North County Transit and the Kindness of Strangers

A few nights ago, I came back from Los Angeles by train to Oceanside and discovered that I had left my car keys somewhere else. It was 8:30 at night and I was roughly 20 miles or $90.00 by taxi to get home.

It turns out that I got home by spending $6.00 on local transit and $10.00 for the final 3 miles. It took a few hours, but was otherwise pleasant and educational. But it would not have happened without the help of many of the other people on the poor trail home.

The North San Diego County Transit Authority (NCTA) runs all the buses and trains in the North County. Believe it or else, there is a light rail system that connects Oceanside (pop 180K) to Escondido (150K). How is it possible that these two communities are connected by train when in Los Angeles they can not connect Santa Monica to Los Angeles? Well I am here to tell you that they act that way down here out of fear, fear that they will turn out to be Los Angeles, that hunk of vile stinking shit, if they are not careful.

But even a train does not do people much good if it is not run and the fact is that all good white people in North County are home in bed by 8 PM in order to be able to get up at 5 AM when the rooster crows and they have to start plowing the back forty. And except for Friday night when they run it late for their teenagers, the last train east is at 8:33 PM.

So here I come wandering up at about 8:40 PM and all I see is an empty train station and one black guy hunched over his bike. So I say to him, I think we missed the last train. He looks at me. I say, I think we missed the last train. He says, where you going. I say Escondido. He says so am I. We have to take the 302/303 and then connect to the 305, he says. It takes about two hours.

Now I had been living in this here part of the world for a few years now and I can tell you that I had never been able to figure out the buses. I had not tried all that hard, it is true, but I had tried a few times to figure it out and I could not make heads or tails out of it.

But with some discussion with my new friend and his bicycle these are the things that I have learned which I write here so that the knowledge may not be lost. And to encourage others to use the system when it fits their lifestyle or circumstances.

1. Although the train stops about 8:30 PM, major segments of the bus system continues until about 11 PM or so on weekdays. After that, I think you are either walking, taking your bike, or staying over in a local motel or hotel lobby.

2. All the buses that I saw were new, clean, did not seem to be pumping out diesel or other shit, and were driven by nice people who spoke English, whatever their first language may have been.

3. Every bus I saw that night had room for two bicycles on a rack in the front. I do not know what would happen if a third bicyclist showed up, but that did not happen.

4. It is not self-explanatory, but once you know, you realize that the 302 bus goes from Oceanside to Vista. And that the 305 goes from Escondido to Vista and, although it does not say so, back again. And furthermore, that the 305 arrives at Vista a few minutes after the bus from Oceanside arrives at Vista.

5. Now, armed with that knowledge, and with the knowledge that the buses of the NCTA actually run on time, at most a minute or two late, you can take two buses and arrive at Escondio transit center.

6. But even better than that, I noticed that the bus to Escondido also stopped at Nordahl & Mission, which is several miles closer to my house.

7. Now I have to admit that the 302 in particular seemed to go in circles and that not everything was as speedy as it might be. It took about an hour to go the 7 miles from Oceanside to Vista but it took about 30 minutes to go the 12 or so miles from Vista to Escondido.

8. On top of that was a very nice, young, hip security guard at the Vista station who was extremely helpful.

9. I was also impressed that everyone was looking out for my interests, moneywise. Unlike my experience in Escondido where you are expected to pay like you were living in Manhattan or Beverly Hills, the people of the NCTA and their passengers made no such assumption, and worried whether I would have the 2 * $1.75 fare to get home.

Then as a footnote to all this, when I arrived at Nordahl & Mission expecting to have to walk the 2 plus miles home, I ran into a taxi cab, which never happens, and he took me home for $10 including one stop at the local mini-mall.

So there you have it.  It is not speedy, and the routes seem to be quirky as hell, but it does get you there and the people are very friendly.  Be prepared to walk the last mile or two, of course.

I really have to get over my “I hate buses” thing which I developed living in LA where the buses are dirty, slow, unfriendly and made me sick from the exhaust fumes.

Armed with my spare set of car keys, I am now setting off to walk to the train and see if my car is still there in Oceanside.

Ladd McPartland 1951 - 2015

I am sorry to have to report that Ladd McPartland passed away last week. Apparently he died unexpectedly in his sleep from causes that are still being determined.

Ladd was one of the nicest human beings that I have ever met. He ran editorial at deGraf/Wahrman and then went on to the same thing at Sony Imageworks and ILM. He lived in Darwin, a ghost town in California that he and several other people occupied.

His brother Tim McPartland wrote the following obituary for Ladd:

Ladd McPartland was born on March 29, 1951 to John and Eleanor McPartland. He died peacefully in his sleep on December 20, 2014. Ladd was highly creative as a photographer, filmmaker and in the way he crafted his own life.

After graduating from Pacific Grove High School in 1969, he attended UCLA Film School where he earned his Bachelors Degree in 1973. Many years later, Ladd completed coursework and projects to earn his Masters Degree in Film. As an undergraduate, he directed, shot and edited a student film entitled “Stillborn” that was screened worldwide, including at the Cannes Film Festival. and earned him respect and recognition among the creative community.

Ladd also worked extensively in the film industry as an editor and visual effects artist. At Industrial Light and Magic and Sony Imageworks, he contributed to films including Star Trek: First Contact, Look Who’s Talking Now, Speed 2: Cruise Control, Jetsons: The Movie and many other theatrical features. Ladd was for many years the editor of the prestigious SIGGRAPH conference on computer graphics. He later was videographer for the Institute of Noetic Science in Petaluma.

Ladd was beloved for his wry sense of humor and charmingly quirky approach to life. From early childhood, his uniquely creative sensibility astonished and amazed all who knew him and he remained true to his own vision of life until his untimely passing. Ladd is survived by his brothers Tam, Tip and Tor McPartland and his sister Jan. His ashes will be scattered in his adopted home, Sebastopol, California.

I am not sure when this picture was taken, but I would guess it might have been when he was attending UCLA.

Apparently the audio from the memorial service was recorded and can be found at: 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/nyvs1b62j0kvw4r/LaddMemorial.wav?dl=0

Darwin, Ca on Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin,_California

The Case of Daniel Chong: DEA and DOJ Work Together

It is often said that US Government Agencies can not work together well.  Here we have a case where two agencies, the Dept of Justice and the Drug Enforcement Administration, which is part of the DOJ by the way, worked very well together in order to hide an unlawful arrest, torture and attempted murder through negligence by the DEA.

www.cryptome.org has published on their website a FOIA response in the matter of Daniel Chong. Mr Chong, a student at UCSD, was falsely arrested by the DEA, thrown in prison, told he would be released, and then held without food or water, in handcuffs, for the next five days where he was discovered by accident in a holding cell, unconscious and near death, and rushed to a local intensive care unit. Someone, we do not know who, called various Department of Justice (DOJ) hotlines describing the situation and informing the DOJ of the situation.

Mr Chong did survive. Several investigations were held, he was given a chunk of cash, and the DEA and the DOJ attempted to suppress the matter. No one from the DEA was in the least bit reprimanded, nor dismissed, and the Southern California Attorney General office declined to prosecute for “lack of evidence”.

You may read the FOIA document at

http://cryptome.org/2015/01/DOJ-OIG-DEA-DanielChong_2012-2013.pdf

Here are some obvious questions after reading the report.

1. Why are the names of the DEA Special Agents blacked out?

An innocent citizen was falsely imprisoned tortured by starvation to within an inch of his life and nearly died. Why do we, as American citizens, not have the right to know which of our public servants perpetrated these apparent crimes?

2. For what reason have the people involved not been dismissed from government service?

At the very least we can say they were grossly incompetent and criminally negligent.

3. Why have criminal proceedings not being brought against these people?

The statement of “lack of evidence” is not the least bit credible. From the description of this case, there would seem to be ample evidence of criminal negligence if not malicious intent.

4. How do we know that others have not been tortured by the DEA and possibly murdered. What assurance can you give us that this is a one time anomaly?

Since by all appearances the DEA and the DOJ are covering these crimes up, it gives me no confidence that it has not happened before and is likely to happen again.

If the US Government wants to be given the benefit of the doubt regarding matters that an informed citizenry can not truly know about, such as the NSA matter, then it is all the more important for them to come clean on matters that we certainly have the right to know about.   Very clearly gross incompetence led to the torture and near murder of a citizen and the Attorney General's office does NOTHING?  

Wake up, DOJ.  Its time to do your job and apply a little justice to the matter.  Do it.  Do it now. Or do not be surprised when in the future people do not believe a word you say and assume that you are just lying.

It is nice to discover that DOJ and DEA can work together so amicably in order to repress justice showing once again that there is often a silver lining if you look for one.

More on the Vision of the Future Past

Dave Moon asks if there was really a vision about tomorrow in America? He points out that the 1964 Worlds Fair left a lot of people out.

He is right, so let me qualify my statement, which I believe is still correct but for fewer people. Among middle class Americans, most of them white but by no means all of them, there was a vision of tomorrow that was shared, unspoken and positive. I believe that the 1964 World's Fair was the high point of that belief system as it was before Vietnam, Three Mile Island, the Oil crisis, Watergate, and the Tea Party.

So I confess, I readily use words like “Everyone” when I really mean and meant the middle-class of this country, a class that probably does not exist anymore. Could poor black families in the inner cities or Hispanic families laboring for below minimum wage in the fields of the rich buy into this vision? I guess not, although I think some of them might have.

A taxi driver from Ethiopia told me, a few weeks ago, that America was a great country and a country of opportunity for anyone with a lot of energy who was willing to play by the rules. I did not disagree with him to his face and I thought it was actually a very nice thing for an immigrant (1) to say and believe. But I do not happen to believe it.  Maybe it is true relative to where he came from.

But back then “everyone”, again by which I mean the mostly white middle class, believed that Americans would have jobs and be able to support their children and send them to college. Even Don Corleone believed that his children or grandchildren could prosper without crime.  That was when people believed that the government, although not perfect by any means, was generally on our side and not entirely a corrupt servant of the rich. This was when nuclear power was good, the environment was not yet recognized as being destroyed, and there were two cars in every garage. That was before a very large part of our citizenry had publicly disavowed their belief in science because it did not support their politics. A citizenry who wants to sell the national park system as part of some sort of religious faith in the free market which not even an economist can begin to make sense of.

That vision, the promise of the future being better, gave a stability and a moral force to all our actions. Even if some detail was not right, a corrupt local politician for example or racism in our education system, we knew that the broad vision was in place and that things would work out.

But they did not work out. Technology has not been a force of good. Intolerance, racism, greed and stupidity is rampant throughout this country. No one even knows how many unemployed there are. Genetic engineering is feared and loathed by most Americans when it is used to engineer more profitable plants: note its all about profits not about feeding the world. I do not know when genetic engineering will achieve its promise in medicine, or if it will, but I am confident that only the rich will be able to afford it when it happens. I am not sure what the war in Iraq was about, but if it really was about the banality of protecting oil sources, which I do not think it was, then at least it was about something instead of being merely insane.

The morality is gone, perhaps it was never there.

The belief that we were fighting for the right, and that our strength was as the strength of ten because our heart was pure is gone, betrayed.

Elections were stolen, districts gerrymandered, the government worked and continues to work very hard to see that the poor and the sick are exploited for the profit of their friends.

I can give you hundreds if not thousands of examples where we threw it away. From Los Angeles transit to offshore drilling contracts let to incompetent friends of the Nixon White House to a total failure to regulate the obviously out of control and dangerous financial community,

The abandoned and derelict transit systems and compromised attractions at Tomorowland are mere symptoms of the failure of our cultural myth.  Yes, I am saying at some deeper level, Disneyland and our civilization, if you call this civilized, are symbolically or at least metaphorically linked.

In fact, it is probably even arguable the Disneyland is overall more functional than society as a whole. Consider, for example, that while no doubt there are privileges for the rich at Disneyland, they are not slapped in your face every moment of every day as it is in the rest of America where being poor is the greatest crime and the rich laugh at the misery of their fellow Americans.

So yes, Dave, I do believe that there was a shared vision of tomorrow that was positive and that motivated and gave hope to a large segment of the American people. But you are right to point out that there were always people who did not share that delusion.

I may be romanticizing things a bit.

Well, this is certainly a bright note to start the new year with.

_______________________________________________________

1. We are all of course immigrants here in America except for perhaps the Native Americans.

Google Chrome Now Works with Centos Linux

I have used Centos Linux for all my professional software development in the last five years or so and I have been very happy with it. For those who are sensitive to the different camps of Linux self-Balkanization, this is in the same lineage as Redhat and Fedora.  It is supposedly the most used variant of Linux for commercial and enterprise-related activities.

But one problem with it is that it was very difficult to get Google Chrome to run under Centos even though it seemed to work fine with Ubuntu.

Anyway, this has been fixed, and it is necessary to run a script which has been created by Richard Lloyd, and you may read about the situation and the fix here.

This is known to work under Centos 6.5 which is the version I am running.

Thank you, Mr. Lloyd.

http://chrome.richardlloyd.org.uk/

Understanding Our Cuban Foreign Policy

Just recently the US has “normalized” relations with Cuba, a country with which we have had an awkward relationship for decades. But this should not have been a surprise because the real reason that we have been estranged has become less of an issue as time goes by, but it is a reason that you will never read about in the popular press and even many foreign policy journals seem to be unaware, or choose not to bring it up in their analysis.

I will therefore, in my own words, describe why I think our policy towards Cuba has in the past been so intransigent and why it matters less today. It has to do with how we nominate and elect our President. The explanation goes something like this.

It is possible to win the nomination of one of the parties to be a candidate for the Presidency of the United States of America without carrying certain key states, such as California, New York, Illinois and Florida. However, losing such a state, with its vast number of delegates makes winning the nomination that much more difficult as you must make it up by winning a large number of “minor”, in terms of numbers of delegates, states.

Therefore, it follows that if you want to be President of the United States, you must work very hard to win these key states and each of these states has its own local politics and political forces who must be catered to and appeased. The politics of California are very different from the politics of New York and the politics of New York and California are both very different from the politics of the State of Florida.

If you want to win the state of Florida, then you pretty much have to win Dade County. If you don't win Dade County then it is still possible to win the state of Florida but its much harder and you have to win pretty much everywhere else in the state. But if you want to win Dade County, then you pretty much have to win the City of Miami. It is basically not possible to win Dade County without Miami.

It turns out that the City of Miami had a large population of ex-patriot Cubans and most of these Cubans had come to this country because they had to flee the island of Cuba when the revolution happened. These people all still had relatives back in Cuba and the whole thing was ugly and they are, or were, hopping mad.

Now you may say, well, we can not run the foreign policy of this country because one little interest group has a grudge because they lost a war. Well, thats easy for you to say, but if you pissed off this group you were probably not going to carry Miami, and if you did not carry Miami, then you probably would not carry Dade County and if you did not carry Dade County, then you probably lost Florida and if you lost Florida then you may very well have lost the nomination of your party for the Presidency of the United States.

As this Cuban population has aged, their descendents, although still not all that happy about Castro and the communists, are not as committed to the cause as their parents and grand parents were.

And that, I propose to you, is one of the key reasons that our foreign policy has been the way it has been for many years. It is not the only reason, but it was certainly part of the reason, and it is a reason that with time has become less important.

Comment from Dave Moon about Tomorrowland

I was delignted that Dave Moon, formerly of the MIT AI Lab and Symbolics, commented on my Disneyland / Tomorrowland post.

He wrote: 

____________________________________

    Dave Moon December 26, 2014 at 11:37 AM

    
    I am shocked, shocked, to learn that Disneyland has been commercialized!

    You will perhaps be pleased to know that in Disneyland's clone sister in Florida, as of a year and a half ago, 
    the People Mover had been refurbished and was back in operation.

    The Carousel of Progress is still in operation there and pretty well corresponds to my memory of it from the New 
    York Worlds Fair in 1964. Presumably it has been refurbished too, but its essence is unchanged. If you haven't 
    read Cory Doctorow's novella The Great Big Beautiful Tomrrow, you should.

    The train people are cool in Florida, too.

    --Dave Moon

____________________________________

Dave

Its great to hear from you. Its been a long time. You may not remember this but I used to lurk on one of the ITS systems at MIT and used to see you logged on and apparently active at all hours of the day and night. This would have been about 1974 and I was at the time “mike@ucsb-mod75”

I am delighted to hear that the Carousel of Progress is still in Disneyworld. I was under the mistaken impression that it was not there but that GE Horizons in EPCOT had replaced it. Well apparently the Carousel is still there but its “sequel”, Horizons, is gone. Also good to know about the Peoplemover.

But even if those were recreated at Tomorrowland it would still not solve the “vision” problem that I am talking about. Both of those two attractions are from the 1967 or so vision which benefited in no small part from the triumph of the 1964 World's Fair. I believe that the 1964 World's Fair was the apogee of American civilization, when we had hope for the future, economic strength and a great sense of design. We might go so far as to say that the 64 World's Fair was the REAL Tomorrowland for our nation, and the others were pleasant but pale reflections.

The problem today is not merely to clean up the decayed infrastructure, or to create some new cool attractions, both of which I am sure Imagineering can do just fine. The problem is to create a vision of the future, a vision that we can believe in. That feeling, that vision, that gestalt is not there now and not even the Carousel of Progress or a roomful of robotic presidents can bring it back.

Do we really believe that there is a great big beautiful tomorrow shining at the end of every day? I don't think so.

Hope all is well, tell me how you are.

        Sincerely,

             MW

Scale, Future and Decay at Disneyland

Christmas Day, 2014

This is the second part of my impressions of a recent trip to Disneyland, the original park, for the first time in many years. You can read the first part here.

It has been speculated that Disneyland has a function in our civilization beyond merely being an entertaining vacation destination. From Tinkerbell, to the ancient myths, to the promise of tomorrow, these concepts manifested in Disneyland but originated in our unspoken hopes and beliefs for the future. At least they were our beliefs in the future back when we were naive enough to believe in a future.

When I approached Disneyland on this occasion, I was moving fast to meet my friends who were waiting for me in Frontierland. I was late. I was also disoriented because the traditional parking lot was missing and the entire entrance now reconfigured into the space between two gates and a transit center. My pass worked and I sprinted to my rendezvous.

Having found my friends, I paused to catch my breathe. There was something wrong. I felt a sense of disquiet as I walked around New Orleans Square, past the river, across from Tom Sawyer's Island. It was something to do with scale. It was smaller somehow. Jungleland, Frontierland, the River it all seemed smaller than I had remembered.

Of course my first memories of Disneyland were from the mid-60s and I was much smaller and the park was much bigger, relatively speaking. Is it possible that the memories from visiting Disneyland all those times when I was young remained in ways beyond what we normally think of as memory, but as a sense memory of the rightness of things, of its basic size and dimensions? Could this unconscious dissonance be the cause of the unease that I felt?

Familiar and yet unfamiliar some of the dissonance was probably a reaction to the crass repurposing of classic attractions for more current popular product placement, the Swiss Family Treehouse was appropriated by Tarzan for example, but the feeling of a scale difference was persistent.

As evening approached this sensation finally went away. I had chosen to walk around the Matterhorn to New Orleans Square to meet my friends for dinner, and the dark of evening restored the sense of mystery and of scale that had been missing during the day. Night made it less apparent how the pieces all fit together, night allowed the park to expand in my imagination.

It was in this darkness that I was able to pass through Fantasyland and it was at night that I was finally able to get to Tomorrowland.

The old TWA rocket still remains, unlabeled, but defiant

Lets review for a moment the Tomorrowland of 1967 or so. On one side of the entrance is the AT&T Bell System Circlevision film with a working Picturephone to their headquarters in New York City. On the other side was the Monsanto exhibit “Adventure Thru Inner Space” which talked of the promise of microscopy and the quantum world through a journey into a snowflake. Dare I go any further into the center of the nucleus itself?

Further on was a recreation of our nuclear submarine force which had just recently gone under the polar ice cap for the first time. There was an external and beautifully plastic House of the Future. The GE pavilion's Carousel of Progress swept you away in a narrative of white suburban Americans singing about their home appliances. Trans World Airlines took you on a trip to Mars. The future of transportation opened in July 67 with the PeopleMover to augment the Monorail, the overhead tram, and the Disneyland Railroad. And even that 60s vision of world peace: There's so much that we share that its time we're aware: its a small world, after all.

We would go to the moon. We would explore the ocean floor. We would create new and unlimited sources of energy. We would look at the night sky and explore its mysteries.  We would heal the sick. We would live in a world of peace, freedom and harmony. We would save the world.

We jump to the present and we find the promise betrayed. AT&T and TWA no longer in business.  GE a shadow of its former self threatening to just go bankrupt rather than take responsibility for the gross environmental destruction of the Hudson river which they did with deliberate malignancy and for a fast buck.   A NASA without the capability of going to space without assistance from the Russians.  The people betrayed and unemployed.  A cluttered monstrosity of a “rocket jets” attraction destroys the symmetry of the entrance to tomorrow. The rotting hulk of decaying urban transportation infrastructure lies abandoned and rusting in the center of everything, attached to the former location of the “rocket jets”, now a transit hub to nowhere. Silent it stands abandoned at night. The Circlevision film about our country has been turned into some sort of video game arcade to promote a Pixar film. The Mighty Microscope (Monsanto Exhibit) becomes a redo of the original Star Tours continuing the theme of idle tourism for the wealthy  The Carousel of Progress is now a house of tomorrow that is more like a house of today, but for the very rich. You see, it seemed to be saying, this is how you could live today if you had a lot of money. The Submarine Ride which formerly presented the sense of adventure of those heady days of the submarine pioneers, now advertises a fish movie.

Abandoned rocket jets and Peoplemover turnabout

No transportation, the transport was all gone. Only the rotting infrastructure remained. The promise of how we would live in the future became the betrayal that said only the rich would live well. Advances in science were turned into cheap movie promotions. Symmetry became clutter. It was all outsourced to China, perhaps to Shanghai Disneyland, by our government.  I guess if you wanted to see the future you would have to go there, if you could afford it.

But if you look, you will find remnants of the former greatness. With the help of some docents at the Illuminations pavilion we were able to find elements of the Carousel of Progress hidden in plain sight on the outskirts of the exhibits.  In urban archaeology, you find the old doors, you walk to the end of the hallway and check to see if there is space beyond.  And there on the floor was the track of the former Carousel of Progress, now stopped with no promise for the future. But still there, nevertheless.

Look on the floor to see the seam that separated the unmoving stage from the rotating audience platform.

So what does the future hold for Tomorrowland?  We know that the Brad Bird movie of the same name and shot in part in Tomorrowland is coming out in a year.   I have no doubts that many plans are in the works for the rehabilitation of the future.   Will it convey an articulate and inspirational vision ?

Vision of Tomorroland from the first trailer for the movie

Trailer for Tomorrowland (2015)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11fgwFAk3fk

PeopleMover on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PeopleMover

Updated 12/15/2025

Field Notes on Disneyland Winter 2014

This is a report on a visit to the Magic Kingdom gate at Disneyland in December of 2014. My two previous posts on Disneyland can be found here and here.

This time I visited the park with Harvie Branscomb and Yayoi Wakabayashi during their annual Thanksgiving visit to see Harvie's father in San Diego. They were there the entire day and aggressively achieved a very high attraction visitation rate.

I had a more eclectic agenda involving a variety of topics that have been on the backburner for several years now. I still need to return to see several new attractions (new to me, at least) and updates of some older, traditional ones.

Its important to know as you read this that I grew up in S. California and have visited the park many, many times in the past, perhaps 20 times. I remember when Space Mountain was just a drawing on the maps of the park they used to sell. I used to give an informal tour of Disneyland to visitors from outside the area. (1)

Here are my notes:

1. In all the times I have visited Disneyland, this is the first time that I never had to wait in line for an attraction, other than a very brief wait for the Disneyland Railroad. Fastpass completely changes the strategy of seeing the best of the park and makes everyone's time more productive. On the other hand, Harvie observed that the user experience associated with Fastpass per se is decidedly flat. Where is the entertainment value is just printing out a little ticket? At the very least it could resemble a Pachinko machine or perhaps Esmerelda could be located in all these machines (spiritually of course) and could also print a fortune while she is doing her Fastpass thing.

The boring Fastpass device could certainly be more entertaining.

For example, it could be made to resemble a Pachinko machine.

2. The Haunted Mansion was in its holiday version based on Nightmare Before Xmas. I had never seen this whereas I knew the traditional Haunted Mansion by heart. I liked the design but I felt something was missing, and that was probably the score. I would swear that they had been able to change the order of some of the rooms, something I would have guessed was impossible.

I thought the announcing angels of the apocalypse were a nice touch.

3. I had dinner with Yayoi Wakabayashi and Harvie Branscomb at the Cafe Orleans in New Orleans Square where Yahoi had thoughtfully made reservations. What stunned me, what completely flabbergasted me, was that the “usual vegetarian entree” was actually very good. It was regional, it was fresh, it was great. It is one of the best high end vegetarian plates I have ever had, and believe me, I have had a few.

4. There seem to be no more animals in the park. Horses powering trolleys and carts were an important part of the recreation of the turn of the century America. Now kids will only realize that horses had something to do with transportation and motive power through the archaic term “horsepower”.

5. The attendants in Jungleland were extremely helpful in understanding what I was looking for in terms of shrunken heads and glowing skulls, and reported that those tschotskies had not been at the park for a long time. I did notice, however, some excellent faux snakes and bats that would have fulfilled the same role in a horror-oriented young visitor.

6. The attendants / docents of the Disneyland Railroad answered our questions (we sat right behind the engine) and explained where the five locomotive engines had come from, and various other technicalities of the track, the cars and so forth. These are real steam locomotives, something that barely exists anymore, but was so critical to the history of the modern world. The Small World alarm clock animation helpfully went off while we were waiting inside it.

7. I explained to Harvie the vital necessity of finding the access roads and the places where the park turned inward and became behind the scenes. This is particularly productive when using the railroad or the monorail, as both take you behind the scenes, if only unwittingly.  We noticed that they would occasionally paint fences and gates with camouflage.

8. I had heard that the Main Street Cinema was no longer there but fortunately this is not the case. It is still there, and it still attracts its tiny number of appreciative adults and children. To my amazement, the glass blowers on Main Street were still on post as well, although on lunch break when I happened through. The Penny Arcade has been turned into a Disney Store while retaining a few key exhibits from its more glorious past. Esmerelda is still telling fortunes and the electric hand grip manhood evaluator is still there to evaluate your potency.

Esmerelda will foretell the future.  The penny arcade one reelers are to the left.

9. The Kodak store has been turned into the Nikon store. I don't know for sure what they sell there, but there is no more film sold anywhere in the park. Just think how symbolic this is, the great American company is no more, so they outsource the storefront to a far eastern company and do not actually sell anything there. Its beautiful

10. I refused to see that traitor Lincoln, or his robotic avatar, unless I could throw tomatoes at it. Sic Semper Tyrannis.

11. Harvie points out that the audience at Disneyland is far less interesting than the audience at Burning Man.  Although that is no doubt true, I think this is something of an unfair comparison.  The whole point of Burning Man is that the audience is the performance, and the people who attend Burning Man are people who buy into that aesthetic.    The Disney parks are based on a more traditional audience / performer dichotomy.   I also point out that just our one park that we attended that day had 50,000 or so attendees, and they do numbers like that more or less every day of the year.  Burning Man does about 50,000 attendees a year, and the attendees spend a non-trivial amount of the year preparing for that 1 week event.  It is certainly an interesting comparison but they (Burning Man and the Disney Parks) are very different sorts of things.  I might even call Burning Man a more elite counterculture type of event, which by its very nature can not be sustained year round.

12. Harvie and I both noticed that people seemed to be wearing "custom" mouse ears that were very colorful and creative.  Harvie concluded that people had made their own, which was my first impression as well.  They are very nice mouse ears, don't get me wrong, but I am pretty sure that everything I saw was for sale at various places in the park.  I think that Harvie was observing this through his Burning Man filters and giving the audience a bit too much credit here.  The mouse ears were no doubt entertaining and value added however, but I am pretty sure they were an expression of a whimsical purchasing decision not a personal creative endeavor.

We will discuss the dramatic and insidious shrinking of the park and the wreckage of our future that is Tomorowland in our next post.

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List of current Disneyland attractions:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Disneyland_attractions

1. My tour was called “Transcendental Style in Theme Parks” and discusses how the divine and eternal are represented at Disneyland.

Report on the Overland Train Route to Disneyland

In Southern California, we take any efforts to build a mass transit system personally. How dare the swinish scum-sucking politicians use our tax money to build a system that does not use the holy automobile! The most pure are the politicians of Los Angeles who will sink to any level to obstruct or destroy anything in the public interest such as mass transit.

But the city of Anaheim is not at one with the body of Christ in Commerce for they are failing to obstruct mass transit. These do-gooding, tree-hugging, business hating lefty swine think that they can build infrastructure for the public good. I laugh at their pathetic efforts here in Southern California. Don't they know that the Republicans will rise up and destroy them?

Nevertheless I am here to testify that I have personally taken the train to Disneyland from Oceanside and it worked very well. Furthermore, Anaheim not only makes this convenient, they have built a whole new transit center / train station / bus station / etc. to support the activity. In other words, they appear to want people to use mass transit. Crazy, huh?

Anaheim Station from a distance

Interior of Anaheim Station

The ticket to/from Anaheim from Ocanside is roughly $20 each way by Amtrak, and perhaps 1/2 that by Metrolink. The trains via Amtrak run about every two hours. I would think that the main application here would be to/from LA and I do not know what it costs, but I can tell you that it takes roughly 40 minutes by train to get from Union Station to Anaheim station.

Once in Anaheim, you have the option of using some sort of bus system to get you to Disneyland, but I opted for using the taxi cabs that were provided in a taxi stand right outside the station. How amazing and unique, what a concept, a taxi stand. There are no taxi stands outside stations in LA other than Union station. The taxi fare is about $15.00 each way, and it takes about 10 minutes.

One thing to keep in mind is that the taxi stand at Disneyland is convenient, but the whole transit situation outside Disneyland at 10:00 PM or so is so confusing that you might want to ask directions rather than just trying to make your way back by memory as I did.

I also tested whether one could see an evening show of some sort, we saw Fantasmic or something like that, and still make it to the final train Southbound from Amtrak which arrives at Anaheim about 10:50 PM. If you do not make that train, then you are stuck overnight or must have some other plan. Even though I decided to stay overnight at a local hotel, I did verify that I could easily make the train after the show. One must not dawdle however, one must push on and get to your train as there is quite a delay walking out of the park with everyone else.

Not only did the transit work very well, but I decided to reduce stress by staying overnight, and I was able to get a very reasonable hotel room at a local Motel 6 at 100 Disney Way, conveniently located, and reasonably priced at $100/night. A short bus or cab ride from Disneyland, one could probably even walk it if one were ambitious.

The new Anaheim station opened (a soft open) the day I returned to Oceanside, and it looks rather Saudi Arabian, which is to say large and futuristic. It seemed very nice to me as I ran though it trying to make my train.

In short, it is completely possible to use the train to go to/from Disneyland from LA or San Diego. It is convenient and probably not all that more expensive than driving and parking.