mariness

1. Flashmobbing can be indeed organized with a few days notice (like, two) and two hours of practice.

2. When following the directions of flashmobbers, it will often feel as if Google Maps is your best friend. Or even your only friend.

3. As is shade. Shade is good. Shade is very good. What happened to Florida this April? I miss you, delightful Florida Aprils! Oh, wait. This is supposed to be about flashmobbing not weather. Back to that.

4. Astonishingly, about one third of the people who show up will claim to have never flash mobbed before. About half of them will claim to be unable to dance.

5. You will wonder just how this is going to work.

6. As it turns out, this works by choreographing a dance specifically for people who can't dance. Also, fist pumping.

7. As it also turns out, thanks to this, people who are not, in fact, professional dancers can, in fact, do flash mobbing on a regular basis – say, at least once or twice a week.

8. Which also means that Orlando and Tampa are the sorts of cities that host flash mobs at least once or twice a week.

9. Orlando and Tampa may be a bit weird.

10. You can, as it turns out, fist pump and air guitar from the wheelchair.

11. Hiding in the back corner will not prevent people doing what is apparently meant to be a King Tut dance move from King Tutting right into your wheelchair.

12. You will be told that the one thing you never, ever do as part of a flash mob is call it a flash mob.

13. You will then decide that you are calling it a flash mob anyway.

14. First grade teachers join flash mobs to get out their frustrations. "At a certain point you need more than crayons."

15. Since everyone has to type things into tiny, tiny, keyboards, it will take a surprisingly long time to tell everyone where the flash mob is actually going.

16. "Everybody knows this Hilton, right?" "It's the one across from downtown Disney!" "Right!"

17. That will turn out to be wrong.

18. Orlando has far too many Hiltons, even if the first Hilton you head to turns out not to be a Hilton.

19. The second Hilton is, in fact, a Hilton, but is not the Hilton you are looking for.
20. Google Maps is your friend.

21. Parking garages are not your friend.

22. This particular Hilton will turn out to have not only a convention center and a splendid view over a championship golf course but also a lazy river and 24 hour chocolate.

23. You will realize that certain things have been missing from your life: namely, lazy rivers and 24 hour chocolate.

24. What high powered, wealthy attorneys call "business casual" and what the rest of us call "business casual" are two entirely different things.

25. You can be in "business casual" and feel terribly, terribly, underdressed.

26. Until you see some people in Mickey Mouse hats and gloves and cheer up.

27. All of the planning that goes into a flash mob can be destroyed in a second when the flash mob realizes that the area they can flash mob in is considerably smaller than the already not large rehearsal area.

28. It is nearly impossible to have a casual conversation about not having enough space for a surprise flash mob without letting the audience know that a flash mob is coming.

29. Hint: if part of your flash mob experience includes having to put on bright orange sunglasses, make sure that you have not placed your bright orange sunglasses into a bag with a zipper that more than occasionally gets stuck. Otherwise the sounds of "WE BUILT THIS CITY ON ROCK AND ROLL!" will boom out and you, rather than fist pumping, will find yourself wishing you had indeed bought a second bag with a working zipper from Target.

30. You can fist pump while putting on bright orange sunglasses.

31. Conga lines are much more difficult in a crowded room full of attorneys. They are much much much more difficult in a wheelchair in a crowded room full of attorneys.

32. A surprising number of people will want a picture of the group afterwards. You, however, will want chocolate. Because.

To my surprise, I found myself at the Children's Miracle Network PGA Tour event (this means "golf") last weekend, this a surprise largely because I forgot it was last weekend.

Anyway. The Children's Miracle Network is hosted by the PGA Tour at Walt Disney World on their Magnolia Course, this important mainly because that means that officials and employees and volunteers from multiple different groups – Disney, ESPN's Wide World of Sports, the PGA Tour, Children's Miracle Network, and the Orange County Sheriff's Department are all meandering around, not always consistently or agreeably. Since it's at the end of the tour, it's typically attended mostly by golfers who have not exactly done brilliantly in the past year and are thus desperate to earn their tour card for the following year, which adds another touch of tension to the event. Fail here, and, well, it's a lot of work to get back into the PGA tour.

We could not help noticing a few small differences between the Children's Miracle Network Golf Tournament held at the Magnolia Course at Disney, and the Arnold Palmer Invitational, held at Bay Hill, and a few small differences between this event and literally any other event held at Disney. For instance:

1. This is the only golf course where you enter and leave through a Disney gift store, which sells very cheerful golf shirts embroidered with Mickey.

2. This is also the only golf event where one of the bunkers is shaped like Mickey Mouse. (The accompanying sign cheerfully says that the bunker "never fails to draw a smile" no matter "where the ball happens to land on this very difficult hole. On a related note: no kidding: in order to avoid the water you almost have to aim your ball directly at Mickey's ears. Now that's a sentence I didn't think I would be typing.)

Also, this is the only golf event featuring a topiary of Snow White and one of the dwarfs. And where the PGA volunteers hold up signs saying "Please be as QUIET AS A MOUSE" because ha ha.

3. This is also the only golf course where you can constantly hear the Mickey Mouse train in the background. In fact I think it's easier to hear the Mickey Mouse train from this golf course than from inside the Magic Kingdom. Maybe the Seven Seas Lagoon echoes and enhances the sound. I don't know. It does go along with the various Mickey signs telling you which hole you are at and the nice signs giving the Storied Histories of each hole.

4. Disney is absolutely fine with everyone bringing in Nice Big Bags as long as they are more or less inspected and are not concealing guns or other things that go bang. The PGA Tour is Noticeably Not, because, and I'm sure you can all understand this, Big Bags could have CAMERAS, the EMBODIMENT OF EVIL for the PGA. As you are informed upon entering, absolutely no pictures whatsoever are allowed especially from your cell phone or other mobile device and any images that might just happen to pop up while you are there ALTHOUGH THEY SHOULDN'T belong absolutely and permanently to the PGA Tour. Since I'd completely forgotten about this I accidentally brought a nearly empty bag (which was, I hasten to add to you all, completely CAMERA FREE) but which was TOO TOO BIG which led to us having to leave the bag at the lost and found, which was about when my brother remembered that I also had the completely empty bag attached to my wheelchair, so we dumped that too and then finally headed out to the course, me clutching my clearly dangerous sunscreen in my little hand.

5. The PGA Tour also informed me that I absolutely, positively, could not tweet any of the results while on the course. So, despite knowing that a grand total of zero of my Twitter followers were eagerly awaiting my reports of golf scores, since those would not be widely available, say, on CBS, Yahoo, or any of a number of different entities faster than I could type in the results, I was very very good and just typed things like, "Also I was very very close to stuart appleby but I won't tell you what resulted!" (I think it's safe to tell you now – he hit a ball very close to us.) Also I told everyone about the topiaries. Only not where any of the PGA volunteers could see us.

6. Also, because we are no longer on Daylight Savings Time and the days are getting shorter, this tournament is still played on both sides of the course even on Sunday with three golfers per group, which makes it easier to see lots of golfers than it ordinarily would be on Sunday.

7. Anyway, we wandered around the golf course, watching golfers, and finding a surprising lack of food for Disney, and surprisingly decent bathrooms for a golf event. (Go Disney!) Also, a large flock of wild turkeys that were not exactly into golf, two eagles, lots of herons and ibises, some ducks, some squirrels, two lizards, and a very cute little bunny rabbit which technically was outside the course but which I am counting anyway.

7. There was a touch – just a touch – ok, more than a touch of tension between the Disney Wide World of Sports people/Disney workers and the PGA volunteers. The Disney workers had always run this event up until this year, and well, now they were only running PARTS of the event, but not the cool part that involves telling people to shut up and keeping track of the scores. You could tell the difference since the Disney people proudly wore nametags and the PGA volunteers did not. Also, the PGA volunteers, oddly enough, more than once did not know when to tell the spectators to shut up, forcing the caddies to interfere, or where exactly spectators can go around, which led to one interesting bit of pushing me over decidedly uneven ground which left me kinda dizzy. (The PGA volunteers at the Arnold Palmer Invitational are better trained, but that is a better paying event attracting a stronger field of golfers.)

8. Towards the end of the tournament, we meandered back to the 18th hole to watch the last groups come in, only to be stopped by Disney employees who asked if we would prefer to be up in the bleachers, which had a nice elevator and everything.

This was a nice and kindly thought, and it's not exactly Disney's fault that it went wrong. The elevator was not exactly an elevator, but rather an elevator lift, which a) scared me, and b) could only be operated by one (1) key and person – the same key and person operating the two other elevator lifts including the one for the People Considerably More Important Than You Tent, which meant that getting on the lift required waiting and waiting and hearing – not seeing – one of the golf groups go through until the key guy ambled up and let us up.

"Last year we ALL had keys," said the Disney people mournfully. "This year they TOOK THEM AWAY. We're TRYING to show them that we all NEED KEYS. We don't know WHY they did this and gave the keys to only one person. [a PGA, not Disney person, even though these were Disney bleachers with Disney people]"

I could not help but feel that I had been in some small way dragged into a Disney/PGA power struggle.

Apart from this, the bleachers bounced every time anyone walked, clapped, stood up, shifted, or in fact did anything that might be placed under "movement" which was pretty much all the time, with the result that after about five minutes I was feeling a bit dizzy and ten minutes later feeling very dizzy. Getting off the bleachers, however, meant Summoning the Key Guy again, which was a process that I felt was somewhat beyond me. So instead I tried to watch everyone gathering at the 18th hole (bounce bounce), and by "everyone" (bounce) I mean "spectators, volunteers, and the Mickey Mouse band (bounce bounce bounce)," and tried to send out "sit still. sit very very still" vibes at the bleachers which if nothing else proved that I do not, in fact, have the mutant ability to mind control complete strangers. And now you know. (bounce)

9. Most tournaments end with various people coming out to congratulate the winning golfer and handing him or her a trophy. This tournament ends with Mickey Mouse striding onto the green followed by the Mickey Mouse band playing zip did dee do dah, zip did de day. And since I am no longer reporting live or on Twitter, I can now tell you that the winner was the same guy who started the tournament suffering from a major panic attack requiring hospitalization, so that was kinda cool. Also he has a very very cute kid.

10. By that time I was really feeling that I had to get off the bleachers, like now, and since I'd been warned this was a long process my brother pushed me over to the lift, then looked at me skeptically.

"Do you think you can get down the stairs on your own if I carry the wheelchair?"

"Maybe."

"...We might end up doing that."

I sent him back to watch Mickey shake the hand of the winner (who had to sign his golf card first) and get the trophy and listened to Mickey songs while I waited and waited and waited....

10. And finally I was off the bleachers and at the lost and found and then at Shades of Green which quite apart from giving military families a nice discounted place to stay at Disney also has very nice bathrooms and a lovely waterfall thing. (Really a lovely waterfall thing that helps lead military families to the Shades of Green buses which whisk them to the parks where they can spend lots of money all relaxed from the waterfalls.)

11. Pretend point 11 contains something bouncy.

From Fandom Wank comes a cheery tale of a comics conman, which I mention only because I briefly saw this guy at Mega-Con. (Briefly, because, as I mentioned, crowded. What's entirely left out of this story is how remarkable it is that Ethan Van Sciver and Mark Waid managed to get to his table at all.)

Anyway, I'm amused because my main thought at the time was, this guy is trying to sell Disney art in the Orange County Convention Center? Does he not know where he is? (I'm sure that Granito would claim that he was inspired by the original E.H. Shepherd illustrations, not Disney, but the pictures I saw at MegaCon were pulled directly from Disney, not Shepherd, and in any case I believe the Shepherd illustrations are still under copyright.) Then again, I thought I remembered seeing the guy before, so, maybe he did have permission. Not my problem.

Right after I thought that, I heard someone behind me say, "He's selling Disney images HERE? Is he insane?"

Apparently we were all the same page. Except, as it turns out, Disney. So far.

Tangled

Hmm.

Let's process, shall we?

( Where I ramble on at some length, with the added warning that I can't discuss this without massively discussing the last five minutes of the film. And while yes, this is Disney, so you can basically guess the main ending, the part I'm going to talk about isn't as obvious from the trailer or the Disney bit, so may be a spoiler for you. )

So I finally got around to watching last year's The Princess and the Frog last night. I liked it.

But.

It took some time for me to nail down the source of that "But." My general mood? The tiny issue that my left hand was still burning from an excess of juice from a surprisingly hot chili pepper which had turned my hand red, red, red and made me wince whenever anyone in the film discussed making food just a little bit hotter?

Well, possibly.

But in thinking it over, I realized that this was less my mood than something lacking in the film itself. And here, I'm not just talking about the problems of going YAY we are FINALLY FEATURING A BLACK CHARACTER AS A DISNEY PRINCESS EXCEPT SHE'S NOT REALLY A PRINCESS BUT A WAITRESS WHICH WE'LL KEEP REPEATING OVER AND OVER GO US and then having her spend the majority of the film actually being green, problematic though that may be. (I say may because I liked the frog bits.) Or the fact that the film takes a while to get going, unlike the best of the Disney films which use their short length to plunge straight to the point.

No, the real problem is the lack of the villain.

Oh, the film has a villain – two, even – who are Appropriately Evil and even deal with Nasty Evil Things. But neither feel particularly menacing, and neither has the now customary Funny Evil Sidekick, and neither seem to be, I dunno, very motivated. Possibly because one of their goals – marry the cute blonde girl and take all of her money – just seems entirely too easy (the blonde girl wants to get married) and also, well, let's face it, although Disney avoided the cliché of the wealthy mean blonde girl, she's not exactly a character that we're overly worried about, which means that much of that plotline comes off as, well, whatever.

And, oh yes, quite possibly, thanks to the villains, Tiana and Naveen might just have to spend the rest of their lives as frogs. Which might be terrible and awful and completely villain worthy, except for one teeeeeeeenny tiny problem:

Tiana and Naveen, after their initial shock, seem to like being frogs.

And why not? They can leap vast distances, play music with jazz loving alligators, dance, swim, sing, enjoy romantic riverboat meals and even still talk to their fellow humans. Being a frog barely even halts Tiana on her gourmet cooking path – she cooks up a marvelous pot of gumbo and advises other people about their recipes. And it doesn't keep Naveen from playing music and flirting and in general having a pretty good time.

In other words, it's hard - very hard – to worry whether or not they'll ever get to be human again. (Plus, it's Disney, so it's easy – very easy – to guess.)

So. No threat. No real motivation, except perhaps a worry that Tiana might not get her restaurant after all, which, while frustrating, doesn't exactly provide the same sort of dire threat that the great Disney films offer. (A scene where the frogs stop to make a nice gourmet dinner of gumbo just adds to this feeling – I mean, don't, you know, hurry to try to turn human and stop the bad dudes or anything, now.)

And the film's cheery emphasis the importance of working hard for your wishes and dreams is rather undercut by its equally strong emphasis on the importance of being a princess instead of a waitress, but for that, I fear we must blame the Marketing Power of Disney Princesses rather than Disney storytelling.

The film wasn't bad enough to snark – although I must ask, have we seriously hit a point where every animated film from Disney/Pixar has to have a revealing underwear visual joke? It's amusing a couple of times, but this time it felt flat. But apart from the carping – and I realize I've done a lot of it – I liked the jazz loving alligator, and I thought the banter and flirtation between the frogs was one of Disney's better attempts at romance. And, I rather like the conceit of falling in love with a star.

So, as I mentioned, yesterday my parents and I headed off to see Oceans, a French film brought to the U.S. by Disney with revised narration by Pierce Brosnan. I have no idea if the English narration is the same as the French.

First, let me mention the good parts: the photography is stunning, with particularly vivid pictures of crab armies (the highlight of the film), a blanket octopus, a ribbon eel, a blue whale, and some cute little baby turtles getting eaten by hungry birds (this film is probably not suitable for very small children, whatever the G rating.) It looks glorious. I wanted to take several of the images and turn them into screensavers. And I adored all of the bits about the sea lions. (I love sea lions, and these were particularly adorable sea lions.)

But it is not without its problems, some from the editing, some from the narration, and some stemming from the sad truth that I have spent way, way too much time in my life staring at dolphin noses.

1. Presumably to emphasize its overall "all of the oceans are connected" viewpoint, the movie jumps around and around and around the oceans, and I do mean all of the oceans, with little to no identification; if you didn't know better, you could easily believe that the cute little sea otters just off of Monterey Bay are in fact swimming over the coral reef that the film showed just moments earlier.

This continues to happen through the film, giving little to no context for most of what is going on. We have a shot of what was probably an Atlantic barrier reef almost immediately followed by kelp forests presumably in the Pacific (difficult to tell) switching to Japanese waters and so on.

2. Speaking of editing issues...those dolphins.

The film has quite a few scenes of jumping and swimming dolphins. In all of these scenes, we are meant to think that the film crew just happened to manage to get images of the same dolphins, first under the water and then over the water and then in the afternoon and then in the sunset. Except for one major problem: the shots are of different dolphin species. (If you see the film, watch the noses.) In the most egregious example, the underwater and initial swimming shots are of either Pacific or Atlantic white-sided dolphins, which then through the magic of movie editing become spinner dolphins.

I get that this is going to be lost on the vast majority of viewers. I also get that different dolphin species, less interested than we are in these sorts of distinctions, often swim together, and if I'm not mistaken there was also a shot of some spotted dolphins swimming along with bottlenose dolphins, demonstrating just that point. But combined with the constant shifting from ocean to ocean made me not want to trust the film.

3. If I see an ocean area solely filled with medusae (jellyfish/jellies, whichever term you prefer) and absolutely no other fish, my first thought, Disney, is not, ooooooh, what an exquisite pristine ocean environment, but rather, holy )(*)(, what an overfished area.

The numbers of ctenophores and jellyfish do appear to be increasing in ocean waters. This is not necessarily something to celebrate, since their numbers appear to be increasing just as fisheries are collapsing. It is probable, if not proven, that they are taking advantage of the reduced competition for food.

I suspect magnifelyn had other concerns.

But these quibbles aside, I did find myself loving the film – largely because so much of it really looked cool. Oh, and the sea lions. And the otters. And the blue whales.

*******

We also took a moment to watch – not go up in – Disney's Big Balloon Thing at Downtown Disney, which is a big balloon featuring Mary Poppins which goes up a few hundred feet, hovers there for a bit, and then comes down – all for the low, low price of...$18?

As far as we could tell, the entire Balloon Thing lasts for about five to ten minutes, which, well, great, but given that in the same location you can take in a movie for $7.50 to $10.50 (depending when you get there) or spend several hours at the considerably more exciting Disney Quest at $35 to $41, or (in the evenings/weekends) listen to free sidewalk entertainment, I have to wonder just how well the Balloon is doing. It certainly wasn't attracting many people when we were there, although, granted, we were there during a largely unbusy weekday afternoon.

Also, my mother figured out how to work her moving sand picture thing, which had failed in its potential awesomeness by not actually, as it happened, moving. As it turns out, like so many artistic things, the sand pictures are…dare I say it? A bit temperamental, requiring just the touch of fiddling and kindly if slightly irritated tapping to get moving. I can sympathize.

So I headed out to start looking around for a new laptop, only to find myself at a baseball game instead.

Hey, look. That sort of thing can happen to anybody.

Anyway, we had six seats at the Atlanta Braves/Pittsburgh Pirates spring training game at Disney's ESPN Wide World of Sports for all of two of us, which felt slightly like overkill.

Despite innumerable trips to Disney, this was my first trip to Wide World of Sports, which I must say did not exactly live up to the theme park standards on this particular visit, given that the entire place is undergoing massive renovations and planning for a small marathon this upcoming weekend, forcing people wanting valet parking (not us) to drive along an exciting dirt road that was rather less smooth than dirt roads tend to be, and people with preferred parking (us) to see a truly spectacular collection of Porta Potties. If you like that sort of thing, and don't tell me if you do, that was absolutely the place to fulfill your Porta Potty fetish. We ended up parking on one of the football fields, in a place that was not exactly marked for disabled parking, and went over some intriguing terrain to get to Wide World of Sports. For once I was exceedingly grateful that we'd selected the wheelchair and not the scooter. We then went through what I think are usually basketball courts but were now filled with sparkling Disney Princess and Lady Foot Locker supplies, up an elevator, and finally into a nice café, and then, finally, into the more official Wide World of Sports entrance. It was precisely the opposite of my general Disney feeling of wow, look at the parking lots.

We did, however, have excellent seats – right behind home plate. We could not possibly have chosen two teams that I am more neutral about, so naturally I cheered for the Pirates, because, well, pirates. (Equally naturally I shall spare you any tension – since I was cheering for the Pirates, naturally they lost.) This decision was to have a more momentous impact than I'd anticipated. But I anticipate.

It'd been years since I'd gone to Orioles spring training games with the Venezuelan down in Fort Lauderdale. I'd forgotten just how relaxed and laid back they are, even by baseball standards. (Which are not exactly high on the tension scale.) And I'd also forgotten just how much is lost when watching baseball on the small screen – most of the point, really, even if you have bought a little box of Cracker Jack to munch on at home.

(Incidentally, we did not get ANY Cracker Jack because some people felt that popcorn fulfilled that traditional need, which no. I was also amused to see the added Disney touch of menus placed by each seat featuring overpriced food that can be ordered and delivered to your seat, and even more amused to watch pretty much everyone selecting hot dogs and beer instead. It's baseball.)

Specifically, what you miss are the spectators, including:

To my left, a highly excitable Atlanta Braves fan with a remarkably booming voice and a penchant for colorful language and surprisingly creative metaphors that had at least one person saying, "Daddy will explain that later," followed somewhat later by, "Daddy really doesn't know. No, Daddy's clueless." He broke the genius of Daddy.

Directly above me, a former player for the minor leagues, now playing softball, and his two friends, one of whom runs a fairly successful home contracting company offering expert service on circuit breakers. One could hardly fault his work ethic since he was continually answering calls during the game, switching delightfully from a fairly foul mouthed baseball fan to an educated, utterly polite, professional and rather slick salesman who was easily able to convince people to upgrade all kinds of things to circuit boards.

Directly behind them was a diehard Pirates fan ("We're REAL Pirates fans. We don't just PRETEND to be Pirates fans," making me wonder just how big this fake Pirates fan movement is) who we'll call L, who treated us to an extensive, and I must say, very persuasive, explanation of just why the current owners of the Pirates are the Worst People on Earth and how terrible it was that the other potential buyers had not in fact bought the Pirates at all. (Names were listed and I'm sure I could look them up, but I'm not going to bother.)

Moment one: So, diehard Pirates fan L is shouting, at some length, about the multiple, multiple inadequacies of the guy at bat (a Pirate) below, who apparently, is just awful, because the owners won't spend money on the right player, and all we need is a new owner and this guy at bat is totally overpaid and like )(&^&**& _)()*(*&(&*^*(&() and )(**(&*(&*( and )(*&*(&*()*( and also totally overpaid –

And with that, the guy hit the only home run of the game.

"God," said the minor league player in awe. "Talk shit about a player, watch him hit a home run."

"YAY!"

Moment two: So, it's the bottom of the 9th, and things are not, it must be confessed, looking too good for the Pirates, since although they have two men on base the score they are two runs behind and have two outs already and the batter already has three balls and two strikes, and the remaining crowd is roaring and roaring and –

"Yes, ma'am," said the contractor in an exceedingly polite voice. "I am at a baseball game. No ma'am, work comes first. Of course. Yes, ma'am."

Fly ball and OUT!

"Turns out she's a Marlins fan and taking her kids up to their game," he explained.

"You have a customer for life," said the minor leaguer.

Moment three, which had nothing to do with any of the above people: So someone else has noted that I was clapping for the Pirates, and told me that I was too pretty to be a Pirates fan, to which I answered that I'm really more of a Cubs fan anyway, because, well –

"That's just sad," he said, before I could go on to explain about the Red Sox and the Marlins.

It is, really. At least until some goats are sacrificed. Go Cubs!

Incidentally, based on this small and completely unrepresentative sample of the U.S. population, the current proposal to put Ronald Reagan's face on the $50 bill is not popular, not particularly out of a love for Ulysses S. Grant, but because, as a few people put it, Reagan should be put on a "real )(*(^ bill" that people will see. If I were Andrew Jackson's ghost, I would be getting a bit concerned about my fate here.

******

Small note: As you might have guessed, this computer is not in a very happy state of mind at the moment, what with fan failures, keyboard failures, and, well, ok, not enough ram to make me happy, although that's less a thing of the moment than an ongoing feature.

Cirque du Soleil tries to set new world records for stilt walking.

Not even mildly incidentally, it was insanely hot today, which means those costumes are either considerably more or considerably less appropriate than they may look. Certainly not a day for long sleeves. Fortunately, the heavy rains are cooling things off now - if a bit too late to help out the stilt walkers.