Life as a Theme Park

Today’s news chum brings together a collection of stories related by… well, they all struck me as having some connection with a theme park or similar attraction:

• Disney Raises Prices. This one has the strongest connection: Disneyland is raising its prices. Why did they do it? This article offers a possible explanation. To my eyes, it is in the “not worth it” department — especially for a one-day visit. It gets better if you can afford an annual pass and plan to go very regularly. Although I love Disneyland (and its history), I don’t go all that often — perhaps once every 5 to 10 years. My wife and daughter did the pass route for a number of years, but that stopped with Berkeley (which is a theme park of its own).
• The Red Car Conspiracy – Not. If you go to DCA, you see a romanticized version of the Red Cars… and thanks to Roger Rabbit, you know about the conspiracy that got rid of them. Of course, none of that this true. The real reasons behind the disappearance of the Red Cards is much less sinister and much more complicated. This article discusses what really happened, and this paper provides more information.
• Where Do The Trains Go? Thinking about the Red Cars makes me think about one of my favorite museums, Orange Empire Railway Museum, and that makes me think about their model train displays. It appears that, in another city, a model train display is looking for a new home. In St. Louis, the old Famous-Barr (now Macy*s) building downtown is being closed… and the model train display that used to be housed there is looking for a new home.
• A Crushing Experience. For the artists among you: Here’s an entire amusement park compacted into a 4 meter cube.
• Oswald Found. No, I’m not talking Texas, but Oswald the Rabbit — a Disney character that predates Mickey. It looks like one of Disney’s lost Oswald shorts has been rediscovered.

Lastly, to continue yesterday’s post about the joke’s just writing themselves… Yesterday, I cited an article with the headline “Why Did The Chicken Lose Its Penis?” because the responses that came from the headline just seemed to write themselves. If you went to the link, the comments gave a lot of them (such as “Because its pecker is on the other end”). Here are three more headlines that caught my eye:

• “Police find evidence linked to homicide in La Brea Tar Pits“. My favorite comment says it all: “The wooly mammoth is expecting to be indicted on several counts within the week. The sabertooth tiger, who cooperated with investigators, will be placed in a witness protection program.”
• “From Russia, Without Love: Vladimir Putin Divorces Wife Lyudmila“. No good responses in the comments, but I can just see Putin walking into a bar in Moscow, sliding up to a comely young female comrade, and bringing out a line about being the President of Russia.
• “N.H. posthumously frees 14 Revolutionary War slaves“. Note that these folks were freed more then 230 years after they submitted their petition. The paperwork was lost on a clerks desk.

I expect to see most of these showing up on “Wait Wait” in the coming weeks.

 

This entry was originally posted on Observations Along The Road (on cahighways.org) as this entry by cahwyguy. Although you can comment on DW, please make comments on original post at the Wordpress blog using the link below; you can sign in with your LJ, FB, or a myriad of other accounts. There are currently comments on the Wordpress blog. PS: If you see share buttons above, note that they do not work outside of the Wordpress blog.

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