What about science?
2012-12-10 03:02(This post delayed in part by internet slower than molasses every January except Boston 1919. At least it's free.)
Today, I think, was bittersweet. There was nothing ambiguous about the morning: after being woken up at inexplicable o'clock by the hotel phone suddenly ringing off the hook (after it had already gotten on our murder-the-bugler list by blinking all night, brightly and redly, with a nonexistent message, finally leading![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel to box it in with trade paperbacks in an effort to make the room dark enough for sleep), we slept late and took a taxi to Disney's Animal Kingdom, where we rode Expedition Everest three times in a row. I made a point of taking my camera with me, so I may try to post pictures when we get back and the internet is no longer as slow as simile, but it is both a very good coaster and a beautiful example of storytelling, its queue being the base camp of a fictitious tour company with a Yeti museum on the premises. There are flyers for lectures by the museum curator pasted over with postcards and advertisements (I am sad that Flying Yak Air Transport does not, to the best of my understanding, exist), views of the company offices crowded with a mix of documents and technologies accumulated over decades of tea storage and outfitting climbers, and it fascinates me how seamlessly the museum blends what looked to me like genuine artifacts from Nepal (masks, statues, prayer flags, stamps) with the details of a lost expedition I am quite sure never went up Everest in 1982. Tenzing Norgay is thanked in the acknowledgements on the wall. That might not be a joke. I have no idea. We wandered into the dinosaur section afterward for a badly needed hit of salt and protein and the pair of rides that looked most interesting (Dinosaur and Primeval Whirl, which we're pretty sure was the same design as the spinning teacups we rode in October with rushthatspeaks at the Big E, only with more time travel and cranky scientist motifs. It was part of a deliberately cheesy dino midway. We weren't quite expecting that). There were spoonbills running around pecking up crumbs instead of pigeons.
And then we took the bus to Epcot. This is where I do not want to start ranting or reciting the history of Disney World, because I'm too tired for one and I'm not qualified for the other, but the fact remains that the last time I visited what was then the EPCOT Center, when I was eight years old and fell out of a palm tree onto a deck chair by the hotel pool, the attractions I remembered most vividly were almost all in Future World: Horizons, Journey into Imagination, Universe of Energy, World of Motion, Spaceship Earth. I remembered Mexico in the World Showcase, because I was very proud of my ability to order dinner off the menu in Spanish; I demonstrated to the waiter that I could count up to thirty and he listened to me very patiently even when I remembered too late that veinte y diez does not exist, at least not in base ten. Of the boat ride through the country's history, the opening sections with Mayan and Aztec myth and history stuck with me most. I remembered Norway, because of the ride with the three-headed troll. I remembered Japan, because it was the first place I ever had teppanyaki. But I loved the three futures of Horizons; I wanted that Deep Range-like world of kelp farms and seals and children learning the rules of deep-sea diving as naturally as I'd learned to cross a street. I can remember the precise smell of the volcanic diorama in the Universe of Energy, swampy and saurian. (It was the perfect smell for fossil fuels. Later I figured I was being suggestible and it was just the hydraulics, but then Rob informed me the designers put careful thought into the sulfurous smells of a Cretaceous swamp and my eight-year-old, deck-chair-winded self felt justified.) I had vivid memories of Leonardo da Vinci, pentagonal and triangular wheels losing out to the round model in a vaguely Babylonian court, some disastrous attempts at early flight and a spectacular early twentieth century traffic jam in the World of Motion. Spaceship Earth got "Tomorrow's Child" stuck in my head for years (conflated somehow with Pamela F. Service's Tomorrow's Magic, which I must have read shortly afterward) and the burning of the Library of Alexandria scared me. And there is still a stuffed Figment sitting on the end of Rob's bed in Somerville, which tells you how I felt about Journey into Imagination. I almost took him with me on this trip. When my mother was sorting and re-filing boxes of photographs last month, I found one of me standing outside the pavilion with a red-bearded Dreamfinder and a puppet Figment on his arm. I remembered the proto-steampunk, the towering mystery stories and the horror-show organ and Edgar Allan Poe (Figment valiantly holds the covers of a book of monsters closed), the words that look like their connotations or their sounds and Figment in his little yellow sweater at the end, surrounded by possibilities of himself. A dream can be a dream-come-true / With just that spark in me and you.
( That's how our minds create creations. )
I don't want the Epcot experience I had when I was eight. For starters, I hated the black-light stamp on the back of my hand and spent the entire day trying to scrub it off my skin and off the matte-vinyl hand of Kirsten, the only doll I've ever been given that I really cared about; I carried her everywhere that trip. I also don't need to fall out of any more trees and I liked that none of the dark rides this afternoon scared me. But I would have liked just as much if Spaceship Earth and Journey into Imagination had not been so drastically changed from their original versions, or if at least they had been updated in some way that trusted their audiences would find invention and exploration as exciting as cartoon robots or an upside-down house. We rode Living with the Land (ex-Listen to the Land) between Spaceship Earth and Imagination and the greenhouses in the second half are terrific. I never see cotton growing in the wild. A pumpkin trellis is a very entertaining thing. It doesn't hurt anyone.
Today, I think, was bittersweet. There was nothing ambiguous about the morning: after being woken up at inexplicable o'clock by the hotel phone suddenly ringing off the hook (after it had already gotten on our murder-the-bugler list by blinking all night, brightly and redly, with a nonexistent message, finally leading
derspatchel to box it in with trade paperbacks in an effort to make the room dark enough for sleep), we slept late and took a taxi to Disney's Animal Kingdom, where we rode Expedition Everest three times in a row. I made a point of taking my camera with me, so I may try to post pictures when we get back and the internet is no longer as slow as simile, but it is both a very good coaster and a beautiful example of storytelling, its queue being the base camp of a fictitious tour company with a Yeti museum on the premises. There are flyers for lectures by the museum curator pasted over with postcards and advertisements (I am sad that Flying Yak Air Transport does not, to the best of my understanding, exist), views of the company offices crowded with a mix of documents and technologies accumulated over decades of tea storage and outfitting climbers, and it fascinates me how seamlessly the museum blends what looked to me like genuine artifacts from Nepal (masks, statues, prayer flags, stamps) with the details of a lost expedition I am quite sure never went up Everest in 1982. Tenzing Norgay is thanked in the acknowledgements on the wall. That might not be a joke. I have no idea. We wandered into the dinosaur section afterward for a badly needed hit of salt and protein and the pair of rides that looked most interesting (Dinosaur and Primeval Whirl, which we're pretty sure was the same design as the spinning teacups we rode in October with rushthatspeaks at the Big E, only with more time travel and cranky scientist motifs. It was part of a deliberately cheesy dino midway. We weren't quite expecting that). There were spoonbills running around pecking up crumbs instead of pigeons.And then we took the bus to Epcot. This is where I do not want to start ranting or reciting the history of Disney World, because I'm too tired for one and I'm not qualified for the other, but the fact remains that the last time I visited what was then the EPCOT Center, when I was eight years old and fell out of a palm tree onto a deck chair by the hotel pool, the attractions I remembered most vividly were almost all in Future World: Horizons, Journey into Imagination, Universe of Energy, World of Motion, Spaceship Earth. I remembered Mexico in the World Showcase, because I was very proud of my ability to order dinner off the menu in Spanish; I demonstrated to the waiter that I could count up to thirty and he listened to me very patiently even when I remembered too late that veinte y diez does not exist, at least not in base ten. Of the boat ride through the country's history, the opening sections with Mayan and Aztec myth and history stuck with me most. I remembered Norway, because of the ride with the three-headed troll. I remembered Japan, because it was the first place I ever had teppanyaki. But I loved the three futures of Horizons; I wanted that Deep Range-like world of kelp farms and seals and children learning the rules of deep-sea diving as naturally as I'd learned to cross a street. I can remember the precise smell of the volcanic diorama in the Universe of Energy, swampy and saurian. (It was the perfect smell for fossil fuels. Later I figured I was being suggestible and it was just the hydraulics, but then Rob informed me the designers put careful thought into the sulfurous smells of a Cretaceous swamp and my eight-year-old, deck-chair-winded self felt justified.) I had vivid memories of Leonardo da Vinci, pentagonal and triangular wheels losing out to the round model in a vaguely Babylonian court, some disastrous attempts at early flight and a spectacular early twentieth century traffic jam in the World of Motion. Spaceship Earth got "Tomorrow's Child" stuck in my head for years (conflated somehow with Pamela F. Service's Tomorrow's Magic, which I must have read shortly afterward) and the burning of the Library of Alexandria scared me. And there is still a stuffed Figment sitting on the end of Rob's bed in Somerville, which tells you how I felt about Journey into Imagination. I almost took him with me on this trip. When my mother was sorting and re-filing boxes of photographs last month, I found one of me standing outside the pavilion with a red-bearded Dreamfinder and a puppet Figment on his arm. I remembered the proto-steampunk, the towering mystery stories and the horror-show organ and Edgar Allan Poe (Figment valiantly holds the covers of a book of monsters closed), the words that look like their connotations or their sounds and Figment in his little yellow sweater at the end, surrounded by possibilities of himself. A dream can be a dream-come-true / With just that spark in me and you.
( That's how our minds create creations. )
I don't want the Epcot experience I had when I was eight. For starters, I hated the black-light stamp on the back of my hand and spent the entire day trying to scrub it off my skin and off the matte-vinyl hand of Kirsten, the only doll I've ever been given that I really cared about; I carried her everywhere that trip. I also don't need to fall out of any more trees and I liked that none of the dark rides this afternoon scared me. But I would have liked just as much if Spaceship Earth and Journey into Imagination had not been so drastically changed from their original versions, or if at least they had been updated in some way that trusted their audiences would find invention and exploration as exciting as cartoon robots or an upside-down house. We rode Living with the Land (ex-Listen to the Land) between Spaceship Earth and Imagination and the greenhouses in the second half are terrific. I never see cotton growing in the wild. A pumpkin trellis is a very entertaining thing. It doesn't hurt anyone.
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