brief Disney hits (a.k.a. musings on World Size)

[wrog]

• I know that it's not actually profoundly unique to have a continuous slightly-less-than-1200-mile strip of asphalt and concrete connecting one's driveway with Disneyland. Still weird to actually experience it. Thank you, Rome, for coming up with the whole idea...
  
  (Doubtless, the more unusual thing these days is to not have such a connection; and there are actually a number of islands around here that one can live on to achieve that; but suffice it to say, we didn't pick one of those...)


• also amazes me just how much having a GPS ipad along really changes the game. "Okay, where's a nice, non-Denny/Applebee place to have lunch in the next 100 miles? Break out teh Google!..." Nor does one lose any time due to stupid, difficult-to-find locations; yay satellite map.


• JMS (creator of Babylon 5) missed an opportunity — arguably the same goes for Roddenbury and everyone else who depicts a future Earth under a common government, except that Star Trek never had any actual scenes of EarthGov (not to be confused with Star Fleet / Federation HQ) in action, and I figure this is more JMS's style anyway:

  We just need a scene of some cermonial proceeding in Geneva,
  where it's time to rise for the Earth Alliance anthem,
  followed by a quick cut to a side room where some
  last-minute deal is concurrently being worked out,
  where you can hear a few measures in the background,
  and it's an over-the-top anthem-style arrangement of that song....



• Speaking of That Ride, evidently one of the casualties of the 2009 rebuild was that they did away with the modulations. It's now All G Major All The Time ...bad enough that I might actually prefer the Christmas version now. Shoot me. (...and good luck with cobbling together enough absolute-pitch people [i.e., those who have a snowball's chance in hell of caring about this] for a petition drive; oh well...)

Comments

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I will still occasionally get weirded out that the I-90 here is actually the same I-90 that's in Seattle...

[wrog]

I-5 in this case but yeah, same idea. I have now driven all of it except for a roughly 70 mile stretch from Anaheim to Encinitas (and probably have about as much chance of filling that in as I do for the 200 mile stretch of I-90 between Buffalo and Cleveland).

[firni.livejournal.com]

ah HA, ear virus averted.

[acw.livejournal.com]

I forget the details of the modulation; did they "crank it up" for a triumphant verse in A?

[wrog]

The Xmas version does a verse of Jingle Bells in F, Jingle Bells chorus in F, a 3-measure bridge modulating to G to do the Small World verse, then a Jingle Bells chorus in G, then a Small World chorus in Ab and then back to the beginning...

... except that there's one room where the the Jingle Bells in F verse and chorus are replaced by Deck the Halls in F, which is sort of interesting because it's not the same chord progression, so they have to have a transition room (the Western North America with the Toy Story characters) playing nothing but a base line drowning out the neighboring rooms. The transition back is easier because it's the last room and nobody actually expects the tunnel music to line up with what's playing outside (except that it does!).

it's been too many years since I last heard the old summer version, I'll probably get it wrong anyway.