Uncle Walt's Insane Dream

Wednesday dawned and I wandered into the living room to discover that the sofa was now unfolded into a bed and some sort of unidentified life form had made a den in it.

I was on the point of alerting Mrs Stevie to a possible badger infestation when I remembered that the Boyfriend was staying the night, and that Ipsum Loren this must be what it looked like when it was aestivating. Blech. I decided to shower and re-assess the tactical situation with a fresh eye and fresh everything else.

I was somewhat bothered by numbness in my legs, a problem I have when I've been walking and standing for extended periods of time, and one which is accompanied by intense pain under the numb area if I stand too long once it begins. I know that doesn't make sense, but it is pure misery once it starts and I wasn't too happy that symptoms were manifesting so early in the vacation, what with at least two more days of walking- and standing-intensive "entertainment" plotted by Mrs Stevie. Oh well, I'd play it by ear. Leg. Whatever.

Showered and shaved¹ I re-entered the world of snooze and started rousing everyone. Then I drove to a nearby pharmacy and used their ATM to withdraw lots of money to cover expenses during the Great EPCOT Adventure and returned to the Villa de Stevie. We would not need cash for tickets since we had leftover "never expire, no ID" park hoppers from the year we came with the family² for Mrs Stevie and me, and an ID branded never expiring park hopper we got for the Stevieling a few years later³ so we were good to go.

We breakfasted on eggs and toast and stuff and Mrs Stevie perpetrated The Great NASA Zero-G Room Hoax⁴, then we piled into the Mrs Steviebus bound for fun, adventure and fun⁶. Just before boarding Mrs Stevie asked me to reimburse the Boyfriend who hadn't been able to get a discount ticket after all due to his being too tardy and not getting a bloody move on. Apparently, while I was distracted by spaceships and spacesuits and space rocks the Stevieling had negotiated an alternate plan by phone with Mrs Stevie, in which they would buy a full price Park Hopper ticket for $140⁷ and I would supply the funds from my Special Bottomless Money Bucket.

Mrs Stevie, having delivered the news, climbed behind the steering wheel and let me have a few moments to myself, as is her custom.

"I say sir, what was that jolly dervish-like dance you were doing just now?" the Boyfriend asked when I climbed into my seat. "It had elements of Australian Aboriginal tribal hunting dances I saw on the National Geographic channel - I noted the stabbing motions you made with an invisible spear toward this vehicle as you stamped and whirled. I did find the ritual grimacing a little hard to watch though. I thought for a minute you were having a seizure of some sort. Very effective, the way the enamel flaked off your teeth like that, though I suspect gnashing them so hard is not conducive to their longevity."

"It is a creation of my own. I like to perform it whenever we share family outings with others to drive away evil spirits. I hope no-one minds if we stop off at the pharmacy so I can get some cash?"

"What's that smell?" asked the Stevieling.

"It's the lining of my wallet. It must have caught fire somehow. Luckily there was nothing in it."

We drove to EPCOT with only a minor shouting match when Mrs Stevie couldn't read the new road signs Disney has put up sometime in the eight years since we last cared to visit and requested directions from her half asleep passengers, and I paid extra for "preferred parking" so we would be only half a mile from the gate should the old legs start giving me problems. The others were also talking of moving over to The Magic Kingdom⁸ once EPCOT closed (it closes around 9 pm, hours earlier than the other park) so having the bus close by was favorite. In our joy at arriving Chez Fun we neglected to note the car park name, rank and spot number we had parked in. A rookie mistake that many years ago had me on The Sad Train, an experience I was not in a hurry to repeat.

Should you ever visit Disney in a car, you will see that all the parks have placards on which Disney characters are pictured and named prominently, and these also have a rank number on them. Consider that in order to accommodate the bajillion guests that turn up each day, the car parks must be huge and many. So huge and many that Disney operates special road trains called people movers to get folks from a point near their car to one near the gate and back again later that night.

This seemingly daft labelling practice is in fact a very clever thing indeed. It is relatively easy to remember "Goofy 150" and thus be able to find your car when you are tired and so are the kids, but in order for this quite clever number and rebus solution to a problem in the making to work you must take the preliminary step of actually looking at the placard nearest your car while your brain is switched on.

Those who fail to do so will be confronted later on by geography made different by darkness and exhaustion, and face the prospect of trying to find their vehicle among more cars than they ever thought moved on the face of the Earth. Not only that, the People Movers are constrained to set routes. If you don't know which Disney character you car is parked with, you have minimal chances of locating your car no matter how loudly the kids scream.

At about one o'clock in the morning, Disney operates one last People Mover that travels every route through every car park. It slowly zigs and zags across the now mostly barren fields of tar, with the occasional cries of joy as a passenger discovers their vehicle sitting in the middle of nowhere and everyone else groans as they cannot see theirs. I call this The Sad Train, because I know well how one feels when riding the bloody thing. Many years ago I took my Mum and Dad on a trip to Disney, where many things went wrong including me making The Rookie Mistake and us riding The Sad Train until almost the last stop⁹ as a result. Never Again I vowed. I will pause while you regain your composure.

We got to the park gate where we were directed to go back to Guest Relations and exchange the card tickets for plastic fingerprint-ID branded cards. Mrs Stevie was a little put out that we couldn't keep the voided card tickets as they were apparently a souvenir of our family get-together (why we needed a reminder of it other than our memories I have no idea) but eventually we trooped over to the gate and got fingerprinted again and were let into EPCOT.

Walt Disney was a visionary man, but could take wrong turns with the best of us. EPCOT is what was left after one of those wrong turns was narrowly missed.

Originally designed as the Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow, it was to have been a working community of 20,000 living with and working with state of the art technology, that visitors could peer at as they went about their day-to-day lives. There is a description of what was intended in the Wikipedia which matches what I remember reading in Omni magazine when the park was being built. Fortunately, this vision was lost when Walt Disney died (I mean, can you envisage the psychological stresses of living in such a place? In my first job the computer operators freaked out because of a letterbox-sized window that allowed passers-by to gawk at them in the course of their work) and EPCOT was re-envisioned in its current form (or damn near; there have been one or two changes over the years).

The park is essentially two quite different parks glued together. At the front there is a collection of pavilions dealing with various aspects of life such as energy, technology, earth science and so on, each containing themed attractions (usually a ride of some sort), restaurants and gift shops¹⁰ and at the back, surrounding a lake, the World Showcase in which pastiches of various countries have been assembled for people to wander through and interact with young men and women from each country modeled and buy crap from in the many themed gift shops¹¹.

I know that right now people are scrunching up their faces, but remember, this isn't for the benefit of those who already live in those countries, it is for vacationing Americans to get a Disneyfied view of them. If you cannot get into the spirit of the Disney Thing you should not waste your money. I don't have the Disney buy-in of the women of my house, but I can ride with it when I have to and EPCOT is my favorite park of them all, being a very sedate experience on the whole. Not only that, I have fond memories of a visit when the Stevieling was about two or so.

On that occasion we were sharing our vacation with my in-laws. One day we suggested to them that they visit EPCOT on their own and that we would join them later for dinner. We got tickets for them and on the appointed day they eagerly drove forth and we settled back for a nice day of "just us".

I forget where we went that morning, but I have a clear memory of driving back into Orange Lake Country Club around 1 pm and saying to Mrs Stevie: "You know, I bet they are already back and waiting for us." I dunno why, but I was certain of it.

Mrs Stevie laughed off this stupid suggestion, but when we turned the corner to the Villa Stevie there was the Mrs Steviedad's car parked in its spot.

We went in and asked them why they were back. "We did everything" said the Mrs Steviedad. We expressed incredulity that this could be the case in such a short period of time. Allowing for travel they had spent maybe three hours in the park, if that.

Closer questioning revealed that they had actually not experienced anything but the World Showcase because "everything was being remodeled and was boarded up, and your father was in charge."

Okay, we said, we'll have some lunch and a rest and we'll take you back for another look. They grudgingly acceded to this while the Mrs Steviedad did some grumbling that there was really no point. There followed one of those sweet experiences life occasionally serves up.

Like many men, I am not well thought of by my father in law and never have been, so the chance to show him to be wrong while openly being helpful was a powerful narcotic. Accordingly I suggested we park in the Magic Kingdom car park and ride the Monorail into EPCOT, as the high perspective offered by this would allow me to see over the plywood that Disney had covered some stuff with while they remodeled and get a better idea of what was and was not working. The key to the fun to come was the Mrs Steviemom.

I began innocently asking her as we swooped over the various bits of EPCOT: "Did you do that Dinosaur ride in the Exxon pavilion over there?" "No." "There's an interesting presentation in the Land pavilion, that one there. Did you see it?" "No." "Well you must've ridden the Spaceship Earth ride. It is right at the front of the park." "He said the line was too long." Each of my questions caused a paint-blistering glare in the Mrs Steviedad's direction, of course. "Well never mind, we'll do them all now. The lines will be short at this time of night."

By the time we got off the monorail the Mrs Steviemom had steam coming out of her ears and wasn't speaking to the Mrs Steviedad, and he was looking very sheepish indeed. Result! We toured the park and made everything "better", and everyone was happy by the time we went back to the car. But that monorail ride was the best ride I ever took with my father in law, and the sweet nectar of the memory has carried me through many troubles.

Better days. Better days. Back to the present.

Used to be that everyone would crowd into Spaceship Earth, the giant golf-ball shaped thing front and center in the park, so Mrs Stevie and I would head over to the exact opposite end, into the America portion of the World Showcase and The American Adventure. In the huge Colonial Period mansion you can often listen to choirs of period-dressed people singing music from the Colonial Period, and The American Adventure is also the name of an animatronic presentation on the history of America (a very superficial one it has to be said but then one must remember the audience is on vacation and time is short). Upon viewing it Paul the Globetrotting Wargamer announced it made him feel proud to be American, even though he wasn't. Parts of it are very impressive still from a technical standpoint even though the mechanics date from the very early 80s. When it opened, I recall Disney were inordinately proud of their ability to make Benjamin Franklin's animatronic self climb a small flight of stairs convincingly.

Where was I? Oh right.

We would then work our way round the various countries until the crowds started to join us, at which point we would go back to the entrance and do the rides everyone else had queued for an hour to get on. It worked very well.

that is no longer an option, since they now only open the World Showcase part at around 11 am, so we were forcéd to rub shoulders with the hoi-poloi. Bah.

First up was the Energy pavilion so we could visit the (now cheesy) dinosaur animatronic ride. I had to sit through a movie presentation starring Ellen DeGeneres who is not my favorite comedienne with an energy-themed plotline that was like toothache in parts. When this ride was put together we still thought that oil came from Dinosaurs (apparently it doesn't, it comes from algae according to late breaking science) which is the justification for the display. The movie used to be a delightfully dated thing leading a cheer for gasoline usage in the classic Disney Mode that positively reeked of the 1960s, but I guess they thought it was time to modernize. Boo hiss.

The dinosaurs are still there, though. I dote on this sort of laughable animatronic stuff. My only reason for visiting the Magic Kingdom is the Pirates of the Caribbean ride¹² which is another cheesy animatronic ride past its sell-by date¹⁴ but much-loved for all that in my case. Nothing says fun like a mind-bogglingly elaborate animated display of life-sized dummies, and no-one can make this stuff work as well as Disney. In a world increasingly in love with CGI it is a dying art too.

Anyway.

I love those Brontosauruses¹⁵ at the start of the ride. munching greenery in the early evening, the first thing you see when the chairs you watch movie from convert themselves into a train and truck you through the dinosaur bit before re-assembling themselves into a theater at the end. The rest of the dinosaur exhibit is no much to write home about to be honest, but the Apatosauruses¹⁶ are neat. Yes you can do a better job with CGI. Yes you can spot the joins in the "sky" if you look. To harp on these concerns it to miss the point and the spiffiness of what has been done. Get off my lawn.

After that we raced to The Land pavilion so we could try out the new "Soarin'" ride, which is a wraparound vision simulator ride of reasonable niftiness. The Stevieling and I had a great time poking fun at the frequent disorienting scene shifts. One moment we would be over the desert, the next zooming over the sea, then an orange grove. Our cries of "Wait, what?" and "Disney should stop putting LSD in the drinking fountains" were not enjoyed by Mrs Stevie who just likes to ruin other people's fun and harsh their mellow and like that.

This ride adds a new dimension to the usual motion/vision trickery by having perfumolators pump appropriate smells into the area as you soar over orange groves, the sea etc. (I wonder what the hyper-asthmatics who seem more numerous each year have to say about that). I think Disney should add footage of flights over the littoral left by the Deepwater Horizon disaster, Dioxin Springs New Jersey and the Staten Island landfills. That would sort the men out from the boys, stench-tolerance wise. Only when the riders exit coughing, eyes watering after having swooped through the plume left by a Union Pacific Big Boy¹⁷ under full steam will this ride be said to have achieved excellence.

We staggered off that ride and limped over to the fast-track ticket machines and got ourselves on the Push-Ahead-Of-The-Proles list for Fast Track, another ancient ride but a rather neat one, and were told to bugger off and come back around noon by the smiling young man in charge. I'm never quite sure whether Disney clones these up or builds them from cogs and gears, but they never fail to smile¹⁸.

Disney has the best express-queuing mechanism of all the park operators. I believe they were the first to offer the feature, which involves no extra expense above and beyond your ticket and allows you to get on a special fast line for a ride provided you agree to come between certain times. A computer keeps track of capacity and when there is no more it refuses to issue express line-jumpers for that ride. Contrast this with Universal Studios who ask you to pay almost double the price of a single entry ticket which gets you on express lines throughout the park, but there is no capacity control involved - there can't be since it is a park-wide optional thing. The express line can get quite long in that park.

Anyway, we got ourselves a reservation for Fast Track, my absolute favorite ride in EPCOT¹⁹ and then nipped over to Mission to Mars, totally the best ride ever invented²⁰. We first encountered this ride the last time we were in EPCOT, nearly a decade ago, when it was in shakedown, and it rocked.

We had been issued an express line ticket (I seem to remember it wa for the Fast Track ride but it has been a long time and Mr Brain is not my friend) and on the back was a printed invitation to "join us for Mission to Mars". Only thing was that although there were signs for the ride, advertising it as "due soon", they were plastered on huge plywood walls enclosing whatever Mission to Mars involved. I loudly opined it was a mistake²¹ and we proceeded with our park consumption but as we were leaving, around an hour before the park was due to close, Mrs Stevie said "lets go and have a closer look".

We went for a closer look and discovered a small doorway in the plywood with a young woman on guard in front of it. I started to explain why we were there and she waved us through without a word. Mysteriouser and mysteriouser.

The ride we entered was an elaborate space-themed thing and had lots to look at while you waited for the line to diminish, which we weren't required to do on account of there being a grand total of about twelve people in a ride designed to accommodate a thousand or more. The ride itself, explained Gary Sinese from two dozen TV screens, was a rocket trip to Mars. Reading the small print, we found it was a simulator ride (of course). We would be enclosed on a small "capsule" which was itself part of a centrifuge that would provide the gravity effects, as I could see when we began boarding.

The Disney engineers were in the process of tuning the ride to discover how hard they could push things before people started throwing up or having coronaries and strokes, and the ride we got that night was intense, to the point I thought I was going to die on the thing, but it was so convincing and so much fun I didn't care and was laughing for joy of the whole affair. So much fun we ran around and did it all over again when it was over along with the other riders who were grinning like idiots too.

The ride is boffo, tricking the riders with a very convincing bumpy ride to the pad, a launch, booster separation lurch and crash landing effects. It is more fun than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick and I recommend it to all.

In the interval between our rides on it Disney had come up with a compromise of sorts; they now offer the ride in two flavors, intense and not so intense. We, as veteran pretend space rats, picked the aneurysm line. Naturally, the ride was not as we remembered, being less intense and shorter than memory insisted it had been all those years ago²² but a good time was had regardless and we left the ride grinning like idiots again.

We decided then to go book our lunch in Germany and try to get in a ride on Spaceship Earth before we had to report to the Fast Track ride, and we made contact with a Disney representative who, after a brief chat took care of the booking and then kindly walked us to the front of the Spaceship Earth line. When we didn't understand what he was going to do he said, "I'm going to V.I.P. you into the ride folks!"

"Hurrah!" I cried, flashing on Sunday's "Sales Presentation". "We're V.I.P.s again and not idiots like we are at Orange Lake!"²³. Mrs Stevie tearfully thanked him for his kindness and boarded the ride's little four-seater car under the resentful glare of those less fortunate and who had experienced the line in all its glory in a properly regal manner befitting one on whom had been conferred the lofty status of V.I.P.

"You look like The Queen" I snarled. "Stop waving to everyone in that regal manner."

"One must acknowledge one's inferiors lest one loses touch with the masses" she murmured, carefully adjusting her pose so the invisible tiara I knew she was wearing would catch the light properly.

"You're going to cause a riot! Stop it before they throw us off the ride!" I yelled.

"Let them eat cake!"

"That only works if you say it in archaic French, and then it only gets your head cut off by the masses you are waving at!"

"All right! All right! Fuggeddaboudit!"

Spaceship Earth is a sedate ride through an animatronic look at human technological progress through the ages²⁴. I recall that it used to feature many more visual simulator effects that made it feel like it was zooming around at high speed, prompting Disney to advise people at the entrance that the ride never exceeded 4 miles per hour, but those seem to have been dialed back in favor of more dioramas, but again, old memories at work here.

And then it was just time for Fast Track. Ha!

Fast Track is a lovely little number. First you get to use nifty touch screens to design your car²⁵. Mrs Stevie an I paired up to design the most perfect car in the history of automotive design, partaking of state of the art materials and incorporating many visionary design elements while at the same time building on the wisdom of others and not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Sleek, powerful and bright red, it evoked the lines of the old Corvette Stingray with a soupspoon of Thunderbird Three. Perhaps he most controversial design element, the face-level jet engines mounted in the blind spot were entirely justified by the design goal, and not just a way of getting cyclists of all types to stay where the driver could see them in his/her mirrors.

The Stevieling and Boyfriend also paired up and managed to half-build some lame yeast-powered ecomobile, but they ran out of time because halfway through they hit a major design issue that split the team ideologically: they couldn't agree on the right shade of green. They also messed around attempting to paint flames on it for some bizarre reason. I, mindful of the fact that although the Stevieling is fully grown now I am still her father and one from whom she occasionally seeks approval, roared with laughter and mocked their puny pseudo-Prius loudly and often until Mrs Stevie told me to shut up.

Our designs were "recorded" on a card which we took with us.

Then we were made to stand in line. The cars we were about to ride are six seaters, three front, three back, so some interlopers were placed in our happy bickering group. We were told to put our cards next to a sensor in order to "transfer our designs" to the test vehicle. It was claimed that our designs would be compared to each other as the test car went through various maneuvers, to determine the "best". Ho hum.

Then, those words actually penetrated Mr Brain and a fiendish plan formed. As "our car" pulled up I leaned over to the Stevieling's row and tapped our card on her team's sensor. Now we would be comparing the Parent Sport Annihilator²⁶ with ... itself! The Stevieling howled with rage as I executed this brilliant plan and madly tapped her card against the sensor to undo my perfidious parental perfidy. "Not cool, Dad! Not cool!" she snarled as the sensor refused to flash its lights.

It transpired that either the plan did not work or that her frantic ameliorative card tapping was effective because the computer displayed the fact that indeed the Parent Sport Annihilator would be up against the Yeastmobile after all. I dunno about the interlopers. They didn't speak English and probably had not gone through the motions of getting in on the action.

Mrs Stevie and I grabbed front seats on the grounds that we were the parents and older and were bigger and faster than everyone else. The Stevieling grabbed the seat behind mine so she could kick it and yell at the back of my head on the chance she could thereby induce vomiting from vertigo. And we were off!

The car swerved this way and that as it went through various "steering tests" and "brake tests", but I wasn't paying attention, nor was I worried about whatever the computer decided about how our "designs" performed. I was psyching myself up for the last bit, the whole reason for getting on line.

Eventually the shenanigans were over and the car emerged into the bright sun on a track that runs around the outside of the pavilion the attraction is housed in. One small hump-back hill to set the scene and the car took off on the "speed test", hurtling around the track at Warp 7. As we approached the end of the track a speedometer claimed we were doing almost 65 miles per hour and it was just great. Consider that we were inside something only slightly larger than a go-kart, about fifty feet in the sky with no windshield to speak of, on a banked curve so you could feel the Gs piling on. And the acceleration is wild on this thing too. Those last few seconds (it must be around 20 or so but I was too busy grinning to time it) are worth the annoyance of the rest of it. I recommend a hearty "Yeeeeeeeeee Haaaaaaaaaaaaa" as the perfect accompaniment.

And so on to the World Showcase, and Mexico was first up since we were going clockwise round the lake. I love the way that when you go inside the Mexican display from the hot, bright outside you walk through a small museum of artifacts and then into a market plaza in the cool of night. On the horizon a volcano is burbling, and behind the worlds largest gift shop is a plaza restaurant overlooking the river, which houses the ride. This used to be a boat ride along a river with some light Mexican history extolled in an amusing way. Inoffensive and educational for the little ones you might have in your party.

It has been "improved".

Now it is a lame ride-long cartoon show featuring The Three Caballeros, Disney characters possibly popular in Mexico, possibly not. Who cares? One look and I was fretting about what might have been done at Norway, possibly the best of the showcase attractions.

Of course, the attraction isn't the entire point of each "world". Outside, the whole thing is a mock-up of some local architecture that provides excellent photographic possibilities, there are several options when it comes to dining (Mexico has at least two: The plaza restaurant and a more formal one across the street) and various local snack options abound. Everyone on staff is young, in the prime of health and kitted out in appropriate national costume (not necessarily The National Costume). There are also several gift shops, which is part of the point of the place. Mexico has a huge market with stalls of stuff I've never been tempted to browse.

Norway has the best architecture in my opinion, and the still-great Maelstrom ride in a "Longboat" through Norse myth and history (lite). The trolls in there terrify the kids, and I've always been fascinated on how Disney folded the ride up the way they did to cram so much into such a small space. The scenery is wonderfully evocative. The gift shops feature a wide range of inclement weather clothing and local-themed portable crap, along with Viking-themed stuff for the kids. Not too offensively Disney. Plus, there's all those blonde young women staffing the place²⁷ to liven the day a bit, which is why Mrs Stevie always hurries us out of the place I suppose. For some reason we've never dined there.

Disney Norway was relatively empty this day and so we had the run of it, more or less. We rode the ship with a terrified child who took one look at the big troll and went into a conniption fit. Then we got admonished by a large animated one-eyed floating head of Odin and shot backwards for a bit so the kid could be terrified into three years of bedwetting & nightmares. It was just great.

All the young people staffing the place were speaking with dots over their "o"s and everyone was blonde except me. Outside in the "authentic" Norwegian street there were Norwegian snacks to be had, Norwegian statuary to gawk at and architecture sort of like Viking Tudor to my uneducated eyes. Every so often the stern of a little Longship would burst out of the "mountain" above us, then have second thoughts and disappear back in again²⁸ accompanied by the screams of the younger crew fresh from Odin's Savage Visage.

We gave all the countries between Norway and Germany a miss (the Stevieling and Boyfriend pulled faces because they wanted to go into China and I did not. I wasn't in the mood for more than one 360 degree movie²⁹ and Canada at the extreme other end of the circuit³⁰ had dibs because of the Stan Rogers³¹ soundtrack. I pointed out that we could always split up and explore independently and smiling broke out.

Germany has a nifty restaurant themed as a beergarten in a Bavarian village, with the tables looking out onto the "square" - a dance floor - and a stage where every so often a band plays a set featuring traditional German drinking songs and polkas and stuff. They even have an Alpenhorn. And in Disney Germany they sell beer in litres, of which American wives have no idea of the size and readily agree to allow British husbands to buy them from the fraulein in the strange costume. We also had all the delicious German food we could eat served buffet/carvery style. The obvious danger here is overeating to bursting point, then going out into the tropical heat of a Florida afternoon.

We were careful and only overeat because the food was delicious, not because we were cheap and desperate to get value for money (as so many of the Englishmen I know would instinctively do). I recommend you do Dinner rather than lunch if you try this out for yourself. That way, as you stagger around the park groaning at least the heat will be manageable.

After Germany we split up, the Stevieling and Boyfriend heading off to Disney China and Mrs Stevie and I heading for The American Experience. After the show and some Singing Without Instrumental Accompaniment (aka Acapulco Singing) by women in Period dresses far too heavy for the heat we went outside and partook of Period lemonade while some men with a flag and some drums and fifes did patriotic things in public in swelteringly hot Period Dress Uniforms (If we British had cracked the secret of the Hawaiian Shirt and Surfer Shorts kit a bit sooner we would have put George Washington and the Swelterin' Mutineers to flight in two shakes of an Imperial Fist (of benevolent rule). Oh well.

Somehow, we all rendezvoused in Disney Japan, where I wanted to check out the Kimonos in the back end of the gift shop (the Japanese gift shop has a sort of price slope - the further back the deeper the debt). Ever since I found out I cannot replace my Mitsukiku kimono³² I've been keen to find a stand-in for it. I found a somewhat less impressive one of similar design, but then the Boyfriend ruined everything by dashing into theater and trying on every kimono I had deemed acceptable for me. I couldn't wear anything the Boyfriend had been seen in, even if only as a lark. Bah.

The Stevieling tried on a kimono with the help of one of the young Japanese ladies staffing the store (all the men were banished to the things going on outside because they screwed up the ambience or something) and looked so beautiful in it I bought it for her. She needs all her cash for college, and Dad's are supposed to buy stuff for their little girls. And Mrs Stevie told me I had to so that was that.

I had thought I had managed to lose that vile harridan but it turned out she was only round the corner watching another Japanese lady sculpt candy into animals. Once the smell of me enjoying myself was in the air she homed in like a starving shark to chum.

We dallied for a bit in Disney Britain, where a rock concert was underway in what looked like a Kensington Mews. If it hadn't been for the total absence of litter and the leavings of dogs it would have been completely convincing. We've eaten in the "English Pub" once, and the food was okay, but I've never understood why I find so many Englishmen in and around the pub as I walk by when there are so many other options for a good drink (Disney Germany stands out, but I think all the "worlds" serve beer somewhere with the possible exception of Canada, which I don't think has any restaurants in it - could be wrong though). The beer isn't that great and English style beer is hopeless for relieving the Florida Afternoon Heat Wave: if you chill it enough to work you ruin the taste. Plus: pints vs litres. I recall I had steak and kidney pie with trifle to follow that one time we ate there, many years ago³³.

It was here in Disney Kensington that my legs started to play up in a big way, and I began to dread the rest of the afternoon and the evening plans for Walking Disney Until Midnight™.

I made it as far as Canada, where they make you climb up through scenery reminiscent of Quebec, to a waterfall in a rock diorama evocative of the types of features we saw surrounding the Columbia Ice Field, thence to a fake gold mine and the entrance to the 360 degree movie "Oh Canada!"

Mrs Stevie conferred with a young Canadian staffer who it turned out came from the same area where my Mum and Dad have settled small world and all that and reported back that the movie had been changed since we last visited. Argh! I demanded to know if the soundtrack still featured the late, great Stan Rogers³⁴ but she didn't know. I sang a few bars but she begged me to stop, as did the three dozen or so tourists lining up to see the movie.

It was okay. Martin Short does a funny intro that dispels the stereotype "blizzard filled" Canada Americans usually picture and the new movie certainly shows off the wildly varied scenery to be found across Canada.

But there was no Stan Rogers³⁵, and I miss the part from the old movie where you were in the cockpit of an aerobatic jet and could look around and see your fellow teammates flying alongside, in front and behind you, separated by lethally short amounts of distance - and it was all real, not a simulation. There were places in that old movie when the scenery banked and people would have to hold onto the grab bars or fall over from the illusion of movement. All excised from the new film, though in compensation there were remote places shown that Mrs Stevie and I recognized because we'd been there.

We aren't very adventurous. The idea of climbing Everest leaves me cold, even though it is a sorta-tourist affair now rather than a fraught man-vs-nature in a World Gone Mad one. I prefer my excitement man-made and escapable at will, as does Mrs Stevie³⁷, but if you holiday in Western Canada civilization can mean door flaps on the tent and hand-painted warning signs directing you away from the bears. In Western Canada one is never more than five minutes away from spears made from a stick with a knife tied to the end and banging rocks together in the hope they will catch fire.

So, to the amazed disbelief of all around us, we had indeed stood on the same river bank as the camera operator as the glacial runoff roared along in grey magnificence behind us and the Rockies soared vertically into the sky wherever one cared to look, and we'd stood looking at the Athabasca Falls in much the same spot the camera operator chose to stand³⁸. We didn't think much about the rough conditions and rugged life style at the time. It was just how things were in Alberta. Traffic may have to wait until the Elk herd wakes up and moves off the highway, and they may choose to wander through town and eat the contents of one’s flower beds of an evening. My Mum has chased a yearling bear off her back deck with nothing but an improvised squirt gun gussied up from bicycle pump and a bucket of cold water. That's how it goes. Life, Western Canada style.

In the Disney version, any bears you see will likely be wearing dungarees and floppy hats, and will pose for a jolly photograph and not attempt to eat you once, and if the weather is inclement Disney will likely figure a way of changing your experience of it into something not unpleasant instead of letting it kill you.

This marked the end of my tolerance for EPCOT and parks in general, and I begged to be allowed to go home and sit in a hot bath to soak my legs. Mrs Stevie decided that this was an excellent plan as she didn't want to be lumbered with me and my "moaning and dripping" during her Magic Kingdom experience, and so we suggested that the Stevieling and Boyfriend to go over to The Magic Kingdom while we went to get the Mrs Steviebus.

It was at this point that the fundamental Rookie Mistake was discovered, and the Disney staff were treated to that most rare sight, a couple locked in the ballet of synchronized Bonehead Dances. Admittedly, mine was a little off due to the leg problem³⁹, but the onlookers were very impressed.

A quick consultation with a Disney Guest Security Assurance Operative in which we bickered over what the details of the walk to the gate involved, scenery-wise and he made helpful suggestions which we interrupted and argued with followed, in which we gradually reached the consensus that we were parked in the car park in front of us - somewhere.

Mrs Stevie boldly strode forward with renewed resolve toward sure and certain car findage. I staggered from side to side, bouncing off other people’s vehicles and the occasional Disney employee⁴⁰ moaning piteously⁴¹ while my beloved bolstered my spirits by swearing at me. Only the fact that she had been driving was restraining her usual line of attack on my parents' lack of a marriage certificate at my birth and speculations as to how closely they were related. If I hadn't been suffering such debilitating torment I could have made much of this situation, but I was already in monumental amounts of discomfort and didn't need a kick in the hurtybits as garnish.

I gave up looking after ten minutes of fruitless searching, sank to a grassy embankment and began to weep for my lost bath, moaning how hopeless it all was and that I thought I might be ready to "let go" and gain some surcease from this interminable agony of life.

I was just getting into my stride, self-pity wise when Mrs Stevie hit me over the head with a bag of souvenir anvils and told me she had found the car by the expedient of telling a Disney Car Park patroller when we parked, and he had used some sort of electronic calculating machine of the future to tell her the rough area in which the Mrs Steviebus had to be located. Twenty minutes later I was soaking in a bath⁴² and Mrs Stevie was heading for The Magic Kingdom in a cloud of smoke and swear words.

I have no idea when they all returned; I was sound asleep.

1. I've had a sort of Nigel Green Victorian Facial Hedge for a couple of years or so now which demands a daily scrape of the neck and chin. As soon as I run out of razor blades I'm going back to a full beard on account of it's quicker to look after and I'm lazy↑
2. The year of the Barely Clad Brazilian Women Misunderstanding↑
3. Disney used to sell tickets good for all their parks without requiring they be tied to a person by ID. They also sold these tickets good for multiple days, which never expired. If you bought two five day park hoppers and only used two days, you had three tickets to use the next time you came no matter when that was. When the Stevieling was around six or so they started branding the tickets with a photograph ID. A year or so after that the tickets started expiring after a few years. I have no idea how long a ticket lasts now, since the expiry date, ID branding and cost mean that it is extremely unlikely I shall buy such tickets ever again↑
4. They bought it with stunned admiration for our daring and wistfulness at their having missed a turn. We never told them it was a gag so they remain convinced that NASA can just turn off gravity when they feel like it⁵ ↑
5. A delusion shared by Ron Howard when he was negotiating for access to make Apollo 13 by the way. The implications of this dimwittery depress me utterly↑
6. fun fun til her daddy etc↑
7. Quel snip!↑
8. Another Disney park↑
9. Back at the park entrance. I've often wondered how many end up there and what their next step is↑
10. Of course↑
11. Are we sensing a trend? In a very real sense many of the attractions to be found in the Orlando theme parks are simply an elaborate lobby for a gift shop. All the ones in Universal Studios are↑
12. And Space Mountain. Two. My two reasons for visiting The Magic Kingdom are The Pirates of the Caribbean ride and Space Mountain¹³ ↑
13. and the Runaway Mine Train. Aaaaaaamongst the reasons for my visiting The Magic Kingdom are: The Pirates of the Caribbean ride, Space Mountain, The Runaway Mine Train and ... I'll come in again↑
14. Unless it has been modified in light of the success of the movies of course↑
15. Or whatever it is fashionable to call them now↑
16. New name for Brontosauruses↑
17. It's a humongous steam locomotive. Look it up for yourself for Stephenson’s sake↑
18. Under pain of "retirement"↑
19. Two. My two favorite rides in EPCOT are: The Dinosaur Thing and Fast Track↑
20. Among the rides I count as among the best in EPCOT are such diverse contenders as: The Cheesy Dinosaur Thing, Fast Track, Mission to Mars ...↑
21. Another win for my powers of prediction↑
22. It occurs to me that the memories in question had just been spun and crushed under high G forces and were possibly affected by same↑
23. When Orange Lake Country Club was stating up, owners like us were referred to as "V.I.P. Members". Now we haven't bought anything from them in fifteen years we are "You Can't Park There I'm Calling Security"↑
24. Or the Disney version of it at any road↑
25. Riiiight↑
26. Working title pending something more awesome↑
27. Also some polite young men↑
28. this is where the boat transits the switches that fold the ride on itself - an engineering finesse of some cleverness↑
29. The viewer stands in the theater surrounded by a ring of screens on which a full circle panoramic film is projected↑
30. You know what I mean, dammit!↑
31. ♪♪Who will know the Bluenose iii-iin the suuuuuuun?♪♪↑
32. A magnificent black thing with a red lining and a Dragon embroidered in gold thread coiling along the entire back of the garment↑
33. Because when I get the chance to eat from a "genuine English" menu I invariably go for Kate and Sidney pie. The trifle was Mrs Stevie's idea↑
34. ♪♪Knooow the Bluenose in the sun know the Bluenose ii-in the suuuuuuuun?♪♪↑
35. There was a very short piece of footage of the Bluenose³⁶ that survived the change↑
36. A replica Grand Banks Schooner. Look it up↑
37. She says: "If God had meant us to go camping and crap in the woods, why did he allow us to develop The House and Indoor Plumbing?" I find her argument persuasive, backed by the threat of ultraviolence as her arguments so often are↑
38. a precarious walkway carved into the rock by wind and rain, guarded by iron pipe handrails secured to the rock by hope and prayer↑
39. The ritual cries of rage were in my case replaced with groans of pain↑
40. They aren’t allowed to complain of minor collisions, but recent Human Rights Park Statutes allow them to attach humiliating Disney character stickers to persistent offenders.↑
41. Mrs Stevie pronounces this "pitifully"↑
42. Jaccuzi-style↑

The Boyfriend Arrives In-Theater And I Go To Look At Rockets

We arose on Tuesday to the expectation of the arrival of the Stevieling's boyfriend for a two night stay.

The terms and conditions for the stay were hammered out between the Stevieling and Mrs Stevie long before I was informed of matters. I doubt they'd have told me at all but for the fact I might attempt to use the sofa while The Boyfriend was sleeping on it. No doubt a heated discussion was had on the relative merits of letting me have enough time to object vs the usual situational ambush they employ in these cases before deciding on the plan where I didn't end up demanding explanations for the supernumerary on the sofa after sitting on it while it snoozed.

I had been begged by the Stevieling not to make fun of the Boyfriend, as he was "desperate" to impress me. I dunno why this was such fraught subject for discussion. I had made a special effort to make the lad feel welcome. Admittedly I had taken to referring to him as Captain Bizarro, but never in his hearing. I disapprove of boyfriends on principle (the principle that they indicate my little girl is growing up and will sooner of later no longer require me to be around) but had nothing personal against this one as he had demonstrated nothing but the ultimate respect for the Stevieling. He does, however, sport a hairstyle more suited to the mid 1970s than this day and age. He looks a bit like a caricature of young men of that era. This, of course, reminds me of my own lost youth (when the hairstyle looked good on me) sacrificed on the altar of marriage and responsibility and stuff.

In any event, as I pointed out to Mrs Stevie, it mattered not one whit what we thought about Mr Wooly Mammoth since the Stevieling has achieved the age of consent in New York (and by extension, Florida) and could in principle do whatever she damn well pleased with whomsoever she wished without our say-so. She could indeed do a lot worse than the Boyfriend, who at least was respectful to everyone. Since he was to be joining us on a day-long excursion to EPCOT¹ on the morrow, so could we.

He was also late. Instead of arriving in the civilized AM so that they could do the thousand and one things the Stevieling had planned for, he got a late start and then got lost in the labyrinthine roadways of Orange Lake Country Club and finally showed up around 11:30, and then said he had to go to his college to pick up his discount Disney ticket. I saw the Stevieling's lips go thin, and mentally wished him luck. His ability to derail a female-oriented itinerary with such natural skill and flair had me warming toward him. Mrs Stevie no longer takes such activity by yours truly as ingenuous and exacts the most terrible vengeance if she suspects husbandly skullduggery. Plus, she's seen all my best tricks and developed counters to them over the (seemingly endless) years.

Once the young and restless had departed for Azathoth-knows where and a day of whatever they could conjour from it, Mrs Stevie and I decided to make a trip to the Kennedy Space Center and look at some spaceships and stuff.

It is my favorite place to visit in Florida, and I've been going there since before I met Mrs Stevie and all there was there to compete with Uncle Walt's Extravaganza O' Merriment was a cafeteria, a gift shop, a bus ride out to an observation platform (which incorporated a demonstration fo the launch sequencing of Apollo 8 (I think it was 8) using recordings and the actual consoles from launch control - boring by today's standards but pretty interesting for a space-nut like me) and a field full of rockets held up by guy wires.

It cost about $15 per head to do everything, and that included tolls on the Beeline Expressway².

Around ten years ago NASA finally got a clue and realized they were competing for tourist dollars with Disney and Sea World and Universal Studios and a dozen less well-known attractions in the area, and they modernized extensively. They built a museum³ and an iMax movie theater showing several different movies during the day⁴. They reconditioned the rusting Saturn V and built a special themed display pavilion for it halfway round that bus tour⁵. They put seats in the Apollo 8 launch simulation⁶. They bought five new jokes for the bus drivers to tell⁷ and most recently they built a new display pavilion for the Shuttle Atlantis⁸ where one can view the spacecraft posed majestically like the worlds biggest Airfix kit.

It is very striking, angled so you can see and photograph the open cargo bay. All around are interactive displays for the kids to poke and pry (including a "space station" gerbil-run for the younger kids to crawl around in), and most of the interactive things feature the women engineers and managers that worked in and around the Space Shuttle program. Kudos to NASA for getting the message out that NASA isn't just for boys .

And there is a simulator ride, purporting to be a close approximation of a Shuttle lunch, that holds fifty-odd people at a time and tips them up on end and shakes the bejayzus out of them while convincing footage plays up front. Now that's entertainment.

We got there a little after one, whereupon I discovered I had forgotten my digital SLR and had only a Vivitar web-ready video/still camera. After a short pause for a demonstration of The Bonehead Dance we walked over to the ticketing booth and found that all this new development plus the passage of time had pushed the cost up to $50 per head⁹.

Sobbing quietly at the prospect of incipient bankruptcy we embarked on the bus tour with about fifteen hundred Spanish, German, French and Brazilian tourists, none of whom could understand a word of what was being said and so yapped over it in the gibberish that passes for language in their individual necks of the woods. Since the German tourists had grabbed all the window seats, Mrs Stevie and I had to sit in different parts of the bus and suffer them yelling to each other every time one of them saw something camera-worthy.

First stop on that part of the tour is the observation platform. Since this wasn't by any means the first time I had stood on that construction (I remember when it didn't have windows to shelter from the breeze) we did some quick photography from the top floor, then made our way back to the bus while our former co-travelers were marvelling at how small and far away everything was.

Rockets are essentially towers of high explosive. If one of them explodes in an uncontrolled manner the fireball and blast wavefront are huge and devastating, so the trick is to keep the launchpads as far as feasible from everything else and each other. This makes for less-than imposing sights for the sightseers if they don't have binoculars or telephoto lenses. Those who've only seen it all on TV have been known to experience disappointment.

One interesting feature for me was the reconstruction being done on the crawlerway. Apparently, the crushed rock roadbed isn't thick enough for the next generation of spacecraft destined to be trucked along it, and they are making it several inches thicker. The work is only partially complete, so one can see the process in, er, process. Well, I think it's interesting.

For those who don't know, the way rockets get launched at Kennedy Space Center is that they are stacked together in the Vehicle Assembly Building (still claimed as the tallest single story building in the world) on a portable launch pad. A crawler vehicle is driven under the pad and lifts it and the rocket off the floor, then tootles off down the crushed rock roadway to the launch pad area, where the pad is dropped in place, the crawler tootles back to a safe parking distance and the whole countdown/launch thingy happens.

It boggles my mind that the Saturn V didn't fall over during the ride, and that anything could lift the weight and get it moving in the first place. I remember from my childhood the (possibly apocryphal) stat that when the crawler drove over the road with a Saturn V on it, the road sank four inches and only sprang back three¹¹. The crawler makes about one mile an hour when loaded, but can sprint along at almost three miles an hour once it has dropped off its load.

The pad tour bus drivers had been very vocal in contradicting the perception that with the cancellation of the Space Shuttle program that NASA was closing up shop, too. The resurfacing of the crawlerway served to convince me that maybe there's life in the old girl yet (but there are several rounds of funding cuts to be negotiated through before It All Comes True).

Next stop was the Apollo Pavilion which contains the launch sim, still boring for the kids but I love to see all those huge status lights coming on as the imaginary rocket is fueled and powered up prior to lighting the blue touch paper. The details on the consoles is also interesting, but this display could do with being upgraded in some way to properly explain what each console is doing and when and why each is important during the launch.

The launch over, doors let us out into the huge hanger-like space containing the Saturn V now fully restored to display condition and hanging from the ceiling in all its glory. All around are bits and pieces of history, here a Lunar Module, there an actual piece of lunar regolith that can be touched (sadly, it had been polished so none of its natural texture was apparent¹²). There are displays of more rock samples and space suits, both ones used for missions and ones built as research for future missions that never happened, log books, gloves, hand casts used to make gloves, cameras, toolkits, Apollo 12's Command Module (an actual, real life spaceship!) and a Lunar Rover, the most expensive Dune Buggy ever made.

It was just great.

It was also here that Mrs Stevie conceived a vile, duplicitous plan of such fiendish mendacity that only the fact that it wasn't aimed at me made me chortle and get on board too when she told me of it.

There was a photographer present (of course) who could, for a price, pose people in convincing free-fall array inside some sort of space station module¹³ using green screen chromakey trickery. Mrs Stevie suggested that we have such a photograph taken, and show it off to the Stevieling and Boyfriend, claiming that we had experienced "NASA's Zero-G Room".

The "set" consisted of some green steps in front of a green wall, which, with a bit of thought, could be used to creatively create a creation of much creativity, allowing poses that with the aid of gravity would provide an even more convincing appearance of no gravity whatsoever! Mrs Stevie posed so that her hair hung down, for example. In the finished picture, her hair was hanging up . Voila! Convincing Zero-G hair!

The facet of the whole affair that appealed most to me was that no part of the finished photograph was true. Not only were we not in Zero-G, we were not even remotely oriented in the picture the same way we had been when it was taken, nor were we in amongst the busy backdrops one could clearly see us cavorting in front of. Indeed, we weren't even photographed together. The staggering number of lies in this one artifact¹⁴ was truly impressive. If only there were some way of presenting a non-existent copy of the thing it would have been perfect.

We moved on to the Atlantis Experience (or whatever it was called) and were awed by the sight of yet another real, honest-to-goodness spaceship. At least I was. Mrs Stevie didn't realize she wasn't looking at a mock-up at first. Then she was appalled by the widespread use of tape to hold stuff up against other stuff at the rocket end of things. She said it looked like Duct Tape. I told her not to underestimate the usefulness of Duct Tape, but was secretly appalled too. No-one mentioned that these string and bailing wire spacecraft were actually held together by string and bailing wire. No doubt the tape was a special, super expensive type of adhesive ribbon, but Mrs Stevie had the right of it; it looked like Duct Tape.

Just before closing time we put all our crap into another of those fingerprint-activated lockers that had proved to be so reliable at Universal Studios and climbed aboard the simulator for a few minutes of pretend shuttle launching. We sat at the back and so had the added thrill of hearing stuff falling out of people's pockets and towards us as the whole thing tilted into a vertical plane. Nothing spells excitement like fear of a shower of coins, bunches of keys, Swiss army knives and so forth descending around one's head. Then the Realistic Vibration™ and Earsplitting Rocket Noises™ started and I was too busy trying to stay conscious to worry about people dropping stuff on me.

It was okay I said afterwards, while we were waiting for an attendant to open up the locker for us after yet another "no fingerprint on record" message, but I was probably going to regret the loss of those fillings. Mrs Stevie didn't reply on account of her receiving a brain jangling for three minutes, but I had little doubt she would be commenting on the ride at length on the journey home, once the concussion wore off. Myself, I've never worried over small matters like double vision and bleeding from the ears and we had, after all, paid mucho bux for the pleasure of all this pleasure.

We exited through a gift shop¹⁵ where I came this close to buying a real NASA flight suit once I found out they came not only in astronaut sizes but also in relaxed-fit superannuated bacon-fed Englishman sizes too. It would have been the coolest Halloween costume ever. I contented myself with forking over more bux for a pair of photos that had our heads photoshopped over real astronaut bodies in space suits - another completely fake picture that I wasn't even aware we had posed for, taken when we had signed up for the bus tour. The picture of me made me look supremely uncomfortable and it looked like the suit was too big for me. Perfect to add into The Great Zero-G Room Hoax of Not Being My Idea or My Fault (mostly).

We left the gift shop to discover that the space center had closed for the day (stays open only until 7:30 pm or thereabouts but they don't close up shop on prospective cash customers), so we strolled through the Missile Park (now paved and almost lost amid all the other stuff that has sprung up around it) so I could remember the first time I saw the rockets in a field back in '85, and we drove home, stopping at a diner for food.

We got back to Orange Lake Country Club to discover that because the Stevieling and the Boyfriend were still out doing whatever young people do in Florida when their parents aren't around we had the place to ourselves. This raised possibilities of an uninterrupted and intimate nature, so I hid in the furnace closet until Mrs Stevie gave up looking for me and fell asleep, whereupon I was able to watch crappy television and eat junk undisturbed and unmolested.

Bliss.

1. The one Disney park I had agreed to visit↑
2. Motto: Nickle-and-Diming Drivers Every Two Miles Since Built↑
3. In which I saw the newly-recovered Liberty Bell 7. Boy does Kennedy owe Grissom an apology for the snub. The garbage left behind the console by the Mercury builders is nothing short of criminal. There was even a crushed plastic coffee cup recovered when they pulled the console out for cleaning and reconditioning, and a bunch of metal crap like washers and screws that were just waiting to cause a short of the sort that could blow the hatch charges↑
4. One of the first iMax movies to be shown to a wide audience was shot on the shuttle specifically for this theater and it is a startling demonstration of the technology - the three-d illusion it conveys is so powerful I once had the strong urge to step forward from my seat and walk out onto the cargo deck of the shuttle↑
5. Well done someone for saving the old girl from rusting away↑
6. Huzzah!↑
7. Actually, if you get a witty bus driver who isn't thoroughly fed up with tourists who don't speak English and can't understand the running commentary Much Fun can be had↑
8. Yes, the actual shuttle Atlantis↑
9. If you think that's steep¹⁰ you should research the cost of Disney tickets. I almost had a coronary when I got the bill for those "discount" Universal Studios" passes I was allowed to have for sitting through a sales presentation and attempted extortion. Daylight robbery↑
10. And it is↑
11. I can't remember for the life of me whther this came from a reputable science populist like Raymond Baxter or a Blue Peter presenter↑
12. But it's an honest to Aldrin moon rock for Goddard's sake! I've touched something older than anything I'll ever touch that originated here on Earth↑
13. In my youth I could probably have identified it from the cabinets, but not now↑
14. Artifiction?↑
15. Of course↑

Harry Potter And The Blistered Feet

Reveille was blown at dawn, after far too little sleep.

A brief wander around the shower trying to wake up and remember where I was and who the annoying woman shrieking at me about getting a move on was, followed by a cup of foul-tasting coffee (something about the water, something chemical) and we were barreling down the freeway towards Universal Studios Island of Adventure, bound for Good Times (under penalty of death).

We¹ decided to fork over an extra five dollars and get "preferred parking", which at that time of day meant right next to one of the Escalators Au Bord Du Merriment allowing us to get into the park in relatively short order, along with about two hundred other loons, all trying not to run and by doing so loose face. In my case I couldn't run anyway, as I am recovering from what we all assume was gout. I could only manage a sort of hobble, and after turning an ankle I crossly ordered the women to either slow down or give me my ticket and let me proceed at my own pace. It was only a jumped-up carousel after all.

We proceeded through Dr Seuss Land², Lost Continent Land³ and into Hogsmeade, which had been modeled as a winter scene. Across the sky sprawled an admittedly impressive Hogwarts Castle. All around were the sounds of the park coming alive, roller coasters being sent round once to check for breaks in the track and so forth.

After committing our valuables to a fingerprint-secured locker we wound our way through the dimly-lit scenes inside the castle with talking portraits and other JK Rowling stuff dotted around. It was actually pretty well done, and I say this as someone who has never read a word of the Harry Potter books. The kids were having a ball, with the younger ones staring open-mouthed at the various clever special effects.

The ride itself was fun, although I think you probably would have a higher take-away if you were steeped in HP lore (I'm not) and don't think Quidditch is the stupidest idea for a game ever to boil out of the vacuum (I do). The four-seater cars were designed to tilt and swivel between animatronic animation on one side and a wrap-around hemispherical cinematic screen on the other, allowing for a wide variety of fun to be attempted. The simulator rides using film and movement/tilting were very convincing and quite nauseating in places, what with drop-offs and zooming up and down, back and forth and whatnot. But, like all modern rides of any sort, it was all over in far too short a time.

I didn't time this ride, but I'd bet money it was less than two minutes from one end to the other, because I've seen figures that suggest 90 seconds is some sort of sweet spot for ride length - one for which people will still queue (and by extrapolation buy tickets to queue) for as much as three hours. Personally, I wouldn't queue three hours to get a lift into space⁴ and I won't get on any line longer than an hour, but that's me.

The twinned suspension roller coasters themed for Harry Potter was worth the waiting on line for a place in the front car, and La Famile Stevie recommend the blue one over the red one. All the individual elements are probably the same but the way they are bolted together for the blue route gives a more pleasing ride. The "Hippogriff" coaster is in actual fact a runaway mine train of very disappointing length of ride and I don't hesitate to tell everyone plus his faithful canine to save their time and give it a miss⁵.

And the rest of the day proceeded in much the expected way, the day getting hotter as it wore on, the weather breaking around 3 pm and a downpour of titanic proportions lasting all of 15 minutes soaking everyone to the skin as it would do every day, and my legs getting achier and achier (they don't take standing on line too well and have little time for hours of walking either). By evening I was in agony, but had he comforting support of my faithful spouse, always a pillar of strength and an inspiration, to buoy me up. I don't know how I could have made it through with her constant encouragement to "Shut up" and "Quit that moaning".

I had been anticipating the river raft ride⁶ and the log flume with great, er, anticipation, but was disappointed to discover that both had been detuned in the squirty gubbins and each only delivered a mild drenching as opposed to the total immersion glugfest I had been looking forward to all day and which had been my previous gleeful experience.

I got to ride The Incredible Hulk too.

Perhaps I should explain that The Incredible Hulk is a looping roller coaster, about 12 years old or so⁷ which the Stevieling had wanted to ride the last time we were in the park together about 8 years ago, but became unnerved by the roar of the cars zooming around the track during the wait on line (to the intense relief of Mrs Stevie and me, neither of whom was particularly wanting to ride the thing.

With the passage of time Mrs Stevie and I have grown more adventurous again and so we climbed aboard (I was humiliated by being made to take a "modified" seat as I was too manly for the regular-sized one - modern coasters may be short in duration but they are wide in the seat) and discovered the best kept secret in America. Just as the coaster climbs the ramp it censored, which is just the begining of the awesomeness. Right after the censored it censored censored⁸ and censored , at which point censored censored happens. I know. Awesome, right?

We left the park at sometime around 9 pm, passing by a merchandizing botique where I bought the Stevieling a nice summer dress in citrus green so she'd have something girly-girly to wear when she and her boyfriend went dancing on Tuesday evening.

Gad, my legs hurt.

to be continued

1. IE Mrs Stevie↑
2. Blech!↑
3. Interesting scenic props, uninspiring attractions↑
4. The thing I would like to do most↑
5. A runaway mine train's sole purpose is to provide a high-speed run through banked curves and to grant some air time courtesy of the various hummock contours. This one doesn't have time to do any of that and the operating software causes the train to come to a short stop twice that can cause painful impacts against the lap restraining bar which is entirely unnecessary↑
6. In which 12 people sit in a circular boat that proceeds down a wide looped channel of water, being pushed along by strong jets of water and passing under waterfalls and taking every chance to flood the boat and soak the passengers↑
7. Which means you get a decent length ride not predicated on the 90 second design principle↑
8. And that is right after it censored! ↑

An Interlude With Shopping

Sunday dawned and no-one felt much like doing anything strenuous, what with driving 12 hours more than we thought we would and having arguments with Timeshare Jobsworths and each other, and being royally pissed off with everyone and everything, so Mrs Stevie decided that it was the perfect time to organize her usual trip through hell.

I am speaking of the Timeshare Tour Torture, which is an hour-long sales pitch one can put oneself through in order to get some sort of premium, usually cheap tickets to one of the attractions in the area, and something which I have loudly proclaimed as not being worth the time it siphons off my vacation, even if all I do with that time is stare into space remembering a time of no wife, kid and timeshare, no matter how many bux they knock off a couple of Disney Park Jumpers. It is how we ended up owning a week at Orange Lake Country Club in the first place¹.

Why "tour"? Because when they think you are in the market to buy a week or upgrade the unit you "own" they will take you out and about the sprawling Orange Lake Megopolis in a stretch-limo golf cart. We no longer qualify for that sort of treatment since the sales department know from previous "tours" that we are not interested in investing more money in a fancier set of digs, having paid off the mortgage on what we currently have. They call it a tour for the same reason you call a vacuum cleaner a hoover and a photocopier a xerox whether or not those companies made the product you are going to use - laziness and inertia.

However, a timeshare is at its heart a money printing operation, and the need to re-monetize everyone's investment is as urgent if not more so than any software vendor's (and we all know how often they turn over products in order to get you to buy the same thing again and again). This time the angle was "points". It seems that in the last five to ten years the industry has gone from a model where everyone simply owns a week in a unit to putting a point value on that week/unit combination, which the owner can then use for "whatever they want" (the salesman's words). I imagine it works rather like the points I earn on my credit card for spending money and rather less univesally than the saleman's gleeful claims would have me believe.

Mrs Stevie started the session off with a bang by introducing herself and in the same breath telling the salesman that she wasn't interested in what he had to sell. This set a confrontational tone that turned my stomach acid for the duration. The salesman did his thing, explaining why points would be better for our style of vacationing (it would, by the way) but they spoiled it all by telling me he wanted me to pay for the points, assessed by some arcane process at some few thousands. Not only that, he wanted me to sell our favourite week/unit back at cost, buy a new one for twice that then pay for the points on both units. The cost was on the order of 15 kilobux.

I smiled and told him that I did not have fifteen thousand dollars, and if I did it would be sucked out of me faster than Goldfinger out of an aeroplane window for college fees, Triple Espresso Coalhammer Lattes etc. He countered with 12 kilobux. I repeated my claim of penury and he countered by calling his manager⁴ who dropped the ante to 6.5 kilobux, which I declined and they finally let me go about my day. There's no point double-teaming the husband anyway, as any salesman knows. He doesn't control the purse strings, the blonde-haired harridan fulminating less-than quietly in the seat to his right does.

Our take-away was three cheaper Universal Studio tickets and some passes to the Orange Lake water park (something which when we bought into this place would have been entirely free. Like I said, monetizing is big now). Huzzah! We were finally free to go about our day!

Mrs Stevie then insisted on driving around the entire timeshare complex to see how much bigger it had grown. I tried to beg out of this but was accused of "whining" and told to belt up.

When we bought in, the timeshare was modest, a clubhouse/restaurant complex with studio apartments, raquetball and tennis courts, thre swimming pools and a bunch of villas, in blocks of four to a terrace, set on the fairway and surrounding the greens of a golf course of maybe 36 holes or so (I can't be sure). Within five years there were 96 greens, no raquetball courts, a new development of larger villas clumped in blocks of six (two upstairs dropped on the four below) and a new swimming pool. Now, I couldn't tell you how many greens, four "villages" of units, the new ones resembling the blockhouse halls of residence of certain universities or the hotels one can find all over Kissimee, and which beg to be called "Stalag-something" on looking at them. I wouldn't buy into one of those units if I had the cash and a burning desire to own another week at Orange Lake Country Club.

We got lost in the now labyrinthine road system of the once-small Country Club more than once, causing Mrs Stevie's temper to dip further south, which was bad because of the whole not being out of theater thing, but good in that it promised a stop for coffee in the near future during which I might be able to bolt.

We ducked into a couple of places to set up passes and so forth because The Stevieling would have a guest at some point and we wanted her to have the run of the place and to be able to use the facilities without a hitch, and also because Mrs Stevie said she needed to stretch her legs and get away from my "constant moaning", then we tootled off to Oldtown, a sort of traditional pilgrimage when we are in Kissimee.

Oldtown was opened the year we took our first holiday as a married couple. It was then a street, two blocks long, of turn of the (20th) century style buildings with various period-themed shops and attractions in them, and it happened to be right across a car park from our hotel room. There was a restored antique carousel at the end of the street, a place where you could get into costume, grab come props and have one of those "antique" photos taken, a place that made candy and dozens of different flavours of popcorn, a general store where they sold 5 cent cokes in the original-sized bottles (about 2/3 the size of a modern day one), a candlemaker, an ice cream parlour and so forth. There was a magic shop, and I picked up a couple of machined brass nicknacks each year from them until they moved on to greener pastures.

It was touristy, but not nasty touristy if one excepted the "English Pub" on one corner which employed English staff whose job it was to sneer at everyone who walked through the doors and to be as snotty as possible. A quarter century later and it still stands out as an island of naff, though the pub and the staff are long gone. And good riddance.

We took a hot air ballon ride that first year, that we booked from a guy who operated from the front apron, which was terrifying but served to show me the terrible devastation of the orange orchards that the blight caused⁵ and also was the first time I ever saw a cellular telephone⁶ (in the hands of one of the "chase team").

In short, we had a positive first impression of the place despite the attempts by the "English Pub" staff to turn that on its head when we took lunch in their establishment, and we pop in for a look at Oldtown every time we are in the area to see what has fallen off this time.

Well, there ain't much left of Oldtown now, so little in fact that one wonders why they keep the name.

The photo place, the general store and the ice-cream parlour are about the only things still cleaving to the vision. The carousel has been replaced by a smaller one, itself surrounded by other rides. The front apron, once the home to Doug the Balloonist, now is the site of a go-kart track and a bizzare reverse-bungee-jump-in-a-sofa ride popular with drunken British twentysomethings that flock there of an evening⁷. The Stevieling reckoned they had a zip line too, though I think she had it confused with part of another demented ride in which the rider is strapped into a swing-suspended harness, face down, then winched up and back about two hundred feet and released to swing down through a wide arc.

I was hoping to revisit Mango Republic, a casual apparel store I had used a few times during previous visits to acquire nice quality tee shirts, but it had been replaced by a 60s hippie-themed tie-dye and kaftan outlet. I walked a few doors down and bought a very nice Hawaian shirt from a "Surf Shop", then we flopped down in the ice-cream parlour and scoffed homemeade ice-cream for half an hour or so in disgust at the dogward progress the place was appparently engaged in.

We then moved on to a Cracker Barrel casual dining restaurant just along the raod to get something more substantial to eat, since none of us had had any real food to speak of since breakfast, and for a wonder everything was very edible, the snuff line being met and possibly passed. I like the food in these places, but have only a limited tollerance for the grits-n-biscuit heavy menu and rural America decor. The meatloaf dinner was delicious that evening.

It was around this time that I discovered during innocent conversation about "plans" that our Universal Studios tickets allowed us entry into the Islands of Adventure an hour before the park opened for business, that the park opens normally at seven o' clock in the am morning, that we would therefore be entering at six o' clock as the rooster crows, necessitating a five o' clock rising for the moon, and that furthermore Mrs Stevie was intending to execute Plan Get Up At Midnight To Stand All Day In A Blistering Hot Amusement Park on Monday. As in the very next day!

It is pointless arguing with the woman over these sorts of things, but I did so anyway just for form's sake. Then I demanded to be taken back to Orange Lake so I could lie down and nurse the sudden pounding headache I had developed

And the women did this and then buggered off to Universal Studios to sort out exchanging vouchers for actual tickets and thus save time tomorrow because no delay could be tolerated in achieving the Harry Potter ride before the park filled with the Hoi-Poloi.

This took hours in which I was left alone to sleep in peace, because they got lost and parked four miles from the ticket office or something along those lines. To be honest, I wasn't really paying attention to their babble when they got back, moaning about long walks, car park remoteness and crowds of Brazillians being Brazillian.

Lest you think that Mrs Stevie and The Stevieling were indulging in racisim here I should explain.

Epidemics of Brazillian tour groups infest Florida at this time of year, which wouldn't be a problem but for the appaent lack of any concept of personal space in your typical Brazillian youth. If you are unfortunate enough to be in line in front of such a group, expect body contact (goes double in certain circumstances if you are female), and never get between two separate groups from the same party as they can see it as a threat and may charge. You can accurately predict which individuals belong to which herd because they mostly color co-ordinate the group, adopting distinctive uniforms of bright colors.

I adopt the same rules with such tour groups as African river guides suggest for dealing with hippos - stay clear and stay out of their path, and watch for one surfacing under the canoe. At least the habit of their carrying loud two-way walkie-talkie radio sets to coordinate mass charges across the parks has apparently fallen into disuse - because every single one was toting an iPhone. At least they now do the coordination via silent text messages, though I noticed that the tendency to flock in numbers greater than five was much reduced compared to previous years.

Mrs Stevie and The Stevieling were not complaining about the Brazillians as a race, but as an inconvenient force of nature, like a tsunami or burst levee, that a wise person admits as an inevitable consequence of life in a given geographical area.

Also, Mrs Stevie has not forgotten the time when the Stevieling was three months old and we hosted a family reunion and meet the new baby event chez Orange Lake Country Club that visited the MGM Studios park in our own little herd. Dad and mum and sis and bro-in-law-as-was and nephew and niece all decamped into the Muppet Theater for some quality 3D ents while I volunteered to remain in the shade outside with the sleeping baby Stevieling. When they came out they discovered that a couple of dozen young Brazillian ladies, each wearing a dental floss bikini top and miniskirt⁸ had clustered around to admire the Stevieling, who was unbearably beautiful even then and A Misunderstanding Took Place that scattered the young Brazillian ladies, woke the Stevieling and left inconvenient handbag-shaped bruises on my head for days. I digress.

I reflected as the women ranted about carparks and whatnot that we had spent a day doing zero and I still felt knackered, probably from all the arguing, so I went back to bed and left the women speaking of early starts.

to be continued

1. And how we later upgraded from a studio apartment to a villa² ↑
2. And then a second week in a different part of the complex in January³ ↑
3. And WE ARE DONE↑
4. This process will be familiar to anyone who has dickered for a car↑
5. 15 years on and dead trees from one horizon to the other. The devastation was total and absolute, and I heard on the radio show Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me last week that there is another blight coming. The item was in response to the news that orange growers were supporting an attempt to put pig DNA into orange trees to increase resistance to the pest in question. There was much joking about bacon flavoured oranges, but on a recorded statement a spokesman said the orange was in danger of becoming extinct and I for one understand his comment in light of that balloon flight↑
6. It required a car battery and was packaged in a box the size of a small picnic hamper. I, demonstrating my legendary powers of prediction, opined that they would never catch on↑
7. It is vital not to be standing in the open when they fire the thing as antiperistelsis under extreme acceleration plus a gallon of predigested beer are not condusive to holiday cheer in the onlooker↑
8. A variation of the usual Herd Uniform in which I was taking an anthropologhical and entirely academic interest↑

The Road Goes Ever On And On

I have recently¹ returned from a week's vacation in Florida, where Mrs Stevie and I own a timeshare we haven't visited in years.

The plan was a good 'un. We'd avoid all that faffing about with no shoes on and being yelled at for having the nerve to take baggage on holiday by eschewing air travel² and driving the 1100-ish miles by Mrs Steviebus.

We've done this trip many times in the past, breaking the journey in South Carolina after about 8½ hours transiting I95, that three-then-two-then-three-then-why-can't-they-make-up-their-fbleeping-minds-how-many-lanes-it-takes-to-truck-a-fbleeping-intercontinental-ballistic-missile⁴-from-place-to-place-for-fbleep's sake lane Highway To The Fun That Is Florida⁵. No big deal, as they say.

This time the plan called for a different strategy.

We had three drivers now, what with the Stevieling finally deciding that she needed to move about in a 21st century manner⁶, so we could make the trip driving four hours on and eight hours off, with Mrs Stevie and I doing the hard bits. The trip would be about 17-18 hours long making for four shift changes or so, so if I worked it right I would drive only four of those hours. Now that's what I call a damn fine plan!

We loaded what turned out to be the second worst radio play ever committed to tape⁷ into the CD player and set off a little after noon on the last Friday of July. The first inkling that things were not proceeding according to the damn fine plan arrived after the obligatory traffic jam on the Verrazano Narrows Bridge was followed by the somewhat less obligatory traffic snarl across Staten Island and the mostly unnecessary traffic tail-back on the Goethals Bridge. This allowed us to filter onto the New Jersey Turnpike⁸ and enter the Great New Jersey Turnpike Stimulus Dollars Upgrade and Traffic Stoppage⁹.

This in turn fed into the mighty Delaware Bridge Rubbernecking Line Of Not Moving (there being a five mile long tailback on the other carriageway of the bridge and everyone needing to find out why by stopping so they could get a good look), which enabled us in a matter of hours to join the Maryland Rush Hour Confusion ¹⁰.

Thank Azathoth we no longer require a bloke with a red flag to walk in front of the vehicle¹¹, because the poor sod would have got shin splints from all the standing around doing zero.

Finally the roads cleared and we were able to triumphantly enter the beltway around Washington DC, mostly because it was midnight and all the rubberneckers and fellow holiday-makers clogging up the roads had decided to call it a day and go to bed. A quick calculation showed we were only seven hours behind schedule (the LI/DC journey is normally a 5½ affair for me if I time the Staten Island part properly and don't arrive in rush hour). We pressed on, barreling through the Carolinas, eventually stopping for gas and asking the Stevieling to have a turn at the wheel, it being dark and the roads all big and empty.

She then showed an until now unsuspected genius for getting out of unnecessary work by pulling out of the gas station without turning the headlights on¹² and, when asked to correct the situation at once, driving into the middle of the road so as to present a significant risk of being struck by oncoming traffic¹⁴ and stopping dead.

By this clever ploy she avoided her shift at the wheel entirely and woke her parents up enough that they could substitute for her once they had nipped back to the gas station so they could change their underwear. I fulminated a bit as I drove us onto the freeway, secretly annoyed that I hadn't thought of that first.

The sun began to rise while we were in Georgia, so I decided to make a brief stop at a McDonalds for coffee¹⁵ and we continued on, finally stopping for breakfast in a northern Florida "Denny's".

A sad mistake.

Easily the worst attempt at breakfast since my first self-incinerated one at university, from the food to the, well, I think it was supposed to be coffee. Sadly, the decline of the once fine diner franchise we had come to rely on as a watchword for quality was to be endemic. Each time we used a diner of the same name, even ones we had noted previously as being exceptional, we were each treated to a big plate of mostly cold meh.

We arrived at Orange Lake Country Club at around noon, to be told when we tried to check in that we couldn't check in until 4 pm. So we did the pre-check-in paperwork, then buggered around in what used to be called the Disney Village but is now Downtown Disney (like it matters) where all I remember is the most stunning life-sized Lego sculptures (pretty much the whole point of going if I'm honest) and the intolerable heat boiling every organ I possessed to screaming point.

Then it rained.

Rain in this area at this time of year is a thoroughly professional affair, with gallons of warm wet sluicing down and soaking everything until it is completely waterlogged, at which point it stops and the sun comes out to turn it all to steam.

Eventually it was 3:30 and we drove back to the timeshare in time to get a phone call telling us we could pick up our key and move in.

Pulling up to the front door of the reception area we noted that the car park was full, but that cars were pulled up and parked in the drop-off point so Mrs Stevie did the same, only to be moved on by a Spanish guy in an Orange Lake uniform. She pulled forward after a token complaint about all the other cars that were parked without their drivers being hassled and parked in front of another vehicle parked in the drop-off area, the only available space and one out of the way of anyone needing to drive through, and jumped out to get our key.

I dozed off but was woken by the Spanish guy tapping on the window; he wanted to explain to me (snoozing in the back seat of the vehicle) that he had called his supervisor and told him to call security. I asked what about all the other vehicles parked without any problem all around us. He just went on about supervisors and security. I shrugged and said "fine". Then a space opened up in an official parking spot so I climbed up front and moved the Mrs Steviebus, then I left the Stevieling in charge, walked back to the reception area, told the Spanish Annoyance where we were parked so he could send his supervisor c/w security person over to us if and when they arrived in theater¹⁶, and went inside to find Mrs Stevie and pass on the good news that we were wanted criminals.

We picked up our key after a spectacular amount of faffing around, given that we had already done the paperwork, and returned to our vehicle, passing the Spanish Annoyance and a hefty guy I took to be either his supervisor or the Security Guy he was supposed to set on us. "We're right over there" I said. "If you've got something to say, better get it said before we drive off", but Mrs Stevie was also speaking, and speaking with some feeling on the subject of being an owner at Orange Lake for 25 years and never being so shabbily treated etc etc so the Heavy Mob went into strategic withdrawal and we left for the villa uncuffed and decidedly unrepentant.

Thus did the holiday get off to a great start.

to be continued

1. As in: Sunday, around noon↑
2. It is my hope that many more people do the same, so that the airlines and DHS³ get a clue and start streamlining the process of making air travel "secure". I digress↑
3. The Department of Homeland Security, 'natch↑
4. The reason the United States has such a vast network of superhighways is that they were conceived as a way to make the Russians' job harder by moving the Minuteman missiles they would be aiming for around on trucks. This scheme is also why we have the Internet↑
5. cf The Hell That Is New York↑
6. Took her long enough. Mrs Stevie put the frighteners on her so bad she refused to get behind the wheel until she was 19. So That Worked™↑
7. The very worst one was on the companion disc, played in the forlorn hope it might be entertaining during the attempt to traverse the Verrazano Narrows Bridge↑
8. Eight Billion Cars. I counted 'em while we were desperately looking for America↑
9. To the sound of the BBC radio production of The Hobbit↑
10. And switch to Stewart Copeland reading his autobiographical Strange Things Happen. An interesting way of filling one's ears for seven hours. Recommended↑
11. Though state laws in fact varied on the need for this. Some contented themselves with requiring the driver to stop at intersections and fire warning rockets, others required that tools and a scenic tarpaulin be carried so that if you frightened a horse you could throw the tarp over the vehicle, and if that failed to calm the animal you had to dismantle your car and hide the parts in a nearby field. I am not making this up↑
12. Mistake I was to make myself more than once I might add, due to some peculiarity of the quality of vision in the Mrs Steviebus persuading me they were already on, quickly corrected when the warning claxon¹³ alerted me to the situation with its strident shrieking↑
13. Mrs Stevie↑
14. Bewideringly, there was suddenly lots of it racing toward us in a blizzard of headlights↑
15. It is fashionable to pull a face at this point, but in fact McDonalds coffee can be excellent and this was to be the best cup of coffee I got all week↑
16. As a demonstration of the utter contempt I felt for him and all he stood for at that moment in time↑

'Tis The Season

Just mailed the following to all colleagues:

May your celebration of the Treacherous and Childish Ingrate Colonial Mutiny be safe and enjoyable, and may a skyrocket with a battlefield grade warhead of the type so beloved of the celebrating New Yorker not crash into your roof and burn down your house.

I mail something along these lines each year, and yet for reasons I cannot comprehend I still get cited for "bad attitude" and "lack of teamwork ethic" at annual reviews.

I ♥ My Machine Gun

It may be fake but I do indeed ♥ my machine gun.

Life has been a bit swinish of late. So far I have

Not opened the pool because the Stevieling lost the shed keys. I was about to cut the lock off (again) on Saturday when she dropped into the conversation that she had, in fact, found them upstairs where I said she'd put them instead of on the key hook, a couple of days before. How did I know she'd put them in or near her room? Because a) every time I've looked on the key hook and not found the shed keys, the kid has had them 2) she was asking me for them a week and a half ago þ) ergo she had lost the bloody things and was attempting, in the best traditions of the family, to make it Somebody Else's Fault.

Not repaired the leaking water heater pipe that occasionally overflows the container I put to catch the drips and has begun to corrode the casing of the ten year old (or thereabouts) water heater. This is because to do the fix I need to drain the hot water system, which is a pain, and shut down the water heater itself, which I've never done and view as akin to shutting down a Warp Core on the starship Enterprise. We might never have hot water again once I've extinguished the pilot light. Also, the leaking pipe is up next to the rafters and the house might burn down. However, we are at crisis point now so I guess that is what I'll be doing on July 4th, that being the first free time I'll have.

Not installed the sprinklers. Technically I did install them, but the timer broke so I had to buy a new one, then one of the electric valves wouldn't stop dripping so I had to swap it out for a spare, then I couldn't find one of the sprinklers and surmised it was in the (locked forever) shed so I just unplugged that particular valve so it wouldn't open. Then one of the other hoses proved to be leakier than the Government of late, so I unplugged that valve too. The others tested out good so I announced Job Done (mostly) and Got On With Life, returning home to a flooded basement. So that needs re-doing then.

And to top it off I've injured my left elbow quite badly, making for a pair now since the right one never properly healed after the incident some years ago that buggered it up.

I thought I'd hit rock bottom, but on the same day I hurt my elbow I developed what I now believe to be Gout in my right foot. It's been about three weeks and I can almost walk normally on the swollen lump of agonized redness that once served as a foot.

But yesterday, I got a call from Mrs Stevie asking me if I would do Pastor a favor and rid the church gymnasium of two balloons that had got loose, and that made everything almost all right with the world.

Nothing calms the nerves and restores equilibrium quite like machine-gunning recalcitrant balloons in the gym ceiling.

Silence on the LIRR

At around 10:15 this morning the Long Island Rail Road decided to forestall problems with their Belmont Special this weekend by issuing an alcohol ban notice.

At 11:30 they began to bombard me with train cancellation notices because, and I quote, two work vehicles had "made contact".

In order for this to bring the LIRR to its knees it is reasonable to assume these "vehicles" are actually rail-mounted machines of considerable size. Some of these are longer than a two car multiple unit - the basic building block of the LIRR's commuter trains - one might reasonably call them trains in their own right.

So, to recap: Shortly after issuing a no alcohol notice, two railway maintenance trains crashed into each other.

One is forced to ponder, admittedly with no evidence to support that pondering, whether the no alcohol notice required issuing a) yesterday and 2) to a wider audience than just the passengers.

More Racket on the LIRR

Same seat, this time it's a Hispanic woman yodeling into her cellphone.

Why do people sit under the air conditioner then try and scream over the noise it makes? If they moved to the middle of the car they would be able to hear each other.

And I could ride with my headphone volume set at something less than "Deafen". Which isn't working because this foghorn-voiced idiot has my poor laptop outmatched.

Indeed I suspect she could give an RB211 a run for it's money.

Racket on the LIRR

Three French people sitting in the four-seater today, shouting conversationally at each other.

I put in earbuds and crank up some music as loud as I can stand but I can still hear them. But they move when we get to Hicksville.

And are replaced by two thirty-something guys with fistsful of e-gear.

Who are attempting to show the French a thing or two in the line of conversational volume.

USA. USA. USA.

Un ****ing Believable

Turns out it was a bomb scare.

And they held us for an hour, made unintelligible announcements that no-one could decipher but at no point did anyone suggest evacuating the fbleeping train.

What a completely fbleeping useless crew of fbleeptards.

Still Waiting At Bethpage

Just thought I'd mention that we are now blocking the train I would catch if I had decided to work until 6:30 tonight and thereby lengthen my commute home to about two hours, which I had decided I wouldn't do as I have things I want to get done tonight.

It probably isn't the LIRR's fault we are stuck here (but that isn't a given by any means) but why is it so hard for them to tell us what the fbleep is going on?

A New Era in Commuting Must Dawn Eventually, Mustn't It?

So, we're sitting at Bethpage, doors open, not going anywhere work-wards courtesy of the Bloody Long Island Rail Road.

They undoubtedly have a good reason for holding us prisoner instead of carrying us to work in a timely manner (their sole reason for existing). They've said as much over the P.A. system, a miracle of intra-train communications.

Unfortunately, since the person making the announcements is doing an impersonation of Rod McKuen with laryngitis, and moreover appears to be indulging in seeing how far he can get from the microphone before the little red "I can hear you" light goes off, that reason remains opaque to the paying passengers of the Bloody Long Island Railroad.

Who will all be late for work despite getting up on time.

So that's alright then.

Ennui Ain't What It Used To Be

I've been too utterly depressed of late to put fingers to keyboard, driven into a state of despair by the preponderance of late of what I'm coming to call Fbleeptard Design in my life.

Poor design is of course a fact of life, but there's a reasonable expectation that poor design will be spotted for what it is, lessons will be learned and the next time that particular thing is foisted onto the public the poor design elements will have been replaced by new ones in light of experience.

Which is why I'm finding the propagation of shoddy, stupid, unfit-for-purpose design in the second decade of the 21st century a mite depressing.

A while back the abysmal service I was getting from the Long Island Rail Road, that boil on the backside of public transportation, moved me to do something to reclaim at least some peace of mind and move me further away from the Texas Tower Solution. You are looking atthe result.

Yes, The Occasional Stevie was intended as therapy for me as much as a Schadenfreude-enabling portal for the reader.

So it is with much the same desperate need for a safety valve that I announce an occasional sub-department in The Occasional Stevie, one I am calling Fbleeptard Design. It will be nothing but moaning about the intolerable incompetence in design aesthetic displayed in whatever subject comes to hand, possibly with video footage, possibly not.

If this doesn't float your boat, I'm sorry. Tales of incompetence will be running a distant second for a while, until I've exorcised the feelings of rage and the need to thrash people with a stick until they get a fbleeping clue.

I return you to your Yootoobing.

W.T.F?

So, Bowie's new album finally arrived.

I've been staring at the "altered" Heroes cover art, so obviously a placekeeper for some awesome secret art not leaked to the public ahead of the album release, wondering what the real album art would look like when I finally got to see it. Would it be an Impressionistic affair, a-la Hunky Dory? A photo of the Artiste in clown drag? Bizarro Gonzoid Bat Crap a-la Outside? This evening I peeled The Next Day out of it's mailer and saw the real thing for the first time in all its glory.

They went with the Heroes cover c/w white post-it obliterating the visage of the Great Man (circa 1977). Cunning. A double fake-out.

The CD itself has a blank white square in place of a track list, an artistic trick pioneered in a slightly different form by Faust (circa 1971), first on Faust, then on So Far. Retro recapitulation with minimal info-utility is obviously the motif here. I give this three Peter Gabriels out of Five for form over function.

The sleeve is what I believe the British now call "digipaks" or something equally horrid. What it is is a cardboard double-fold sleeve with a plastic insert on the right panel to hold the disc, a pocket on the left panel to hold the insert c/w lyric sheet and a picture of Mr Bowie glowering like an annoyed granddad out of the middle panel. That pocket has - wait for it - a black square obliterating a black background. It's the opposite of the CD on the opposite panel. Well, it would be if the CD had been white. Or the black background had been white.

And so onto the insert, which isn't a booklet but a folded bedsheet of reddish cartridge paper, one side with lyrics printed on it, t'other with a recapitulation of the front cover done in shades of red (with a blue post-it stuck in front of His face), a really annoying moire thing that has no thematic link with anything I can find in the packaging and a set of credits printed in a typeface so small I need a magnifying glass as thick as an antique fishing net float just to make it out.

I'd review the music but I'm so overcome with ennui and Goth/Emo depression from the art that I couldn't summon the energy to play it.

I did suck the whole thing into iTunes, which couldn't find the artwork to associate with the recording.

That's right; iTunes' artwork database is so flippin' lame it couldn't find the re-used artwork for the most anticipated album from one of the most famous music artists in the world on the day it was delivered to me via the Post Office.

Ziggy on a bike.

Spotted in Penn Station

I saw a young guitarist by the name of Jason Green playing a variety of styles, solo, in Penn Station tonight.

By Jove, he's good. Like really really good. Like good enough to part me from the cost of two CDs from his guitar case without a second thought by the third number I heard him play. Like good enough for me to throw yet more dollars into his guitar case and feel like I was cheating him.

But don't believe me, check him out for yourself. You can find his website here.

I just wish there was a recording of what I was hearing this night in Penn Station - Jason Green, on his own, having fun and blowing off my socks.