carousel.

They serve Pizza Hut there now, and I hadn't had that in quite a while. Do they even have old-style Pizza Huts anymore? The last one I ate at was an Express, and while the food seems to still be the same, I miss the stained glass lamps and the strangely dim light.

This past Saturday, we visited Long Beach Island in New Jersey for the first time. I actually had a provisional job offer there once, but I figured it was too far away, and there was no guarantee that the job would last anyway. According to Beth, around where she grew up in South Jersey, people going to the beach said they were going "down the shore," which I can't recall hearing when I was young. We first visited Seaside Heights, which has a boardwalk and a little amusement park called Casino Pier. While there, we rode Xolo Loca, Pirate's Hideaway, the Ferris Wheel, Hydrus, and the Skyride.

Xolo Loca, named after the Xoloitzcuintle dog, is a small roller coaster with spinning cars.

I thought Pirate's Hideaway might be a dark ride, and I guess it is in a general sense, but it's really just a coaster that's mostly indoors. They also had an odd assortment of statues, including Paul Bunyan, a hobo alligator, a chicken on steroids, and what looks like Mighty Mouse with his face erased and then drawn back on.

As funny as the writing on the hobogator is, I can't help but think some kids would WANT to be bitten.
You can't actually get onto the beach there without a pass. I didn't have any particular desire to do so anyway, but monetizing just walking somewhere is kind of scummy. The other place we visited was Jenkinson's Boardwalk in Point Pleasant Beach, which is more geared towards kids.

There, we rode the train (also a C.P. Huntington) and the carousel, as well as a coaster called Tidal Wave, which was largely the same as Xolo Loca, but had a beach theme instead of a Mexican one. Both boardwalks had a lot of arcades, focusing more on games where you can win prizes than ones you just play.

Spider-Mario says, "With great-a power-ups comes great-a responsibility!"
There are several games called Cut 2 Win or something similar that involve cutting down a big stuffed animal in a case, and I don't think I'd seen that kind before.

They had a lot of stuffed seagulls with food, too.

We ate the Rainbow Diner in Brick (home of the late Rachel Cosgrove Payes) afterwards, and my obsession with kids' menus where the foods are named after cartoon characters continues. Shouldn't the Super Mario be the spaghetti, or maybe mushrooms? I associate Snoopy with pizza and cookies, although the Turtles are even more pizza-obsessed. Diners don't often have pizza, though. And clownfish eat plankton and other tiny organisms. The one thing they got correct is that Donald Duck really does seem to eat a lot of turkey, despite being a bird himself.

Current Mood: a little on the warm side
Current Music: Sparks: Pineapple

Two weekends ago was Monster-Mania. The problem is that we usually spend most of our time there at the question-and-answer panels, but due to the writers' and actors' strikes, people weren't allowed to discuss their work. They could still be there and sign autographs, but there weren't any panels. Beth had already paid for it, though, so we still went, but didn't spend a lot of time. We walked around the dealer rooms and bought some drawings from an artist named Jen Tracy. She got a haunted one, and I got Tik-Tok.

I also thought her Medusa drawing, which we didn't buy, was really cool. And we watched part of a game show called Curse Your Luck, a play on Press Your Luck with horror movie characters instead of Whammies.

There was a trivia part, but it was difficult for the audience to play along. The screen was too small to read, and the hosts didn't finish the questions if a contestant answered them before they were done reading. We did learn that Friendly's has the mini mozzarella sticks again, at least at the location we went to, although Beth says they taste different than they did before. It's hard to tell, as it's been so long, but I think I got what she meant.

This past Wednesday, we went to Playland, where we both felt kind of sick after going on some pretty tame rides. Beth swears by motion sickness pills, and thinks the ones I bought just weren't up to the task. I also bought more pizza than we could finish, because I wasn't sure how big the personal ones were. And I'm usually capable of eating a lot of pizza. But anyway, it was pretty fun, but there wasn't anything new, although I think it was the first time we rode Catch a Wave. There used to be something quite similar at Clementon Park, where it was called the Falling Star.

I mentioned last year that the Derby Racer seems slower now, and one of the employees confirmed that, although he didn't know the reason why that happened. His guess was that there was an injury. I also mentioned the Old Mill, actually the first thing we rode on our first visit to the park, but I didn't talk about the sign that says it has a "dark and forbidding atmosphere."

I guess things have changed since 1929, and dragons aren't as scary when they audibly creak anyway.

I always like to take pictures from the Ferris Wheel, and I guess it's a good thing I'm calm enough about it now, because I used to get really nervous when that kind of ride (not this particular one) would stop at the top to load more people. I'm still kind of scared I might drop something, though.

We've been watching the new Futurama episodes, and from what I've seen and the descriptions of the ones that have yet to air, it kind of seems like they're overdoing the commentary on current events. They've always done that, but not quite that often. I'll wait until I've actually seen the entire season to pass judgment, though. Also, I downloaded the Steam version of Final Fantasy X some years ago and decided to check it out this weekend. There's a guy who ends up 1000 years in the future and befriends a guy voiced by John DiMaggio, which is pretty familiar. I'll probably write more about the game once I've gotten a little further into it or it becomes too frustrating for me to want to continue, as FF8 was.

Finally, tomorrow is Ozma's birthday. How are you going to celebrate?

Current Music: Ditty Bops: The Weeds Are Winning

Our second trip to California was primarily for OzCon, but we did a few other things as well. Beth and I flew in last Thursday, and I rented a car through Turo, which we'd heard about from Stephanie. It was my first time using it, and it's weird, because you're just renting some other person's car. For some reason, that makes me more nervous than getting one from a rental place, even though it's cheaper. I'm not even sure how insurance works; they tried to sell me some kind of extra protection, but since I couldn't figure out exactly what it entailed, I declined it. It worked out all right, although the car wasn't great on hills, of which there are a lot more in the Los Angeles area than where we live. We got in pretty early to have the chance to do some stuff before the convention, but we really didn't. I did stop to do a bit of laundry at a place called Laundry 2000, but we couldn't find anything else that had convenient parking, and we were both tired. A few hours later, we ate at a diner called Norm's, an area chain that I'd never heard of. While driving back to Pomona, we crossed a street called Lark Ellen Avenue, which was weird as there was a character with that name in The Mysterious Chronicles of Oz. I looked it up, and it's the nickname of an opera singer, Ellen Beach Yaw, who lived in the area. On Sunday after the convention, we drove to downtown LA and went out to eat with Stephanie. Her original plan was to eat at a fancy place on a rooftop, but since it was so hot out, we ended up just getting drinks there and eating at the IHOP nearby. Stephanie said she hadn't been to one of those in a long time, but she liked it. As someone who likes to eat what's familiar, I'm a fan of chain restaurants, although I get why people want to try local things when on vacation. I was glad to see that Denny's is apparently still thriving in the area, even though we didn't go to any of them. Around here, a lot of them have closed, and the open ones no longer serve food all day.

On Monday, we went to Six Flags Magic Mountain, as we'd been planning to do on our last trip until I forgot my glasses and couldn't drive there. It's built on an actual mountain, although it's not as vertical in its layout as Universal Studios. I understand it's also the Thrill Capital of the World. It's been very hot recently, and I'm sure that wasn't good for us when we were outside all day. I don't usually get sick from roller coasters, but I did a few times on that day. And, as it's a Six Flags park, they definitely emphasized the coasters. The only non-coaster things we rode were the carousel and the train.

Their carousel doesn't have its own music, which is kind of disappointing. Since it's a Warner Bros. park, they should at least have a particular song playing when it isn't running.

The first thing we rode, the New Revolution, appears in the movie Rollercoaster, and both that and Twisted Colossus are in National Lampoon's Vacation.

It was just the Colossus back then, though; the Twisted part is due to a 2015 remodel that added steel to the wooden frame. There are some steampunk-type things in and outside the waiting area.

We also rode X2 (formerly just X; did Elon Musk name it?), Viper, Tatsu, Full Throttle, Scream, and Wonder Woman Flight of Courage.

Viper was the same as the one they used to have at Great Adventure, which was really rough, and was removed some years ago.

The name of Tatsu made me think of Shredder's henchman in the first two Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies, but it's really just Japanese for a dragon. It's like Superman Ultimate Flight at Great Adventure in that the seats turn you into a position with your back parallel to the track, but I found it more intense. The ride's slogan is "fly at the speed of fear," similar to "travel at the speed of fright" for the now-defunct Big Bad Wolf at Busch Gardens in Virginia.

Wonder Woman is a single-rail coaster.

A lot of them were running only one train at a time, which was frustrating despite fairly short lines. There were a few others that were either closed or we just didn't have the time and/or energy to ride. It's kind of confusing that Six Flags parks will use similar names for different rides. At Great Adventure, there's a Wonder Woman pendulum ride, while one of the coasters at Magic Mountain that was closed was Superman: Escape from Krypton. Yeah, there's more to the names to distinguish them, but still. The tickets we bought included parking, unlimited refills on drinks throughout the day, and food every hour and a half. We didn't really take advantage of that last one, due to time constraints and several food places being closed, but I did get pizza at two different locations.

We're back home now, and it's still strangely lonely with the cats gone. I went back to work yesterday, and I've been feeling kind of awkward there recently for a few reasons I don't want to go into just now, and that probably don't really matter in the long run. I did learn that we'll be able to work from home two days a week starting later this month, although it's different days every week. The problem is that the work laptop has such a tiny screen, so it's hard to switch from one thing to another. Maybe I could hook it up to my computer monitor. I'm also wondering if I should just stop using Twitter. As far as I can tell, changing its name to something really dumb hasn't changed the interface or anything, but there just doesn't seem to be a lot of interaction there anymore, except from the all too numerous spambots. Mark Zuckerberg is probably even worse than Musk in some ways, but he's more behind the scenes, so I don't have to think about how much of a jerk he is every time I open Facebook. Twitter was just so convenient when I had one-off thoughts, though. Musk is like Donald Trump, not just in that they're both bigots, but that they presumably have enough money that they could just live a life of leisure, but instead insist on playing businessman. I guess they crave the power and attention. And I'm still not sure how constantly making things less convenient for users is supposed to make money. It's probably related to how stock prices apparently have very little to do with whether companies are producing anything, but just about the whims of investors; and how every other ad online is about a vague concept instead of a tangible thing.

Current Mood: melancholy
Current Music: Human League: WXJL Tonight

There was a Sparks concert at the Hollywood Bowl with They Might Be Giants opening, so Beth and I made the trip to Los Angeles (the one in South California, not the one in South Patagonia). Fortunately, we were able to stay with our friend Stephanie, who put us up and put up with us. Her dog Chelsea was also very friendly, and it was nice to have a pet around after losing ours. When we got in on Thursday, after sleeping for a while, we went to a place called Vidiots for a screening of Gigantic, the TMBG documentary. I hadn't actually seen it straight through since when it came out in 2002. It's a little weird, because it kind of skips over most of the nineties in terms of the band's history, or at least feels like it does. Afterwards, director A.J. Schnack was there with Johns Linnnell and Flansburgh to ask some questions.

They mentioned how Mink Car, the album they were making when a lot of the footage was filmed, was kind of a lost album that had apparently gone out of print. It came out on 11 September 2001, and the label that released it went out of business not long afterwards. Flans said something about the Red Hot Chili Peppers' Swatch Watch campaign being the major turning point in the music world, and the Sid and Marty Krofft special with the Brady Bunch kids. And he mentioned The Truth About Cats and Dogs being the median between good and bad movies. I've never seen it, but I do remember thinking Janeane Garofalo was more attractive than Uma Thurman at the time, although that may not still be the case today. They had done a long interview earlier that day, so they didn't take audience questions, but I couldn't think of anything to ask anyway. The next day, we did karaoke. Beth sang Sparks' "This Town Ain't Big Enough for Both of Us," I sang Frank Black's "Headache" and the Monkees' "What Am I Doing Hangin' 'Round?", and we both did the Human League's "Don't You Want Me" with the genders switched. I didn't think that it would have been appropriate to do Frank's "Los Angeles" instead. On Saturday, we had brunch with three of Stephanie's friends, who were pretty elegant. I had the berry French Toast.

The place we went had its own hens, and I tried to get some pictures, but they didn't come out that well.

And in the evening, we saw Pee-wee's Big Adventure at the Alamo Drafthouse, the first time I'd seen it on the big screen. They had a replica of Pee-wee's bike in the lobby, so finally it really IS at the Alamo, or at least was for a while.

Sunday was the day of the show, and we had box seats, yet it was still the farthest Beth has been from the stage at a Sparks concert. TMBG opened with "Damn Good Times," which had been in my head before that, as it mentions karaoke.

The trio of horn players joined them for a few songs, including "When Will You Die," in which Linnell worked "the horns" into the lyrics about the band.

That's not the song they're playing here, though.
During the improvisation at the end of "Spy," Linnell did a bit that sounded like it was from a commercial for a record of 1930s music. There were no surprises in the set, but I understand they'd been playing "Authenticity Trip" at recent shows, and that mentions the Hollywood Hills, so it would have made sense in that respect. Of course, it's also pretty obscure, being on an album that I don't think was released to stores. Every show of the Sparks tour has the same setlist, although they cut out two songs this time, specifically "The Toughest Girl in Town" and "Escalator." Stephanie mentioned that they're very strict about curfews at outdoor venues in the area. Interestingly, Russell did do a longer introduction for "We Go Dancing."

The Maels talked about how they'd seen the Beatles play at the Bowl when they were kids. It's interesting that the backing band for Sparks is kind of hidden in the background. Russell does introduce them, but they're not showcased. The Johns give a lot more attention to their band, although they still don't generally participate in the creative process...except on the children's albums, for some reason. A few people left the show early, including the other people in our box and the ones in the next box over. It's an unusual venue in the sense that they let you bring in food. Beth bought some Sparks souvenirs that hadn't been sold at other shows on the tour, plus a TMBG Hollywood sign T-shirt and a Flood tote bag. I got some Flood socks, so now all I need are some Flood pants.

Our original plan was to go to Magic Mountain on Monday, but that's difficult to get to without driving, and I had forgotten to bring my glasses. So we went to Universal Studios instead. I had wanted to see Super Nintendo World, and it does look really cool, but it's very small.

Most of the individual themed areas at the park are pretty small, but especially that one; and there really aren't too many rides in the place. The first thing we rode was the Simpsons Ride, a motion simulator with a narrative about Sideshow Bob trying to kill the family at Krustyland, and then elsewhere in Springfield.

In the line for the ride, TV screens show clips from various episodes, most of them related to amusement parks, plus a few bits recorded specifically for the ride. There do seem to be a surprising number of theme parks in the Springfield area, although Itchy & Scratchy Land is a few days' drive away according to its debut episode. There's a reference to how the Simpsons Ride replaced the Back to the Future one, with Professor Frink going back in time to try to stop Krusty from buying Doc Brown's lab, and Christopher Lloyd did the voice. The Mummy ride is a roller coaster with a lot of stuff to see, and at one point little tentacles grab at your feet, while Jurassic World is a log flume with dinosaurs, and the Transformers ride shakes you around a lot. I thought the voice for Wheelie sounded like Rob Paulsen as Yakko Warner, but apparently it's really Tom Kenney. That one requires glasses, presumably so you can see more than meets the eye. It's funny how many rides there and at the Disney parks have narratives about the ride going wrong. The only ride in the Nintendo area was the Mario Kart one, and it malfunctioned when we were close to getting on, although we did eventually get to ride. It was fun, although rides that are also games can be a little overwhelming. They put a LOT of work into the decorations you see when you're in line, starting with Yoshi's Island stuff and then making its way into Bowser's Castle.

I'd previously seen pictures of the bookshelves, which have many interesting titles. Who knew the Koopa King was that avid of a reader?

There were games in the Nintendo area you could play for an extra fee, mostly geared towards kids, but we didn't participate in that. A lot of Super Nintendo World kind of looked like one of those clocks with a bunch of stuff happening, in that everything moves around in a preset pattern. I wouldn't have minded getting a picture with Princess Peach, but our timing didn't work out. We did, however, get to meet Scooby-Doo, and with hardly any line.

Turns out it was really the guy from the amusement park.
Aren't the Hanna-Barbera characters now owned by Warner Brothers? I'm sure there are all kinds of complex licensing deals involved. The Simpsons are now a Disney property, but that didn't happen until some years after the ride opened. I remember when Scooby was at Kings Dominion in Virginia back in my childhood. We didn't realize that the studio lot tour ended at 8:15, so we missed that, and it was one of the things that interested me the most. I was less excited about the Harry Potter area, as it's hard not to think about J.K. Rowling's bigotry, but we did go on the two rides there. Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey is a virtual reality thing with appearances from many of the actors in the movies, and it was the roughest thing we rode.

The other, Flight of the Hippogriff, is a short roller coaster. For some reason, the train you ride in is made to look like wicker, which is pretty cool. Beth got a T-shirt with a Chain Chomp on it; while I bought some Mario Kart boxers and magnets, and a Bowser keychain. And I got a sunburn on the back of my neck. I understand it's even easier to get burned in Southern California than it is where we live, as there are hardly any clouds. Where's Lakitu when you need him?

We're back home now, but we'll be going to California again soon, as the events we wanted to attend there were too far apart. The next trip is for OzCon, but we'll also try to visit Magic Mountain.

Current Mood: exhausted
Current Music: They Might Be Giants: Authenticity Trip

The weekend before last, Beth and I went to South Jersey, where we saw a movie and went to her cousin-once-removed's fourth birthday party. I don't have much to say about it, but the food there was good. And on Tuesday, we visited a ghost town in New Jersey, but we didn't see any ghosts. Or are you not supposed to be able to see them? I don't know.

The town was called Feltville, because it was founded by a guy named David Felt, who owned a mill at the bottom of the hill, somewhere in the general area of this brook.

There are a few houses that have been preserved, as well as one gravestone that predates Felt, but the mill itself is long gone.

I understand they sometimes rent out the barn for events.

The town was abandoned more than once, the last time being in the 1960s. Several people were walking their dogs there, and at least two of them weren't even on leashes. We also saw Lake Surprise, which was nearby, but we'd prepared for it so the name wasn't accurate for us. We ate dinner at a diner in the area, and ice cream at a place called McCool's. I wonder if it was named after Fionn. I didn't notice any Salmon of Knowledge flavored ice cream, but the polar bear in the window might well have liked that.

I had strawberry cheesecake flavor, which I remember liking as a kid but hadn't had in years. I think it's too aggressively sweet for me now.

We have our reservations and flights planned out for OzCon at the end of July, and I've reread The Cowardly Lion of Oz, which is one of the themes of the convention this year. The other is Oz in animation. Is there anything I should watch beforehand? I believe the Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz series geared toward young kids is only available if you pay for Boomerang. Is the Lion of Oz movie any good? I haven't read the book it's based on either, but I have heard the feature is better than the book. I've also written something for the program book, and I'm supposed to write a quiz. That shouldn't be too hard, but I also have to come up with some kind of prize.

We've been giving Reagan fluid subcutaneously for her kidneys. I don't know if it's related, but in the past few days she's been walking awkwardly and hasn't been jumping. We'll have to take her to the vet if this keeps up, but I'm hoping it won't come to that. It's expensive having senior cats.

Current Music: Cracker: The Golden Age

Since we were married on Leap Day, Beth and I celebrated our anniversary on the first of this month, and went to the orchid show at the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx.

The orchid part was all indoors, much of it in a simulated tropical environment. I can say I didn't know that much about orchids, but there are a lot of different kinds, in many different colors.

Also in the conservatory was a cactus that looked like a bunch of snakes, although snakes usually aren't that scary.

The rest of the garden was, not surprisingly, pretty chilly, and not a lot was blooming. We did, however, take a tram ride around the place. I also thought that this rock looked like it would have an item inside or under it.

Maybe if Link were there. The NYBG is bigger than the one in Brooklyn, but not as big as Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania. It contains the last vestige of the forest that once covered much of the area. Afterwards, we went to eat at the Olive Garden. The last few times I've been there, I've gotten rigatoni with five-cheese marinara sauce and sausage.

This past weekend was the Monster-Mania Convention in Cherry Hill, and while we were on the way there, we stopped at a kitschy candy store called Rocket Fizz.

Maybe this woman made her family disappear.
Tavie had taken some pictures there, and Beth found out that there was one in Marlton.

There's a lot of interesting stuff, including the kind of potato chips my teacher gave out in elementary school and a bunch of socks with brand logos, including Diet Coke, Bubble Yum, Swedish Fish, and Froot Loops.

None of those were anything I felt strongly enough about to want to wear on my feet, although I do drink a fair amount of Diet Coke, and I used to eat Swedish Fish in high school and college. They also had a lot of weird themed sodas, including a Monkees banana nut flavor that we bought, as well as tributes to Ritchie Valens, Rowdy Roddy Piper, and...Fidel Castro?

Beth also picked up a Zagnut bar, Jimmie Stix, and some Dutch licorice cats for her mom. I ended up getting a blueberry muffin Kit Kat, a little Pac-Man machine with some kind of candy that I haven't checked out yet, and a deck of Wizard of Oz playing cards with no candy involved at all. I had a pack of cards like those before, except with those it was just one picture on the backs, and here it looks like there are other images from the movies on the card faces.

I did notice a few items that appeared to be pro-Trump, although they had stuff that made fun of him as well. I remember, a few years ago, passing a souvenir shop in Manhattan that had both MAGA and Black Lives Matter hats. I guess that's what you could call mercenary merchandising.

As for the convention itself, I've noticed a gradual decline in the number and length of events that are free with admission, like question-and-answer panels and film introductions by people involved with them. There are still a few, though. The first one on Saturday was with Amie Donald, who played the titular robot girl in M3GAN, but didn't do the voice.

She has a New Zealand accent, and I'm not sure how well that would have worked for the character. Then came Adrienne Barbeau, followed by Brooke Smith, the woman who rubbed the lotion on her skin in Silence of the Lambs.

There were two bigger panels in the evening, the first featuring final girls from the Friday the 13th series, with Adrienne King, Amy Steel, Kimberly Beck, and Melanie Kinnaman.

And the one for the Terrifier films had several people on the production side as well as the actors.

Before it started, Leah Voysey sang the relentlessly catchy Clown Cafe song, with Elliott Fullam accompanying her on guitar.

David Howard Thornton, who played Art the Clown, did a pantomime of killing someone.

I also bought some Mario-related pictures from Dallas Pritchard of Studio 327.

On Sunday night, we got home in time for Beth to watch the Oscars, while I sort of half-watched them. As usual, I hadn't seen most of the movies that had been nominated for anything. We did see Elvis and Tar, and Turning Red was in the animated category. I do think I should probably see Everything Everywhere All at Once, and I'm sure I'll see Black Panther: Wakanda Forever at some point, although I'm behind on the Marvel movies. From the online comments I've seen about the ceremony, yeah, a fat suit probably shouldn't be winning any makeup awards; a commercial for The Little Mermaid during the broadcast is weird, but the whole thing is kind of a commercial anyway, so whatever; and Warner Bros. taking credit for movies they bought the rights to but didn't make seems rather similar to Elon Musk paying to call himself the founder of Tesla. I have no issue with Florence Pugh's outfit, though.

I guess I think she's just generally cute, though. It's weird how Janelle Monae's dress looked red on stage, but pretty bright orange elsewhere.

It stands out a lot more when the orangeness is obvious. And speaking of unusual colors, I have to give props to The Rock.

I haven't gone to the movies that much recently, but Beth was talking about wanting to see Scream 6, and there's the Mario movie coming up. From what I've seen in the trailers, it almost looks like they're throwing in too many references, although we don't know that everything there will be included, or will be particularly important even if it is. I guess it's just kind of weird to me because, from what I understand, it's loosely an adaptation of the original Super Mario Bros., yet they're including stuff that wasn't introduced into the series until decades after that. Then again, I'm pretty sure that, even if the movie is really successful, they're not going to make one based on each and every Mario game. I mostly like the designs, although Peach's head and eyes look kind of disproportionate to the rest of her.

I guess it's not the first time she's been depicted with a strangely large head for her body, though.

I have an ultrasound coming up on Thursday, and the cats have to go to the vet on Friday. And I'm not entirely sure how we're going to work out our summer plans, since Beth and I both have things we want to do in California in July, but in different parts of the month. For now, here's a picture of Reagan as a bat.

Current Mood: unprepared
Current Music: Battle Theme from Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door

Happy Solstice, Yule, or whatever you want to call it! We've had our Christmas tree up for a while now, and I posted pictures of it elsewhere online, but not here. It's smaller than last year's, but I see that as a good thing. Much easier to carry in and out of the building. I always feel kind of bad that there's no point in putting ornaments on the back of the tree, because it just seems so uneven. The orange pterodactyl is new for this year.

They had several kinds of colorful dinosaurs like that at Target. (And yes, I know a pterosaur is not really a dinosaur.) Whenever we get a tree, Wally likes to sit underneath it, while Reagan ignores it.

I suppose the first pre-Christmas activity I should mention is seeing the Nutcracker ballet at Lincoln Center on the last day of November. We were off to the side in the back of the third circle, and had an obstructed view, but it was still enjoyable. I'm really not familiar enough with ballet to give details, but I usually appreciate the mice and the kids coming out from Mother Ginger's skirt.

The Thursday after that, we saw the Kevin Geeks Out Christmas Special at Nitehawk Cinema in Prospect Park. There's always a list of the performers on the website after the show, but I always forget who did what. I know Camila Jones discussed Christmas movies, and how any film with a scene taking place on or around Christmas could technically count in that category. She also questioned a line from White Christmas about mixing fairy tales with buttermilk and liverwurst, and was confused as to what it actually means. There was a bit about the animated New Kids on the Block Christmas special, which involves Donny befriending a kid who turns out to be dead. Someone else did a multimedia bit about her mother rather passive-aggressively showing her the decorations at her house. There were also talks on Furbys and It's a Wonderful Life. And there was an updated video presentation of Santa Doesn't Need Your Help. Kevin hosted two games, the Santa suit one and Ott or Not, the goal of the latter being to guess whether a film was rated better or worse than a very early movie of a guy named James Ott sneezing. I actually won the Santa suit one a few years ago, and every other time was eliminated very quickly. It's mostly all luck, even if you have a photographic memory for celebrities in Santa suits, as there are always some pretty obscure choices.

Last Thursday, we went to Lightscape at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. We were there last year, but I think they expanded it a bit this time. Sadly for us, it was cold and rainy that day, and the way the lights were positioned in the dark in some places made it hard to see. I liked the flowers and birds made of lights.

The next day was a concert by the Brooklyn Chamber Orchestra, with a good mix of holiday classics. And yesterday, we saw the tree in Rockefeller Center, and stopped at the nearby Nintendo store.

Make more than one trip, Luigi!
It was really crowded, and they didn't have anything that particularly interested me. I noticed a lot of sticker books, and the Pikachus in wedding dresses were cute. Bowser Jr. was apparently trying to blend in with them.

Even though I've lived in New York City for almost eight years, I still kind of feel like a tourist in that area.

Current Music: Puppini Sisters: Here Comes Santa Claus

On the last Friday in September, we did a Halloween event, which was the haunted stuff at Creamy Acres that we do every year. It's a hayride plus a few walkthroughs, and they insist that you do the hayride first, even though that would probably make for a better cool-down.

See?
I didn't notice any major changes since last time, but it's not like I commit all this to memory. I did think about how, within the context of the fantasy, haunted hayrides are kind of weird. You're riding in this wagon, and the driver insists on constantly stopping where scary things can threaten you and sometimes climb on with you. Is the driver supposed to be in on it, or do they not even enter into the fiction? It's also worth noting that most of the hayrides I've been on in recent years didn't have any hay. The one in Delaware last year was an exception, but that one was during the day and not haunted. When we were in the gift shop, there were three cats just kind of hanging around. They didn't seem to be particularly bothered by all the strange people, although they did run if someone got too close.

A buff-colored cat was sitting on a box that was pretty much the same color he was.

I already wrote about the Oz event I saw at the Groliers Club a week ago, so I'll skip ahead to Thursday, and the Kevin Geeks Out at the Nitehawk Cinema in Williamsburg. I have to say the one in Prospect Park is easier for me to get to. This was the Spooky Spectacular, so presentations were horror-themed.

It started with a supercut of scenes from the Nightmare on Elm Street films involving Freddy Krueger's tongue. Kevin Maher and Joe Dator, who had collaborated on the book Santa Doesn't Need Your Help, did sort of a follow-up with a story of Dracula getting testicular cancer. Other presentations included Adam Howard on what media scared him as a kid, Gwendolyn Baily on how to enjoy Halloween when you have mental illness, Tenebrous Kate on foreign adaptations of Dracula, an animated horror short from Wally Chung involving elk and trolls in the mountains, Twiggs Gorey on Latin horror figures, and a burlesque routine by Persé Fanny based on It. The Kindest Cut was a Halloween episode of Walker: Texas Ranger, and Kevin pointed out afterwards that the pentagram they kept showing in it looked a lot like the Texas Ranger badge.

This weekend, we went to two different amusement parks, Knoebels in Elysburg, Pennsylvania, and Dorney Park in Allentown. We did that same two-day trip last year, but this was the first time we went to either for the Halloween season. Most parks come up with their own name for the fall activities; Knoebels used Hallo-Fun and Dorney Halloween Haunt. I thought about how it seems pretty common nowadays to parse the name of the holiday as "hallo" and "ween," when it derives from "hallow evening." But Beth said "Hallow-Fun" would make it sound too religious, and it's not like it really matters anyway.

Before we went to the park, we stopped at a nearby coffee shop in a converted church, which was surprisingly twee for an area with so much Republican propaganda.

They had a little museum and a music store, although the latter was closed that day.

Knoebels was surprisingly crowded, and Beth said she overheard someone say they'd been there over sixty times and hardly ever seen it like that. There was a really long line for the train, which had Halloween decorations set up, mostly a lot of skeletons. We rode on it once in the daytime and once at night, so I do have pictures, but not of everything being lit up.

The thing is, aside from that ride, it seemed like the lines were mostly shorter after dark. The Phoenix, the last thing we rode, also had some spooky stuff in its tunnel, which had a jack o' lantern face on its mouth as well. They have a ride called the Cosmotron, and their mascot is named Kosmo, so why isn't the ride name spelled with a K? I guess that's just a coincidence. I did think it worth noting that, both last year and on Saturday, they played Justin Bieber while the ride was running. The carousel had a mix of spooky songs for the band organ, but it seemed pretty short, as we kept hearing "Purple People Eater" over and over again.

At Dorney, we rode most of the rides they had, skipping a few that were basically just the same as at other parks, and still left about an hour before they closed.

We rode Possessed, the roller coaster that goes back and forth along two tracks, for the first time. There's a pirate ship outside the ride, but I don't know that the ride itself is pirate themed.

The lines in the daytime were very short, and while it got more crowded at night due to the haunted attractions, it still wasn't that bad. There were a few areas that had fog and employees in costumes, but they also closed a few of the rides that had been running earlier. Dorney is a small park that kind of seems bigger than it is because it has so many dead ends and paths that don't just go straight through like you might expect. That was even worse with the haunted areas set up along some of the paths. I think it was also the first time I'd seen a Ferris Wheel with seatbelts. I wonder if something happened on it in the recent past.

Current Music: Andy Partridge: Shalloween

On Thursday evening, we went to see Kevin Geeks Out at the Nitehawk Cinema in Park Slope. That one is more convenient to get to than the one in Williamsburg. Before the show, we got some food at Dog Day Afternoon, a nearby hot dog place. I had the kielbasa with mustard. Kevin Maher's co-host this time was Amber Dextrous, and the theme of the evening was dinosaurs. Kevin started by listing the various types of media stories involving dinosaurs, including the period piece, the period piece with liberties, time travel, dimensional travel, the lost world, and the dinosaur theme park. The liberties usually mean humans living alongside dinosaurs, The Flintstones being the obvious example, but there were plenty of old movies that did the same thing in a less intentionally comedic way. The example for dimensional travel was Land of the Lost, but I actually thought of the Super Mario Bros. Movie, which was addressed later on in the show. For theme parks, Kevin forwent the one everyone knows in favor of the Martin Short film Clifford. I forgot if there were any more categories; I guess dinosaurs on another planet could be one, but that's kind of just the lost world with space travel. Paleontologist Riley Black, who had consulted on the Jurassic Park franchise, did a remote segment discussing prehistoric animals. Corey S. Powell talked about whether dinosaurs and humans could be friends, bringing up Sleestaks, Barney, and Dino. And Chris Cummins had some thoughts on comics featuring dinosaurs, starting with a batshit crazy Chick Tract that I remember talking about before, and also bringing up how DC's Star Spangled War Heroes series eventually started using dinosaurs. He showed some of his favorite dinosaur-related panels, including Fred and Barney talking about participating in a genocide from the gritty Flintstones comic, and the Kool-Aid Man meeting the Purplesaurus Rex.

I'm kind of surprised he didn't include this Spider-Man one that I see a lot online.

The Kindest Cut was something called Pterodactyl Woman from Beverly Hills, with a medicine man turning Beverly D'Angelo into...well, you can figure that out from the title. They finished with a clip from the last episode of Dinosaurs, where Earl accidentally causes the Ice Age and extinction. I actually saw that one when it was new. Incidentally, they showed a few clips from Tammy and the T-Rex before the show, and I thought the dinosaurs from that movie looked similar to the ones from Dinosaurs. I don't think there's any real connection, but it was made during the run of the TV show.

On Saturday, we went to Six Flags Great Adventure. We used to go there kind of a lot, and even had season passes for a few years in the early 2000s, but it's been a while since our last visit. While we went to a lot of amusement parks last year, this wasn't one of them, even though it's fairly close. It's in central New Jersey, so it's about the same distance from where Beth grew up and where we live now. Fright Fest, their Halloween event, had already started, so there were a lot of appropriate decorations, and at night some employees walking around in costume, many of them dragging shovels along the pavement.

If nothing else, that's certainly a grating sound. Perhaps because it's so long before October, the park wasn't all that crowded, and most of the rides had pretty short lines. The longest wait we had was for Wonder Woman's Lasso of Truth, and that was more because of the way the ride works than because there were all that many people waiting; there's no way the lines can't move slowly for something like that.

It's a park that really focuses on roller coasters, and there are a lot of them there. We rode two that hadn't been there on our last visit, the Joker and the Jersey Devil Coaster. The former is one that not only goes along a track but also flips the cars around, while the latter has a narrow track that's quite twisty.

One weird thing about both of these is that they don't have anywhere to temporarily leave loose items while you ride, so Beth and I took turns on them. If the lines had been longer, I probably would have sprung for a locker. Skull Mountain, Nitro, Superman, and the Runaway Mine Train were all the same as they ever were, as far as I could tell.

Batman: The Ride is the same, but they got rid of a lot of stuff to see while waiting in line, and Alfred no longer does the ride announcements. We'd only been on the Dark Knight Coaster once before, but I remember it as having TV screens along the route, and they aren't there now.

Medusa was briefly rebranded as Bizarro, with a new paint job and some relevant decorations added along the track; but it was later restored to how it was before. I have no idea why the rebrand didn't stick, but I like the classic design better anyway. Presumably because it's right next to where the Joker is now, the small coaster Blackbeard's Train is now Harley Quinn's Crazy Train.

It's short, but they ran each load of passengers twice. I don't know if that's standard practice or just because there weren't many people in line. Kingda Ka and El Toro, which apparently both have a lot of problems, were both closed. We've ridden both before, but the former was having technical difficulties when it was new as well. The non-coaster rides we went on that I haven't mentioned yet were Houdini's Great Escape, the SkyScreamer, the Swashbuckler, Justice League: Battle for Metropolis, Cyborg Cyber Spin, the Big Wheel, the Carousel, and Parachute Training Center. I'd never been on the first one, although it's been there for a long time; I don't think I really noticed it before. The seats move up and down a bit, but most of the movement is illusionary, with parts of the room moving around. The SkyScreamer is like the standard swing ride, but goes up a lot higher; while the Swashbuckler is the kind of ride that pushes riders against the outside.

Battle for Metropolis is the kind of ride that's also a game, where you ride along a track and shoot at stuff on screens, with a story involving trying to rescue some captured members of the Justice League from the Joker and Lex Luthor. I don't think we'd been on any rides of this sort prior to this year, when we went on three (this, Toy Story Midway Mania at Disneyland, and Reese's Cupfusion at Hersheypark). By the way, Six Flags seems to have started doing candy promotion themselves in addition to the Looney Tunes and DC Comics stuff, with Mars as their sponsor.

Ferris wheels used to scare me despite being very tame rides, and I think the reason was that, due to the way they have to load, you're just stuck sitting up in the air for a while. Other rides go a lot higher, but don't stay there long enough for you to really absorb it. But the Giant Wheel didn't bother me this time.

We don't see a lot of plays, but Beth was drawn in by an online ad for Death of a Salesman, so we saw it at the Hudson Theatre on Monday. She didn't really know anything about it, while I sort of did. I think it was something I was supposed to read in high school and didn't, but was able to gather the gist of it from class. Maybe I would have read it if I hadn't had so many other assignments at the same time. Or maybe I was just lazy. I don't know. Anyway, this production has Black actors playing the Loman family, with Wendell Pierce as Willy and Sharon D. Clarke as Linda, both reprising their roles from the recent London production.

Andre De Shields appears as Willy's rich brother Ben, who pretends to be wise but is really just full of crap, kind of like the Wiz.

Its critique of measuring success through money and the American dream is still relevant today, although nowadays I'm pretty sure even a more successful traveling salesman wouldn't be able to afford a house in Brooklyn. Before the show, we ate at a nearby family style Italian place, which was quite good, and not that expensive when you consider that we were sharing the entree, baked ziti bolognese.

Okay, I guess that's all there is for now. It's supposed to get a little on the chilly side this weekend, but our building really cranks the heat up starting around the fall, so we'll probably still need fans and such.

Current Mood: hungry
Current Music: Neko Case: Lion's Jaws

Wednesday was our last day at Disneyland, and it wasn't even a full day. We returned to the main park, and the first thing we rode was Peter Pan's Flight.

This is another one where you ride past scenes from the movie, this time on a suspended pirate ship with some stuff beneath you.

I do hope whoever designed this sign of a smiling Peter above instructions for adults to supervise their kids recognizes the irony.

It's probably a legal requirement to display such rules, but isn't that against everything he stands for? Maybe they should have put Nana on the sign.

I got some frozen apple cider at Maurice's Treats, and then we made our way over to the lake, which has several attractions that are only open in the daytime. There are two boats you can ride, the steamboat Mark Twain and the sailing ship Columbia. We ended up on the former, simply due to timing.

Next came Tom Sawyer Island, where you take a smaller boat to an island with a lot of steps and some crazy bridges.

And Davy Crockett's Explorer Canoes is one where all the passengers row. I'm not sure whether this is actually necessary, but it's definitely a different experience from most rides. I had kind of a difficult time getting into the correct rowing rhythm. Maybe they needed one of those drums. Our next stop was Galaxy's Edge, and while we'd walked around the one at Walt Disney World, we didn't really do anything there. This time, we went on both of the rides there, Millennium Falcon: Smuggler's Run and Rise of the Resistance.

On the former, the part before the actual ride has the pirate (but not of the Carribean) Hondo Ohnaka recruiting a crew to steal some coaxium fuel, borrowing the ship from Chewbacca.

Riders are divided into groups of five, each with two pilots, two gunners, and one engineer. Beth and I were the pilots. It's kind of like Midway Mania in that it's both a ride and a game, but I think was worse at this one. I couldn't help thinking that, if a group of kids rode this, they could potentially get way too serious about it. The wait for Rise of the Resistance was said to be sixty-five minutes, and you had to pay extra for a Lightning Lane pass, which we didn't do. The ride was having problems, so our wait ended up being longer than that. A lot of Disney rides have an introductory story before you actually board, but this one was even more complex than usual.

You meet BB-8, Rey (in hologram form, albeit much better quality than the ones in the movies themselves), and Lieutenant Bek, an original character for the ride. He's from the same species as Admiral Ackbar.

Anyway, you enter a Resistance ship with a moving floor and windows showing space, then you're captured by the First Order, taken onto a star destroyer, and made to walk down a corridor lined with Storm Troopers.

The Resistance comes to the rescue, and you ride an escape pod all over the place to dodge your captors. Kylo Ren shows up a few times during the ride. I saw a few costumed characters in Galaxy's Edge, but the only one I got a picture of was Chewie.

I noticed some Storm Troopers asking kids to give allegiance to the First Order. We also got Diet Coke in collectible bottles, which we still have.

The final thing we rode was Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, and I'm probably more entertained than I should be by the safety announcement, delivered in character in a wacky hillbilly accent. "This is the wildest ride in the wilderness!"

We left the park later than I'd intended, and by the time we'd gotten some food from Monty's Good Burger (the vegan equivalent of In-N-Out; I had the "chicken" tenders and thought they were all right, but the texture was kind of weird), returned the rental car and gotten a ride to the airport terminal, we just barely made it in time for our flight. The flight itself went off without a hitch, but we were both exhausted afterwards. And that's it for the time being, although I should probably go back and talk about some things we did before the trip in a future post.

Current Mood: rushed
Current Music: Sparks: Falling in Love with Myself Again

Our Disneyland visit continued on Tuesday with California Adventure, which is right next to the main park. I'm not sure whether a theme park should count as an adventure, since that word implies a sense of danger to me, but I've been to one in New Jersey called Great Adventure many times. I still always think of the 2003 Simpsons episode "My Mother the Carjacker" where Homer, trying to find a place for his mother to hide, says, "I'm gonna hide you where there's no one around for miles. Disney's California Adventure!" The show also took a shot at EuroDisney nine years before that, and I think both have become much more successful since then. It's sort of the equivalent of Hollywood Studios at Walt Disney World, and there's even a section called Hollywood Land. The California theme is fairly loose. One part is based on the Cars franchise and another on the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and Radiator Springs is in Arizona, and most of the Avengers are based in New York. I guess it would be very appropriate for an appearance by the Norse god Anaheimdall, however.

The first thing we rode at this park was Ariel's Undersea Adventure, another ride-through of an animated film.

The ride stopped a few times and gave a good look at the animatronics, and as impressive as they were, the eyes looked bizarre close up.

The description near the entrance describes what you ride as a "slow-moving clam shell." It was pretty similar to the Finding Nemo ride at Epcot in that respect. Then we rode the Golden Zephyr, Goofy's Sky School, and the Silly Symphony Swings, all of which were in Paradise Gardens Park. The Sky School ride is a Crazy Mouse, yet not themed around any of Disney's mouse characters. Instead, it has a narrative based on Goofy teaching the riders to fly a plane, with the track running in relevant ways.

I remember when I worked at a toy store back in 2000, and they sold a game called Barn Buzzin' Goofy, so I guess someone thinks Goofy flying planes is inherently funny. The swings were the typical sort of amusement park ride, but based on the short "The Band Concert."

I didn't actually time things to compare, but it at least felt that these rides were shorter than their equivalents other places. In Pixar Pier, we rode the Inside Out Emotional Whirlwind, Jessie's Critter Carousel, and the Incredicoaster. I'm getting a bit out of order here, but I guess that's okay. Beth was amused by the backwards skunks on the carousel.

Also around that time, we went on Guardians of the Galaxy Mission: BREAKOUT! I'm not sure why the capital letters, but this was originally a Tower of Terror, but was changed to have a Guardians theme. While I'm kind of cynical about such changes, I have to say it was fun, and I appreciated how the characters were incoporated into it. The elevator had been changed to something called a gantry lift that eventually took the passengers out of the Collector's fortress and to the Guardians' ship. I guess the lift was a reference to a gantry crane, which is on legs and portable. I noticed that the gift shop had a lot of Baby Groot, and while that's not at all surprising, I didn't see any Adult Groot. I liked the one T-shirt they had that was somewhat based on the Atari game Breakout, although that has a ball instead of a spaceship with a laser, so I suppose it was more like that combined with Galaga.

Speaking of video games, I received a few compliments on my Donkey Kong shirt, which I bought at the Nintendo store in Rockefeller Center.

We didn't ride anything else for a while after that, instead seeing Mickey's PhilharMagic and Turtle Talk with Crush.

PhilharMagic was the same as the one we saw at Disney World in 2020, although I can't remember if the Coco part was in there back then. There's a cool store near there called Off the Page with original drawings and figurines, none of which I could reasonably afford.

We ate at Boardwalk Pizza & Pasta, where I had pizza and Beth pesto ravioli, so I guess we covered the whole name. The breadsticks were pretty dull, though. And there wasn't that much ravioli in a serving, so Beth also had a corn dog from Corn Dog Castle.

I did appreciate some of the names of dining locations at the park. There's a hot dog place called Award Wieners, and other places named after Mortimer Mouse and Clarabelle Cow. What's kind of disturbing is that a cafe named after the Three Little Pigs sells sandwiches with bacon and sausage.

And it's not a restaurant, but Oswald the Lucky Rabbit has a garage (actually a gift shop) right inside the gates.

The World of Color fireworks show started soon after we had dinner, but we couldn't get a spot for it, so we saw the later one instead.

They closed several of the rides in the area during the show, including the Pixar Pal-A-Round Ferris Wheel, so we never got to ride it. Considering how highly visible it is, I feel like that was something significant we missed. I also would have liked to go on the Spider-Man ride, but that doesn't seem like quite as much of a loss. The last thing we went on was Toy Story Midway Mania, a combination ride and virtual arcade that periodically stopped to let the passengers play games. I think I ended up with 36,000-some points, and I don't know whether that's good or bad, but it was my first time. Someone on our car apparently got over 90,000. There's a talking Mr. Potato Head right outside the ride, and I wondered how it worked, since he'd occasionally say something relevant to the people around him. Apparently all his phrases are pre-recorded, but someone monitors the crowd to play relevant ones.

Next time, our last day at Disney, and proof that I have no clue how to time transportation.

Current Mood: hot
Current Music: Sparks: Slow Boat

After OzCon and our visit with Stephanie, we checked in at the hotel in Anaheim. It's one of those ones that isn't on Disney property, but has an arrangement with the park, including transportation as part of the price. It also included a breakfast buffet, including a station where a cook made omelettes and waffles.

Even Beth liked it, and she's normally against typical breakfast foods. Driving around the Los Angeles area is kind of fascinating because of how so many entertainment media are based there, so you come across a lot of place names that you've heard in movies and TV, but were largely meaningless to someone growing up in Pennsylvania. We did a lot of freeway driving during the time we were there, and it's too bad they had to destroy Toontown to build that. We also drove by the Warner Bros. studio in Burbank when we went with Stephanie to a coffee shop near there.

Considering how spread out Walt Disney World is, it's kind of fascinating that Disneyland is relatively small, and there's an IHOP right across the street from the entrance with a sign forbidding parking for Disney.

The first thing we rode on at the park was Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, although we did the walkthrough of Sleeping Beauty's Castle before that.

A lot of the stuff we were most interested in was in Fantasyland. The Mr. Toad ride is one that seems to get mentioned quite a lot. I remember one Simpsons episode with something called "Mr. Frog's Mild Ride," maybe not a great joke but one that stuck with me.

The ride itself runs along a curving track with scenes from The Wind in the Willows, and ends up in Hell.

I guess that's the moral message, that if you drive recklessly and try to outrun the cops, you'll be eternally damned. Was this ride the inspiration for Grand Theft Auto? Other rides in the area had the same basic theme of riding through scenes from an animated movie.

Snow White's Enchanted Wish, Pinocchio's Daring Journey, and Peter Pan's Flight are all right in there together, although we ended up not riding that last one until Wednesday. They all give some sense of the story while you're waiting in line, and I found it strange that the Snow White one didn't even mention the Queen trying to kill her. The poison apple is part of the ride, but the part with the huntsman is glossed over.

The Casey Jr. Circus Train and Storybook Land Canal Boats are right next to each other, and go past a lot of the same stuff, largely miniature versions of places from movies.

When I first saw Monstro, I figured it must be part of the Pinocchio ride, but it's actually the beginning of the boat ride.

The Matterhorn was another one that's exclusive to Disneyland, and that was fun. The theming reminded me of the Germany section of Busch Gardens in Virginia.

I know the real Matterhorn is in Switzerland, but it's close enough for jazz. Or polka. Or theme parks. Apparently the Yeti on the ride is named Harold, and the one at Expedition Everest in Disney World is Betty. Hmm, that's my dad and Beth's mom.

Next, we rode Alice in Wonderland, and had some dinner at the Red Rose Taverne. Beth had a cheeseburger, and I had pepperoni and cheese flatbread. (Is there really a difference between that and pizza?)

After dinner, we rode Indiana Jones Adventure and Pirates of the Caribbean. I'm not sure why it was necessary to add Jack Sparrow to the ride, but I've only seen the first one of those movies. I liked the film pretty well, but there's something to be said for preserving the original layout. And Johnny Depp is rather problematic these days. Then we unsuccessfully tried to get a spot for the Main Street Electrical Parade. Fortunately, there was another one later that night.

The parade has been running on and off since 1972, and still has the relentlessly cheerful yet somehow a bit unsettling electronic music. They Might Be Giants did a cover of it, and it's so well suited to them.

Watch on YouTube

I noticed that the floats included both Goofy and Dopey driving trains.

Also, there were several that had heroes and villains hanging out together. I saw Colin Ayres at the ice cream shop before the parade; he and a few other OzCon attendees were also visiting the park that day, but I didn't run into anyone else I knew. Our last stop before leaving the park was Tomorrowland, where we rode the Astro Orbiter (okay, that one was actually before the parade), Autopia, and Space Mountain.

I believe I'd first heard of Autopia in the NES game Adventures in the Magic Kingdom, which my family rented once back in the day. Space Mountain was different from the one at Disney World.

Next time, we have a California Adventure!

Current Mood: muggy
Current Music: Don't Let's Start Podcast

I guess I have a few things to write about here. On the last day of April, Beth and I went to Coney Island.

We rode the Cyclone and ate at Ruby's. I had jumbo shrimp, and the mozzarella sticks were surprisingly good. Not as good as some, but still good.

And, a week ago today, we saw Tori Amos at Kings Theatre in Brooklyn.

We had seen Ben Folds play there back in 2017, and at that show as well as this one, the balcony had a lot of empty seats. The pre-show music included a lot of sea-related songs, including two Beatles songs with Ringo on lead vocals, and Beth suggested this might have been to coincide with Ocean to Ocean. But then, we don't actually know who chose the music. The openers were Gracie and Rachel, who are considered chamber pop, which I didn't know was a genre but that does fit what they played. One played keyboard and the other violin.

One of their songs was a plainsong version of Kreyshawn's "Gucci Gucci," and they said she went to high school with them in Berkeley, California. That said, I can't say I was familiar with the original song. Tori was supported by a drummer and bass player, as is pretty standard, although we've seen her do solo shows a few times.

She played "Black-Dove" and "Past the Mission," which are favorites of mine. When she did "Take to the Sky," I noticed she didn't do the high parts. That's forgivable, but I kind of noticed it because we recently saw Sparks, and Russell Mael, who's quite a bit older, can still hit the high notes. She also played a bit of "I Feel the Earth Move" in the middle of that song. During "Josephine," the stage lights formed the French flag.

On the way back to the subway, a girl told Beth she liked her shoes, and we tried to remember when the last time we saw Tori was. It looks like that was also in 2017.

Sunday was L. Frank Baum's birthday, and I attended an online event celebrating that the previous day. I even did my own presentation. I had missed the last International Wizard of Oz Club event about games, which is up my alley, but that was the day we were at Coney. Sunday is also when I decided our cat Reagan's birthday is, since we don't know the real date. Regardless, we're pretty sure she's sixteen now.

Sunday was also when Kevin Maher presented a collection of video clips dealing with carnivals and amusement parks. There were a few from the Simpsons episode "Bart Carny," including the bit with the crappy haunted house, which I love. The collection included both Freddy Cannon's "Palisades Park" and the alternate version he did of it for a Kennywood commercial. Also included were the part of Charlotte's Web with Templeton singing about the fair; a Tunnel of Love bit from a Popeye cartoon; Spider-Man fighting Dr. Octopus on Coney Island; Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman battling on a roller coaster (I've been watching this series, but haven't gotten to that episode yet); a scene from Roller Coaster, which we haven't seen but we know Sparks did the soundtrack for it; and another clip I vaguely recognized that turned out to be from Darkman. It ended with the way too long vomiting scene from Problem Child 2. I kept thinking of other things that could have been used, but obviously it couldn't include everything.

OzCon International is only one day (and the previous evening) this year, but we're still planning on going there, although we haven't made the arrangements yet. We're also going to Disneyland for a few days.

Current Music: She Makes War: The the Quiet Came (live)

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