Topic analysis: UHR v National Interest

Resolved: When forced to choose, a just government ought to prioritize universal human rights over its national interest.

I gather that Camp WTF-a-Mucka has chosen this resolution for their first session. If their choice is predicated on likelihood of selection, it’s a good one, as I can’t imagine this one not getting voted in. If their choice is predicated on value for education, again, I’m with them, as there’s a lot of background one can discuss. There’s only one flaw with the rez, which is that, simply put, the answer, Real World speaking, trends seriously towards No. I’m not sure how that will affect rounds, however, and it’s not as if there’s no aff ground, but whereas the negative has the logic and literature of countless generations to guide it, the aff has to be clever. That could be difficult.

The thing is, governments exist to support their constituents. Even putting aside the whole social contract business—as I’ve discussed in the past, there are plenty of things for governments to do, based on their size and aggregation of the populace versus the capabilities of individuals that have nothing to do with rights protection—there are no governments that exist for the benefit of someone other than their own citizens. That would be the logical analog of forming a bicycle league for trout. The operation of, and the benefits of, government, are by and for the polity. When Lincoln said government of the people, by the people and for the people, he wasn’t just whistling Dixie. (Come to think of it, if there was anyone who was never just whistling Dixie, it was Abraham Lincoln!) Implicit in that sentence is the people of that polity. He was not talking about government by and of one people but for all people.

A just government is, inherently, one that organizes the most fairly the needs and rights of its citizens. That is, it does its best to work for the people, to wit, the people who are its “by” and “of.” (So I have never grokked the famous JFK quote, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,” although I can see its rhetorical benefit for its conclusion of working together with other nations. My country is supposed to do stuff for me, which is why it exists. I will pay taxes and whatnot, and perhaps even claim a cultural stake, but the doing seems to be in its hands, not mine.)

Now, one can say that human rights precede any other consideration, and this could be true. A regard for human rights is a moral tendency on the part of an individual (however that morality is derived, e.g. through religion or intellect or whatever). We ascribe to others what we like to call human worth, or human dignity, and we value them for this essential quality, disregarding any other qualities an individual might have. In other words, our basic dealings with all other humans prioritizes the human worth of all; everything else is secondary.

Governments, of course, operate in the sphere of international politics. That is, governments deal with other governments, and, in fact, one reason they exist is to do that dealing. What the resolution seems to be asking is, when governments are operating in that sphere, they place the moral worth of individuals above their own political interests. Given the rationale of governments in the first place, why the hell would they do this (if they even can)? Well, let’s say this, for one thing: Any government that doesn’t value human worth is inherently immoral. And since human worth is the prioritized human value, valuing human worth, and hence UHR, is prioritized by any government acting morally.

One could argue that a government acting morally is acting justly, which is another kettle of fish altogether, and where I see a lot of potential confusion in rounds, because there is no logical link between the two. I can be fair and I can be bad: the two are not mutually exclusive, and all the talk in the world won’t make them otherwise. So perhaps it behooves affirmatives to remove the justice angle from the discourse, on the assumption that neg’s arguments won’t necessarily concentrate on justice per se. And of course you can indeed be both moral and just at the same time, as long as you remember that the two are not necessarily automatically linked.

Still, while there will be plenty of traditional literature for the neg on how to structure governments, the aff is not totally helpless. The subject of human rights is not lacking commentators. I’m thinking of my favorite P.A.P. blog by Filip Spagnoli which I’m always quoting in the Coachean Feed, and which contains a wide variety of data on rights with statistical links to just about everything under the sun. And that’s just one source. And of course, the idea that a government is not doing its job by its citizens unless it’s screwing some other citizens is pretty nasty. If a government is dedicated to rights protection in the first place (e.g, the USA), at what point can it be doing its job if it ignores the rights of people outside of its borders? Extrapolating this thought to any country trying to be good guys gives you some sense of what the aff is all about. But as I say, the path to getting there is tougher.

Personally, I see this as a topic for either Sept-Oct or Districts or even NatNats. I think it will be too sloppy for the long term of Jan-Feb. I could be wrong though. At least it is a topic of interest and, for that matter, a topic that applies to the world we live in, while still being deeply philosophical. This, to me, is very LD.

A sad state of affairs

Frankly, I found this news to be rather dismaying.

As you know, O’C is in love with awards and awards ceremonies. In fact, when I created a March-Madness type bracket for him, I set it up so that those two would face off in the final round. But I thought that his love of trophies only extended as far as debate, honoring forensics achievement both past and present. How little I knew, that his love of trophies was ecumenical in scope, going far beyond the local, parochial world of high school debate. But if you ask me, this time he’s gone too far. I mean, it is one thing to provide trophies to the Metro-Hudson League or to his own Big Jake Invitational, but his expansion into second marriages just doesn’t seem kosher. The idea that he is now supplying trophy wives to rich, middle-aged male debate coaches (and, when required, trophy husbands to rich, middle-aged female debate coaches) seems to take the concept beyond where it ought to be. Sure, there’s plenty of debate coaches out there who have accrued megabucks over the years (just imagine how much Harvard Bietz got paid, for instance, for coaching a NatNats champ), but they’ve only been able to feed their gargantuan bank accounts because of the early help from their first mates, who were with them when they started out, training novices not to pick their noses during cross-ex and the like. Who is out there seeing to the deposed initial mates now? Not O’C, obviously. It’s all about the trophies, as far as he’s concerned. If you want to know more, you can check it out at CruzsHideaway_HumanTrophiesRUs.com.

If you ask me, this is just wrong.

LD Festivus

Ah, yes: The airing of the resolution grievances. Let’s take a look.

Resolved: When forced to choose, a just government ought to prioritize universal human rights over its national interest.

This strikes me as either very good, or, possibly, entirely clash-free. In any case, I like it until proven otherwise because it forces an analysis of what, exactly, government is all about, and what UHR is all about. Worthy.

Resolved: The abuse of illegal drugs ought to be treated as a matter of public health, not of criminal justice.

Of course. I mean, I guess I can see this as being debatable, but not particularly commanding. One can analyze all those people in prison and make related CRT arguments and whatnot, but the real issue isn’t drugs, it’s poverty, and the causes thereof do not include drugs, which are merely a symptom. So, I'm on the fence with this one.

Resolved: In political campaigns within the United States, corporations ought to be afforded the same First Amendment free speech protections as individuals.

Somehow I see people jumping on this one heavily, so I’d be surprised if it wasn’t picked for one of the slots. Personally, I’m already sort of tired of it, having studied it a lot and heard everyone ad nauseum since Citizens United. The thing is, I don’t think there’s a lot of breadth to what one can argue. Not terrible, by any means, but not terribly promising for a long stretch.

Resolved: The United States is justified in using private military firms abroad to pursue its military objectives.

Cool. I can’t remember looking at the role of the military in any way at all. I don’t know how this comes out in rounds, but I like the subject a lot.

Resolved: On balance, internet neutrality is desirable.

Surprisingly, there is a reasonable argument on both sides, even in the techie sphere. However, like corporate free speech, I wonder how much can actually be said.

Resolved: Progressive income taxes are just.

Core. Hell, any taxes are just would be an interesting topic in our present environment of idiocy on this particular subject.

Resolved: Justice requires the recognition of animal rights.

I don’t like the wording, although I like an animal rights topic. Justice isn’t what animal rights is all about, I don’t think. Morality, yes. I’ll pass.

Resolved: In the United States, juveniles charged with violent felonies ought to be treated as adults in the criminal justice system.

A classic.

Resolved: The constitutions of democratic governments ought to include procedures for secession.

Well, first of all, you need a federal system of some sort, and second of all, you need to create a nation where you don’t care if your constituents drop out capriciously… Are we saying that Liverpool ought to be able to leave England, or Brooklyn ought to be able to leave New York, or Kandahar ought to be able to leave Afghanistan? As far as I’m concerned, unless I’m missing something (maybe we should rethink the American Civil War?), this is the other real non-starter, with the unjust animals.

Resolved: Secular ethics ought to be prioritized over religious ethics in the legislative process.

This is interesting, but I wonder if it wouldn’t be a muddle, since at the core, there is no difference between the two except perceived origin.

Bottom line? Possibly one of the best lists I’ve seen. Good work!

Gypsies

No, not the ones who throw babies at you and steal your wallet while you're distractedly making the catch...

Curiously enough, when I went to create a Sanseverino channel on Pandora, it started out with a Duke Ellington tune called “Accordion Joe.” I guess Pandora thinks that all Frenchmen play the concertina on the Metro or something, so one squeezebox is as good as the next. Not so, especially since Sansverino is a guitarist. Jeesh. As Pandora kept trying, I skipped a bunch of tunes, all of them swing, until I finally deleted the station. I love Pandora, but it isn’t perfect.

Why Sanseverino? Check out “Mal o Mains.” This will lead you, through this, perhaps with another stop along the way at Stephane Grappelli, to, eventually, Django Reinhardt. What a lovely trip…

On the other hand, please note that I am not mentioning the death metal version of “What a Wonderful World,” so you can thank me for that. (All right, I did mention it, but only to disparage it.) (But I definitely didn't mention the new first-person shooter app on the Touch where the victims are ersatz Muppets.) (And if this keeps up, it’s going to be a long, cold summer for debate fans here at good old CL.)

Oh, what a day to be in Dublin!

Ah, yes. Now I remember. It’s called Camp WTF-a-Mucka. How could I forget something so simple? I did not, however, forget that today is Bloomsday. I’m thinking of banning myself from Apple to celebrate.

And I appreciate CP resolving the baffling question of which NY baseball team to prefer when the last time you saw a NY baseball game the Bambino wasn’t even famous yet. (Actually, this is not true. The DJ had a family day back in the ‘90s, which included tix for the nuclear F plus one hot dog per mouth. You had to buy your own beer: I only bought one. Cost me $258. I’ve never been back.)

There is a new Nostrum up and running, if that is your cup of tea. Not having Tuesday night meetings does free one up nicely for other activities. I’m even thinking of going to the movies, but I have to admit that Hollywood has not been forthcoming with anything to get me off my duff lately. Aside from TS3, which I assume will be the berries, it’s been one stinker after another, and predictably so. I mean, how many of us were champing at the bit for The Prince of Persia, eh? I like the game as much as the next yabbo, and probably got through about 25% of it on more than one platform, but that’s about the extent of it for me. It might have something to do with Jake G as action hero, but maybe not. It may just be, while I like action and adventure and whatnot, I’m getting a little tired of how low the common denominator is vis-à-vis Hollywood. Whatever happened to the thinking man’s action picture? For that matter, whatever happened to the thinking five-year-old’s action picture? Hollywood could solve all its woes at the box office by making better and, dare I say it, original pictures, but that’s not likely to happen anytime soon. I mean, even TS3 does have the 3 after it, but then again, one would be pretty nearsighted to look at Pixar and say that these guys are anything if not original. “Up”?

I’ll leave you with this thought. On one of the roads I regularly traverse, there is a billboard with a message for the ages. Look on this, and tremble. It is an advertisement for two doctors who bill themselves as “The Proctologists You Can Trust.”

Do we dare to consider the proctologists we can’t trust?

I'm sorry teacher but zip your lip

It’s probably just me, but I never did figure out, after my one visit there, why the Kansas City airport was so filled with Oz knickknacks. The whole point of Oz, originally, is that it wasn’t Kansas; even the movie got that part right (not that I have anything against the movie—far from it—but it isn’t what we’d call canonical). It’s sort of like the Pilgrims landing in America and opening a gift shop on Plymouth rock to sell England knickknacks. Whatever. I am not in KC myself, of course, although the Panivore is, because I couldn’t possibly take a week off from the DJ for one tournament. I probably take a week off in the aggregate for all the other tournaments I go to, and in the cosmic forensical balance, I don’t think this one is the equal of all the others combined. But, I guess, that’s just me. As religions go, the VCA is well aware that I do not worship at the altar of the NFL. I don’t hate it or anything; it’s not as if I’m marching in front of their doors with a sign saying death to the infidels or whatever. But in our region we’ve got other organizations that do a better, or at least more apt, job of promoting forensics, and I’ll stick with them for the foreseeable future.

Speaking of the DJ, we are moving to new offices next week, and our present offices look like a war zone. Boxes everywhere, books placed on tables in the hopes that rather than letting them be turned them into pizza boxes someone will take them home and read them. I’ve already skimmed the cream of the crop of the crappy ones for future awards, but even a bonanza like this yields only so many stinkers. It’s the good ones that I’m sad about. But I’m already looking forward personally to not buying too many more books in the future, unless they’re lavishly illustrated. Buying them on paper, that is. I’m very happy reading on my iPad, which is a much more satisfying experience than reading on the Touch. As the trope goes, when the iPad came out it I dismissed it as a big Touch, but one learns quickly that a big Touch is quite a joy. I’ve now got all my photographs on it, for instance (some of which need more weeding, I’ve discovered). Once upon a time we put our pictures into shoeboxes and never looked at them again, or albums, and never looked at them again there. It’s a shame. I love looking at photos of places I’ve been. Now I can do it more easily (at least as far back as the purchase of my first digital camera a decade or so ago). And those activities—reading and picture viewing—are just two things of the many that the Pad can do. I carry it with me everywhere, at work and at home. Ah, young love…

By the way, I’m listening to “Right Ho, Jeeves” on my commute these days. Any writer who can create a character named Gussie Fink-Nottle is a writer you just have to love. Performed beautifully on audio by Jonathan Cecil, who’s done a number of Bertie stories, this is heaven on four wheels. Makes me want to get in the car and go to work.

As we navigate our way into summer, we here at CL HQ will probably find ourselves with less to say of interest to the VCA, and we may even occasionally take the odd breather. This means nothing except that we are husbanding our resources for the season to come, so don’t take it askance. Of course, if you’re spending your summer at one of these debate factories like Camp WTF, debate will not end for you, ever, but for most of us, the warm weather is welcome relief. By the time the next school year rolls around, I’ll be ready, but meanwhile it’s summertime, summertime, sum sum summertime…

To the End of the Earth and Back Again

You may think that the life of a debate coach is nothing but champagne and caviar and yelling at people who stumble into the tab room looking for the lavatory. But sometimes we must set forth on adventures far beyond our ken, or your ken, or anyone else’s ken, for that matter. While thousands were herding like llamas in the direction of Kansas City this weekend, I took a more dangerous trip, to the literal end of the earth, also known as Fitchburg, Massachusetts, for a golf tournament in honor of CP’s late firefighter grandfather.

Fitchburg, for those who haven’t been there, which is pretty much everybody and for good reason, is one of those towns where the streets make little or no sense, and where Google Maps and global positioning and just about every known attempt at finding where the hell you are have failed miserably. Random boulevards have signs with numbers slapped on them, but as you drive along listening to “Born to be Wild” and dreaming of Dennis Hopper, a minute later you are on a dirt road with a different number slapped on it altogether, and the music has changed to the soundtrack of “Jaws.” I did find a Christian Coffee House (I wasn't aware that coffee believed in God) and the Straight Apartment Building. That I found the golf course was a miracle. The map said go here, turn left, then left again. In the event, I went there, found no lefts for the taking, so I turned right instead. Lo and behold…

Most of the celebrants were of either the relative or firefighter persuasion, and I alone carried the banner for the forensicians of the world. I was thrown in with three folks whose age, added together, almost reached mine. They were, I understand, rather bummed by having to wheel around a fossil from the McKinley administration, and kept texting CP asking if there was any likelihood that I would make it through the day without my walker. He responded that I normally dealt with high school students, so I would probably be able to survive our encounter. I would have added that I have gone so far as to judge a Nietzsche kritik, so I could handle anything that they threw at me.

Our first attempts at conversation were not promising. After we established that they were from Boston and I was from New York, they asked me whether I preferred the Yankees or the Mets. They could have as well asked me if I favored Sennacherib of Assyria or Mushezib-Marduk in the Babylonian revolt of 689 BC. They were also rather taken aback by my lack of a burning need for beer at nine o’clock in the morning. However, there is no greater bonding mechanism than the great and glorious game of golf. Old poop that I am, and incapable of hitting the ball 500 yards with the bloom of energetic youth though I may be, I was also the only one of us who could actually connect with the ball after the initial drive. We were playing Best Ball, which means that everyone shoots the best shot after each attempt, i.e., the best ball of the four, and surprisingly enough, after the drives these young bucks powered out there, those best balls were almost invariably mine. By the end of eighteen, my new young friends were carrying me on their shoulders and crowning me with laurels. We made a great team.

Unfortunately it was a rather rainy day, mostly mist but occasionally really coming down, which means one has to put on all sorts of raingear to stay dry (unless one is young and nuts, in which case the norm is getting wet and freezing your tuchis off), followed by taking it off when the rain lets up, and putting it back on when it starts up again. One’s grip on the club, like one’s grip on reality, is tenuous at best. And I am now covered with bug bites, although at the time I never saw any of the filthy little blighters. Fitchburg bugs: fitchbugs? Whatever. As for the golf course itself, it was really right up my alley, not very long but lots of shots that required one to think a bit before acting, not that I actually ever do think a bit before acting—that seems to be counter to the whole reality of golf, which in no way reflects the philosophy of golf—but it is nice to know that, if one were to do so, one might achieve good results.

So, I had fun and I’m glad I went. Now CP and I need to find a golf course somewhere maybe halfway between us, since he’s been taking to the game lately. I snuck out for the long drive home halfway through the proceedings that followed the event, lots of fundraiser raffles and whatnot, after my last ticket did not win the case of beer (which I would have started drinking the next day at nine in the morning), while CP was flying up to the podium to collect whatever he had just won with his ticket.

The games were rigged, obviously.

The post WTF won't publish!

Angus Flotilla, one of the first winners of the NatNats LD Final Whizbang back in the 1950s, before they even had LD, offers some advice to this year’s competitors.

Howdy, you lucky sons o’ guns (and daughters o’ guns). Things have changed a lot since I won the old Horse on a Stick, as we used to call it, but a lot of things are still the same. The most important thing to keep in mind is that, while the tournament is longer than most, it’s not as long as it used to be. In my day, the season lasted one week and the tournament lasted nine months. Today, it’s the other way around, which means that there are fewer bedsores, and the bathrooms stay cleaner a lot longer. Still, you need to husband your resources. Make sure you get a lot of sleep, but make sure it’s at night, and not during rounds, even if your opponent is a boring as an Ashton Kutcher movie. Eating well is also important. Avoid junk food, unless you’re really, really hungry and it’s chocolate or deep-fried or both. And don’t attempt any exotic steps at the local Dime-a-Dance parlors: better people than you have lost a limb or three with an errant cha-cha move.

The next important thing to remember is that the judging is different at NatNats. First of all, some of the judges actually know the rules of the NFL, although usually it’s the rules of the other NFL, and the last thing you need is some judge yelling out “First down!” in the middle of your NC. Secondly, the good news is that the league no longer allows corporal punishment. It’s one thing to drop a ballot; it’s another thing altogether to be caned by some sadistic lunatic who thinks that fast-speaking is a criminal offense. The bad news is that the judges are totally unpredictable. If you are unsure of your judges’ paradigms, even after they’ve told you, then it’s probably a good idea to ignore my earlier advice and attempt to teach them some interesting cha-cha maneuvers. It can’t hurt, and it might help. Another thing to keep in mind is that your judges may not be up on the latest LD styles. Theory, for instance, may be common where you are, but most of these judges, well, it’s like the theory of evolution, and they’re just not buying it because it's just a theory. In my day people ran a lot of pre-modernism (which later became modernism, and then post-modernism, before everyone realized that no matter how you sliced it, it was nonsense on stilts), but when you got to NatNats, you put all that behind you and ran the Social Contract. It's the same today: Trust me on this.

Another piece of good news you have is that your topic is well-balanced. The affirmative and the negative are equal… Wait a minute. I take that back. What you want to do is flip neg. I realize there’s no LD flip at NatNats, but your judges may not know this, so it can’t hurt to give it a try.

Finally, a real piece of good news, bad news. The bad news first. The tournament is in Kansas City. If you’re coming from a real city, you will be struck by the difference, although on the bright side they do have decent barbecue (unless you’re from the south, and have religious reasons why their barbecue isn’t barbecue at all, but I’ll leave that to you and your conscience). The good news is, that when it’s all over and you’re heading home, you can turn to the person sitting next to you and say, “I’ve got a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.” The person next to you, having not expected this, will laugh and laugh, provided the person sitting next to you has the mental capacity of a three-year-old.

So, enjoy yourself. NatNats is the most fun you can have in the middle of June in Kansas City. And that, my friends, is a fact.

Don't ask

Okay. My day today really sucked. You don't want to know why, and it has nothing to do with you, so let's just move on.

While I was going about renting my garments and grinding my teeth, apparently Jules and the Nostrumite, with absolutely nothing to do to keep them out of mischief, have published a whole batch of Jules's old epistles to the forensicians on the Nostrum site. Jules blogged about it here. If I were you, I would avoid these writings at all costs, but Nostrumian completists might feel otherwise.

Tomorrow I'm heading up to Massachusetts for a memorial golf tournament for CP's grandfather. I'm looking forward to it. I need to hit the road for a while. If I shoot any holes in one, I'll let you know.

Pursuant to our discussion

You may think I know nothing about branding. But I think I know a hell of a lot more than GM. "Drove my Chevrolet to the levrolet but the levrolet was dry...."

Regarding the Feed

I seem to be moving at half speed, for some reason. Pretty busy at the DJ, I guess, sapping energy from other things that I’m not getting paid for. It happens.

As I do occasionally, I’ve been rethinking my various enterprises. Chief among these are the Coachean Feed, which is probably the most underrated and least utilized thing I do (unless it is the most useless thing I do, and I’m just deluding myself). As the VCA knows, I’m a big fan of using RSS to aggregate internet content. I use Google Reader on my computers; to be honest, I haven’t found the perfect reader on the iPad yet. Feeddler is okay but not great, and no other seems to have hit the sweet spot yet going by the reviews. (Simply using Google Reader in Safari on the pad, unfortunately, is not as satisfactory as it is on a computer because of some interface issues, otherwise I’d just do that.) Anyhow, when I feel like seeing what is going on in the world, I turn to my reader and browse my very organized content feeds. Some of these feeds contain material relevant to debate. My goal with the CF is to act as a curator of this material and to pass it along to interested parties.

For a while I would grab the content, highlight some catchy parts, add a comment and the link, then put it into a separate blog, which I would then feed to myself and mark, which would then send it to the CF. To make sure these things were getting out there, at one point I was even linking this blog to my @jimmenick Twitter account, having them cross-posted there. But this is a lot of hoo-ha for relatively self-explanatory material most of the time. If I simply mark an article as I read it in my own travels, it will also automatically be sent to the CF. That’s what I’ve been doing lately. So if you follow the feed with this link, you’ll still see a pretty regular stream of articles that, it seems to me, anyone of the high school debate persuasion would find at least marginally interesting. Since I will seldom write a separate blog entry on these pieces, I’ve disconnected the link from them to Twitter.

Anyhow, I still maintain that the Coachean Feed is worthwhile for anyone in the activity. You can simply point a bookmark at it and read it every few days, and I guarantee you will find something interesting and/or useful. Or, if you’re like me, you can plug the link into your own RSS to see articles as they’re marked. Whichever. The bottom line is, it’s good stuff. There’s a lot of chaff on the internet: why wouldn’t you occasionally want some straightforward wheat?

This is pretty good

It's quite serious, and a nice way to learn about Plato's key idea about philosophy/reality.

Plato's Cave in Claymation

NYSDCA organization

I’m not quite sure what to call last Friday’s meeting of the New York State Debate Coaches’ Association. O’C and Stefan have been beating the bushes for folks to help design an organization that would do the things that we feel need to be done in the region, and some of the usual suspects and some new suspects turned up to join in the brainstorming. It was fun and productive.

Some things came out immediately. First, we’ll create a novice division of PF in the MHL and at other venues (I’ve already written this into the MHL site). Why should this activity be treated differently from the others? We’ll try to post a good calendar for the region, which we’ve come close to lately but haven’t hit spot on yet. We talked about some issues like membership and the board and whatnot, the predictable things one discusses at such an event. Even when we disagreed, we had remarkably good discussion that led to results everyone was happy with. The point of the exercise is openness and inclusion, which is the way debate is moving these days, which is as it should be. Any activity built on a dialectic ought to move towards a perceived better place through the combining of the best ideas at any time, always trying to improve. An organization charged with moderating such an activity ought to do the same.

It was a hot Friday, meanwhile, and I got into Manhattan early and roamed all over the city, camera in hand, visiting places I don’t ordinarily visit, like St. Patrick’s and Trump Tower, and poking my nose into parts of Central Park I don’t ordinarily stroll. After the meeting O’C and Kaz and I repaired to a Brazilian restaurant (feijoada all around!) to discuss the ins and outs of the Disney Debate Adventure, which is of much more enduring importance than the NYSDCA. A very good day, in other words.

One thing was interesting. Every single person at the NYSDCA meeting had a Mac (or, in my and O’C’s case, an iPad), except Kaz, who brought a pencil and paper (whatever they are).

More on branding

Says Craig: “While you are right to say that branding is a critical step in establishing a long term business model, the real problem that the internet presents is how you create that branding in the first place. For something like the New Yorker the physical artifact is, I think, relevant. Most magazines, branded or otherwise, can't say that."

Branding is one of the great banes of the business universe. Established companies with known, long-term brands hire herds of recent MBAs at extraordinary expense to tell them what their brand is all about. As a general rule, after a long enough period of time, the owners of corporate brands seem to no longer understand the meaning of their brands. I mean, someone starts a business based on a good idea, and that business succeeds, and the product of that business is recognized by consumers, and the brand, which is the consumers’ gestalt concept of that business, is developed. Then the company starts making other products, and the founder dies of old age and is replaced by a board and a bunch of business execs who understand running businesses but do not necessarily understand the products the business produces, or the brand those products represent. Until, eventually, you get companies whose name, derived from their original product, no longer make sense because they no longer produce the original product. Send in the clowns MBAs.

The key here is that the brand, despite what the producers might want it to be, is controlled by the minds of the consumers. The brand is what the consumers think it is, not what the producers necessarily want it to be, although in a good business situation, those two are identical. I was talking about magazine branding, but what applies there applies everywhere. Good branding is branding that identifies products the way the company wants them to be branded and how consumers want to consume them versus bad branding, the release of products that are inconsistent with the brand, either on the part of the producer or the consumer. A perfect example of good branding is Apple, where all products come across as the brainchildren of Steve Jobs, elegant, safe, classy, expensive, simple, effective, stylish, hip. Whether the products are all of those things is another matter altogether; the important thing is that is the brand, so when you encounter an Apple product, your response to it is a combination of those things. (That the Apple brand also includes paternalism, Big Brother control, v.1.0 fails, etc., is probably limited among the technoscenti, and not the public at large, who simply don’t care about DRM because they have neither the time, patience, interest nor inclination to torrent files.) Bad branding? Well, let’s say the makers of a certain product tangentially associated with chocolate released “Ex-Lax Brand Truffles” to candy stores…

So a brand is more than just a name of a product. It is the concept of the product. The meta of the product. The gestalt. Whatever. Amazon has become one of the biggest internet companies working from scratch, with a name that has no identification with its initial service, and it established its brand (cheap, fast, exhaustive, accessible, friendly) by doing a good job with books and slowly expanding into everything else. Once upon a time there was no Amazon, now it is indispensable. And it is a meaningful internet brand. So brands can be established on the internet with no previous connection to a product. Content brands on the internet tend to be aggregators, like Digg or HuffPo or Boing Boing, but then again, Andrew Sullivan writes plenty of original net-only stuff from a recognizable brand position (absent The Atlantic).

In magazines and newspapers, the brand is relative to the perception of the public of the editors of that periodical. If the editors are perceived as having an identifiable, coherent stance, then it’s a brand. Like the New Yorker, and plenty of others. This brand starts somewhere, and sticks or not. Wired is a recent example of a strong brand in magazines. Oprah is another. I maintain that this branding can transcend a particular medium, but the brand owner needs to be clever to make it happen, and to understand the other media it wishes to enter. My original contention was that the content of magazines is now available as the content of the internet, and that the internet is rendering magazines obsolete. Publishers of magazines, to survive, need to become publishers of web content, at which most of them suck. Boing Boing services my need for “magazine” content, and does it better than a magazine because it’s fast, current, and multimedia. BB also has a recognizable editorial voice, in its writing and its aggregation, which is why I wouldn’t recommend it to my mother. There used to be magazines for everybody; now there’s websites for everybody. The content—short-form journalism—is the same.

So, today’s magazines, as I say, will live or die as they master the new medium, the same way movie studios lived or died in the 50s when they confronted the new medium of television. Same content, different delivery system. Some old brands will travel along, some new ones will be created. Possession of a strong brand will be no guarantee of being able to make the leap. Lack of a strong brand will be no guarantee of failure, as long as you work toward overcoming that lack with consistent content that can be seen as a brand.

Think about this. Today, J schools are enjoying their greatest popularity ever. What are all those journalists going to do when they graduate into a world with no newspapers or magazines? They’ll think of something.

On magazine publishing

There seems to be a lot of hoo-ha over magazines figuring out what to do in the age of e-media. The magazine publishers ask themselves, how can they port their magazine over to the iPad or the Kindle or whatever technology is the flavor of the moment, as if the problem they face is that paper has been replaced by something else, and they need to transfer from their traditional paper to that something else.

They’re looking at it the wrong way.

It is the internet itself that renders magazines obsolete. (And, for that matter, newspapers.) The thing is, we turn to a particular medium for the benefits we can derive from that medium. Magazines provide us with content of varying lengths, but usually not too long-form, on just about any subject matter. It is no stretch to say that the internet also provides us with content of varying lengths, but usually not too long-form, on just about any subject matter. (Both, by the way, occasionally also do long-form.) The competition, in other words, begins at the core of what the content is that is in magazines and what the content is that is on the internet. The first question we should probably ask is if there is a qualitative difference between those two contents. Is one better than the other, absent its location? The simple answer is no. Since magazines have been an entrenched medium for a long time, they certainly have had the ability to draw on, and pay, a certain pool of quality journalists, but although the internet has no shortage of inexperienced, poor quality writers, many many sites also have the ability to draw on, and pay, a certain pool of quality journalists. There’s nothing about writing in a magazine or writing on the internet that makes one better than the other, aside from the fact that the entry level requirements for the latter are so low that there’s no inherent expectation of quality on the part of the consumer, whereas one does expect when one buys a magazine that, at some point, the editors of that magazine got some good writers to create the articles. (As magazines die and professional writers move over to internet positions, one can reasonably expect better quality in the internet, but that is beside the point I’m trying to make here.)

So, theoretically, content quality is identical. What else is different? Well, certainly the physical aspects of a magazine are quite different from a computer. Magazines are cheap, portable, and lightweight. Working against them is the fact that they need to be printed, and the production cycle of content is much longer than the production cycle of content online. With the creation of cheap, portable and lightweight devices for reading internet content, suddenly that advantage of magazines goes away, and we’re left with slower production of, virtually, the same thing.

But is it the same? If there is no New Yorker, for instance, either as a physical magazine or as an online magazine, do I lose whatever it was that I was getting from the New Yorker? Not really. This particular magazine has goings-on and reviews (readily available elsewhere), political analysis (way readily available elsewhere, of exactly the same liberal bias or any other bias you might prefer), fiction (ditto), commentary on the arts and life in general (ditto), and articles of serious journalism about whatever the editors think is important (ditto). Every single thing you can get from the New Yorker you can get from somewhere other than the New Yorker, and you can get it at a similar level of quality.

So why do I need the New Yorker? Especially when I can get an analogue to all its content, and I can get it on my portable device?

Well, that’s the big question, the one the magazines should be asking. If I can get everything in a magazine somewhere else, why do I need a magazine?

There’s only one real answer here that I can think of. A magazine like the New Yorker has, for lack of a better term, a brand identity. It has a recognizable editorial personality. I read the New Yorker not because I want a review of Iron Man 2 but because I want the New Yorker review of Iron Man 2. I want their comments on life in general. I like their brand. I like their aggregation of content.

The problem for most magazines is that they lack this sort of brand identity. They may be about something, foreign cars, for instance, but they don’t bring anything more to the table than their concentration on their particular subject. I can get tons of foreign car material on the internet and forego the magazine entirely. As a matter of fact, as one gets more specific on subject, the internet, with its low entry cost, becomes better able to provide content. There are people on the web who are fans of everything you can imagine, and there’s twenty-eleven websites devoted to anything you can think of. Magazines, with their production costs, can’t meet this level of granularity. How many Disney magazines are there? How many Disney websites? And Disney isn’t even obscure.

Magazines, to survive, will have to do a couple of things. First of all, if they don’t have a transcendent and viable brand identity, then it’s a hopeless cause. This is why I’m not taking my hard-earned salary and making a bid on Newsweek. I can’t think of anything about it that makes it a viable concept in the internet age, either on paper or on pixels. Food magazines? Tough, when I can get recipes online so easily, but if they have a face then they have a brand going for them. If you like Jamie or Rachael or whomever, then you’ll want their stuff and not just generic stuff. (RIP Gourmet.) Wedding magazines? Well, they have no content and are only repositories of advertisements, so they might be the last to go.

Computer magazines are an interesting case, seeing that the people most interested in them are the most likely to be, well, computing. Wired has an interesting paradigm. They have the magazine online, they have the magazine on paper, and they now are taking a device-specific approach on the iPad (which looks good but has gotten mixed reviews, but after all, it is v1.0). Wired certainly has a brand identity that I seek out, that will transcend medium. If Wired were a web organization and not a publisher, it would have that same identity.

Publishers need to become, simply, publishers, as compared to being magazine publishers or even web publishers. But they have to think it through. They have to learn what it is that they have to offer that is unique to their brand, and make that their selling paradigm. Make me go to you because whatever it is you have, I can’t get that elsewhere, for whatever reason. Publishing on paper, on websites, on apps, is beside the point. But it must be factored into the equation. Portable devices have arrived. They’re still boutique-ish, but not for long, and along with them is coming steadily growing wifi access. And they enable the magazine-like content at a level of magnitude above a website, plus they replicate a magazine’s portability. Going forward, a magazine on paper can have the best photographic reproduction, but websites have video and audio and apps have functionality. You can’t just translate from one medium to another, you have to rethink from one medium to another. You might even be able to survive in multiple media; smart thinking will, at least, allow you to survive in one of them.

Bottom line? Draw a chart. On one axis, put the number of magazines in print. On the other, put the price of portable reading devices. They will both got down together. Print magazines have had a good run. They won’t go away completely, but they’ll go away mostly. To tell you the truth, many of them already have.

iPad adventures

I have, a number of times, read entire books on my Touch for the DJ. We receive about a quarter of our submissions electronically, which, given that approximately 102% of all writers work electronically in the first place seems a little odd to me, but publishers are nothing if not inefficient (which is why so many of them are in trouble in the 21st Century). On our end, we have not been issued any sort of e-readers, unlike some editors at some houses, so we have been on our own recognizances, as W. S. Gilbert might put it. My recog has been the Touch which, as a book reader, does do the job, but just barely. Obviously, the damned thing is too small. To be able to read on it, you need to blow up the type size, and then you get maybe a paragraph at a time, and you click your way through it like a little house afire.

Not optimal.

One of the reasons I bought the iPad was to get a better reader. I never really wanted a Kindle much, or any of its single-purpose cousins, because my desire to read electronically isn’t all that great, aside from the needs of the DJ. I mean, I’ve got a few books on paper at home that I need to read first, and some I need to reread, before I would need to start collecting an electronic library. But the idea of a multi-purpose device that also reads? That was pretty attractive. Of course, most of the functions of the iPad look, on the surface, to be the same functions as the Touch, which was my original reaction to the thing, so I didn’t dive in immediately. After all, I brought the Touch with me to England and carried the internet in my pocket for two weeks, which was a miracle of convenience that can’t be beat. There was wireless everywhere. There will be more wireless in more everywheres in the future. I would not have lugged an iPad as willingly: my pockets aren’t big enough (and I’m already lugging an SLR and an extra lens, making me more sherpa than tourist, to tell you the truth).

So what got me from “I’ve already got the iPad nano” to buying the iPad? Satisfied customers. Not just Bietz (who loves all tech on first blush and can’t be trusted until the first six months have elapsed) and O’C (who got his for free and therefore can’t be trusted because of the lack of fiscal investment), both of whom are talking life-changing, but the tech people I follow either on Twitter or on podcasts. Even Cory Doctorow’s dislike of the device played into my wanting one. You know, it isn’t 1982 anymore. The computer isn’t a tinkerer’s toy that comes with not just a manual but a guide to Basic plus a complete guide to the machine language of the beast. Apple may control the apps in a Big Brother fashion, but at the same time I can access anything (except flash) from the browser, so it’s like Big Brother with Benefits, if you get my drift. Anyhow, everyone who loves the thing says that it has its own niche and that it’s a niche you weren’t aware of and once you find it, there you are.

This may be true. So far, and it’s still early days, one thing that is clear to me is that I’m going to have to redefine my Touch usage. No need to watch a movie on that screen when I can watch it on the iPad screen. Civilization? Oy! And then, of course, there’s iBooks.

It took a couple of days (literally) but I finally found out how to get from whatever I have to a book in iBook. Basically you get yourself a pdf, then you run a program called Calibre which converts the pdf into an epub, and then you drag the epub file into your iTunes library, and the next time you sync, you read, all of which is easier than it sounds.

And you know what I really love? Playing with a new device, a new computer, whatever. Figuring out how best to use it, getting it organized with the rest of my machinery, experimenting. For instance, I haven’t yet found a good solution to RSS. You can’t really run the Google Reader efficiently because it doesn’t scroll correctly. I tried an app that I’m not happy with because it lost the connection to Google and a hundred login attempts wouldn’t reconnect it (although I’ll try again today). The best Twitter app (as in “free”) only allows one account, unless I want to “pay,” which I’m not ready for yet. Come to think of it, a lot of what is hard to do on the Touch, therefore requiring apps, is easy to do on the larger screen in Safari, obviating the need for those apps. As I say, that’s what I love, sorting out the pluses and minuses and working out the details to my best advantage.

There was a short period of time when I considered buying a netbook. I would like to now publicly thank the gods of commerce for stopping my hand and keeping me ready instead for the iPad.

Good news, gooder news

There are, occasionally, twists on the old “good news, bad news” business that just boggle the mind.

The DDA had long ago resigned itself to the sad, nearly deal-breaking news that Star Tours was going to close for regrooving a week before our trip. O’C, who pretty much spends his whole DHS day at this attraction, couldn’t speak through the tears, and even I was more than a little disappointed, this being one of my top favorites. And then, lo and behold, it turns out it’s going to be open while we’re there after all. The gods of the Lukas Ranch were smiling on us. Not that I necessarily feel a need to ride it five times, like some people, but one last farewell trip? The Force is obviously strong with our group.

One ride being open unexpectedly, to some people, might not represent much. Not even a ride as important as this one. But then, last week, while doing some research, I discovered another piece of startling news. “it’s a small world” is going to be closed while we are there.

As my daughter said, this proves there is a God.

“iasw” could possibly be the most controversial attraction in any Disney park. On the one hand, it has the pedigree of the 64-65 Fair, and the whole Disney tech breakthrough that I’ve talked about. It is also about the children of the world, with a transcendent message of peace and brotherhood. The Mary Blair art on which it is based is positively inspired. There is no attraction more iconic than this one. It even has music by the Sherman Brothers! And, well, there’s the problem. The music by the Sherman Brothers. It’s a cute little tune sung by children in different languages throughout the ride, and it has the general effect that can only be matched by an anesthetic-free colonoscopy, even if you yourself happen to be one of the Sherman Brothers. I honestly did once get stuck on this ride for half an hour, through which the music never stopped. I was one of the few survivors of the experience. The rest went straight into the nursing home.

And the bad (?) news we will not get the opportunity during the Disney Debate Adventure to have a similar confrontation with insanity. Star Tours, yes, “it’s a small world” no. Not to mention that, most likely, we’ll get to see Captain EO rather than Honey I Shrunk the Audience, which already has O’C doing the Futterwack happy dance.

This will be a trip to savor.

Back to business after the holiday weekend

I’ve started putting photos of the UK trip up on Facebook. I’d put them on Flickr but they say I’ve already got too many and should start paying them. Didn’t they read that book about the internet being free? What I really need to do is figure out a way to post them to my own site. Some day, when I’ve got some time on my hands. As it is, editing the photos takes longer than going to England and taking them in the first place. The SLR is still new to me, and I seem to have taken a lot of pictures that are slightly askew, something I noticed late in the trip that I starting thinking about on the fly but meanwhile I’ve now got to fix it on the ground, and it takes forever. I’ve worked out a system using iPhoto and Elements alternately, and it’s very confusing and, trust me, you really don’t want to hear about it. I estimate that, at the rate I’m going, I’ll be done in time for the DDA. At which point I can start all over again.

I also managed to record a Nostrum over the weekend, but had all sorts of issues with the uploading to my site and the RSS and hearing it in iTunes. I ended up loading a couple of different versions, and never did understand the problem. So maybe, if you’re a subscriber, you’ll hear the same episode (with Botch and Wednesday) twice. Maybe not. It is available on the NostrumNation blog, in any case, if you need to get it. Which, I guess, stretches the definition of the word need beyond your wildest nightmares.

I wasn’t able to go to CatNats, where SuperSquirrel debated her very last round (always a gleeful moment). I’m curious to see how she and the Panivore did in the ballot count. And of course, the P has to prep for NatNats. No rest for the wicked. Anyhow, before the event we had a call for a TVFT from Rob Frederickson, as I like to call him, which Bietz set up, and I enjoyed that conversation a lot. Adam T was also with us, and in addition to CatNats we discussed NatNats, so if you’re running that LD topic, you might want to check it out. I also posted a segment of Fred trying to set up Skype. The man is not a technophobe, but he’s not exactly Mr. Skype either. And he does resort to salty language at times, so there goes our G rating. I’m thinking of making a hip hop recording out of it.

And, oh yeah, there is the iPad. It took me a while to get it set up, mostly because there was a whole new EULA that I didn’t bump into right away that was walling me up. Then there was the Apple store guy telling me to let it run down the charge, so I haven’t gone back and synched it again to see how some of the issues were working out. One big thing for me is reading books for the DJ, and that means getting mss that come into the office into iBooks, which requires, first, turning them into ePub format, and second, dumping them into iTunes on Vegas Elvis, then synching the iP to VE to get them into iBooks. A lot of bloody hoo-ha, in other words, but worth it. Something as simple as reading them on Stanza doesn’t work because the Stanza software for the Touch, while it expands to cover the territory of the iP screen, gets too fuzzy for extended reading sessions. And a simple pdf is possible, but it has none of the elegance of an iBooks title. Anyhow, my overall take on the device at the moment is pretty favorable, and I haven’t even tried to play iPad Civ yet. It’s a little heavy for reading, but not prohibitively so: it wasn’t so bad that when I virtually tried to turn the page that I fell out of bed or anything. O’C wants to use his for tabbing, which requires a virtual connection to your home machine, which seems to avoid the need to do something simple like print schematics, but that’s him and not me. I’m seeing him this Friday, so we can compare notes. I do need a name for mine, though. Nothing immediately comes to mind, but I’ll keep working on it.

But I don't know what Elvis this is!

This is pretty amazing. Typing on the iPad is much easier than I expected, and the floating spell fixer is nifty.

Did I say I got an iPad?

I bought the large wifi one. My mother taught me as a child always to get the most memory they sell, and she was right. I've never regretted having too much memory in any device I've ever bought, and always rued getting too little. We'll see if that makes a difference this time.

Starting friction was small, but not nonexistent. Either the iTunes store was swamped or my pad just wasn't getting there for a while, but that eventually ironed itself out. All my Touch apps came in, and I'd say 90% of them are keepers. Some of them have already morphed into iPad apps, taking up the whole screen rather than a touch-sized portion in the middle. My guess is that iPad Civ is worth the price of admission. I'm typing this in Pages, the iworks word processor, which I also expect to use for work. I haven't gotten too many other newbies yet; I don't want to spend all my money the first day.

So why did I buy it? A variety of reasons, but mostly because everyone who has one loves it. I'll certainly use it as a book reader for the DJ (and the chez). I'll watch videos in debate one-night cheap hotels. I'll play games when I should be tabbing. And maybe I'll even get my money's worth out of it.

We'll see. So far? I'm loving it.

Days at the end

“When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.” (So said my friend Joe McGrath, quoting Dr. Johnson, usually at least once a day for roughly twenty-five years or so. Actually, McGrath would change it from London to something else. Tired of cheeseburgers. Tired of Seinfeld reruns. Tired of rhinoplasty. But that is not why we are gathered here today.)

I have been to London many times, for one reason or another, starting as a kid with parents, going on as a parent with kid, for the DJ every now and then, and lately for the odd long weekend in the depths of winter (for me, a nice alternative to the Harvard tournament). So finally getting back to London this time, after mostly exploring the less frequented corners of the isle, was like old home week. I love London, which is just like New York in almost every imaginable way, and I love New York too, so there you are. There’s so much life in a big city; it’s a lot different from walking around the cliffs overlooking the Atlantic. There’s hustle, tussle, muscle, people of all shapes and sizes and colors (although all the women were still wearing black tights, except perhaps for the ones in burkas, who I can’t vouch for one way or the other), there’s noise and life but also peace and quiet in a large number of gardens and parks. Great food. Theater. (All right: theatre.) Art. Architecture.

What can I say?

As I reported on Facebook, our moment of highest culture was seeing the play “Priscilla Queen of the Desert.” This is a series of OMG moments piled one on the other, and it was great fun and I’m glad we went. Usually we see something bleak and British starring people you usually only see on Masterpiece Theatre. Here, the likelihood of any crossover with MT was highly unlikely. We also did the usual museums and whatnot, but we also took advantage of our seemingly endless BritRail pass to get outta town a couple of times. As a result, we had two great day trips.

First, we visited Brighton, site of the palace built by the Prince Regent, George IV. (Speaking of Joe McGrath, he also likes to point out that the play “The Madness of George III,” when it was made into a movie, was retitled “The Madness of King George,” so that people wouldn’t think it was the third movie in the series.) The chubby prince was something of a rake, and a wastrel, and this is one fabulous pile, let me tell you. It’s an Asian simulacrum opium dream of a place the insides of which make your jaw drop. When Victoria came along she sold the joint: it was just too small a place for a family. Jeesh. Brighton also has a wonderfully seedy amusement pier, and other wonderfully seedy amusements, which I just love.

We also visited Winchester, which has a remarkable cathedral, plus the other usual medieval odds and ends. You can see King Arthur’s Round Table, except that it isn’t really KA’s RT, but once something is 700 years old or so, it starts taking on a life of its own.

In London we also did other usual things like the National Gallery, the Leighton house, the War Museum, a garden museum, various walking tours, etc. Not unlike what one would do in NYC, except it takes longer to get there.

Which, aside from asides, pretty much sums it up. I’ll have more to say about particulars, but I wanted to cover the whole trip from start to finish, and then get back to normal, and then write up stuff as it occurs to me. I mean, at this moment we have Sailors in Omaha (home of one of the great American ocean ports), and there’s ongoing TVFTiana, and there’s new Disney Debate Adventure stuff to report on, etc., etc., etc.

Onward!

Days whatever: The Cornish weekend

There is one direct train a day from Bath to Penzance, which is the end of the line to the west. We took it, and spent a bunch of hours watching the scenery (and also, in my case, watching a documentary on the St. Louis Worlds Fair on the good old Touch). Following which we had four full days planned for Cornwall.

In the past we have mostly visited London, or burbs not far from London, when we’ve gone to England. Cornwall is about as far away as you can get from that urban atmosphere. The people absolutely talk differently and look different (although I would like to send a message to every single woman in England: Get over this black tights thing!). They’re rural, and when you’re there, you feel as if you’re in a rural place. This is certainly a tourist area in the summer (beaches and whatnot) but we had beaten that crowd in, so it was peaceful and quite new from what we’ve become accustomed to.

As I said, Penzance is where the train ends. It’s not much of a town, although it does have a nice museum displaying the Newlyn school, which is right up our alley (we’re big on the 19th century, both the academic and the non-), the homegrown art for which the area is justly famous. The area has a long fishing history (and still has plenty of fishing, which meant fish for dinner every night), and mostly what one does is walk along the shore, which ranges from beach to cliff and drama to drama, and just take in all the nature.

Our day trips included Lands End, which we walked for hours, and which is, indeed, the end of the island. I took a picture of New York off in the distance, but it’s hard to make out too many of the details. A lot of this is edge-of-the-cliff-if-I-slip-on-the-gravel-I’ll-leave-Cruz-my-Disney-album-collection scary and high, some of it was easy, some of it was getting lost and roaming through hedgerows looking for any sign of civilization other than a sheep. This was one of those sunny days that made for great picture taking, and over the whole vacation I took about 1300, so it will take a little time to sort them all out, but I will, and I’ll share them eventually (the good ones, not all 1300).

Another trip was to St. Ives (which kept resonating in my head with seven wives) which has a nifty Tate museum of modern art that, to my mind, could comprise a textbook collection starter set. It’s also got plenty of attractive town to walk around, mixed in with a lot of honkytonk resort beach town to walk around in. (I wonder what the UK equivalent of honkytonk is. Honqueytonque?) Then there was St. Austell, home to the Lost Gardens of Heligan, which is this old Victorian garden that went to ruin and has been rebuilt. To get there, in addition to a train, there was a small bus through city streets that were exactly the size of a small bus plus an inch on either side. The gardens were remarkably photogenic (I’m not much of a gardener myself except insofar as I’ll eat whatever you grow in it happily), and one was deeply tropical (the weather here is, as you know from sleeping through earth science, quite warm). And there were plenty of towns walking distance from Penzance which, well, we walked to. This was, in a word, four days of building up an appetite. Those fish dinners were truly appreciated. At one of them I had, for the first time, red mullet. Normally I wouldn’t order a fish named after a bad haircut, but, Mama Mia! This stuff takes just like lobster. Bring on the mullets! I also ate bunches of enormously excellent fish and chips and drank local ale (although, unlike many of the actual locals, I waited until after breakfast to begin my consumption).

The take on Cornwall? If you like hiking, you have come to the right place. I like hiking, so there you are.

Day 3-4: Bath

We first visited Bath about 20 years ago with Kate, so our return, staying for just a little over a full day, was fairly nostalgic. But we had liked the city, which has a lot of charm, the first time—including a must-see attraction, a charming abbey and some good food—so we went back to see how it had changed.

Bath is built around a hot spring that was an attraction back with the caveman. This thing bubbles up nice and toasty, and on those cold winter nights, it was probably just the thing for a prehistoric hot tub experience. When the Romans got there they turned the place into a major operation, and what you see now is the archeological remains of that Roman operation. And it is huge. You expect to go down and see maybe some bubbly water and a rock or two, but this thing has been excavated for decades and has all the latest scientific techniques going for it, so you really get a sense of what it was like (even more than when we were last there 20 years ago, at which point it was already mind-blowing). England is dotted with pieces of old Roman detritus, and you can’t swing a cat without hitting the original wall of something or other, but this is like finding half a city and walking through it. You can kill a whole morning working your way through it. And, of course, the spring is still there and bubbling away. I didn’t bother going for my complimentary free taste; I smelled it last time, and that once was enough. Them there bubbles is chemicals, folks. Good for what ails you? Maybe, but not my cup of tea, thank you very much.

Since Jane Austen lived in Bath for a while, if you’re a fan you can visit her house there (I think it's her house and not just a recreation—I didn’t go in, not that I’m not a fan but, honestly, it’s just some old house, and I’d rather read the books). Outside of it there are people all dressed in full bonnet drag, if that’s your fancy. Mostly I kept muttering to myself various comic turns on “It is a universal truth,” because I couldn’t avoid it no matter how hard I tried. (Unlike looking for a Cheshire cat chapeau in Oxford, on the other hand, I assure you that I was not seeking out any Mr. Darcy tee shirts or anything.) You can also walk around and see some lovely 18th Century architecture, and if you cross the river and hike up the open land on the other side, you can get a fantastic view of the whole vista of the place. That’s the nice thing about countries older than the US: you see things that have been around for a while, relatively unchanged.

The abbey in Bath is also memorable for me for two reasons. First, the ladders to heaven that flank the front doors, with angels climbing up and down, and second, the remarkable stain glass windows telling, on the one side, Old Testament stories, and on the other, New Testament. Apparently the difference between an abbey and a cathedral (which this would seem to qualify as, if one were to go by size alone) is the association of the latter with a bishopric. You learn something new every day.

One thing we couldn’t figure out was how the canals we both distrinctly remember walking along twenty years ago have disappeared. It’s one thing to have a faulty memory, but to have a shared faulty memory is rather frightening. At the end of our sole full day we rediscovered a restaurant we had eaten at lo those many years ago, and it was high end then and it was high end now. Good, classy grub! They also had a window where you could watch the cooks plating the food, trying unsuccessfully for a couple of minutes to stick a pressed beet shaped like a stick of chewing gum into a meatball shaped out of duck confit (which I had eaten—unbelievable!).

Visit Bath? It’s not too far out of London (nor was Oxford) if that’s your starting point, and either can be a day trip (although more is better). I’d say the place is definitely worth a full day, once every twenty years or so. Which, from me, is high praise.

Day 2: Blenheim

For this trip we bought a BritRail pass because we planned a lot of day trips outside of our immediate venues. I absolutely refused to rent a car. Liz and I are not so good getting around in new territories to begin with, I feel like driving is work rather than vacation since I have to pay attention to driving and not sightseeing (not to mention in this case theoretically paying attention to driving on the wrong side of the road), and I really like trains (and can live with buses). Our first day trip, in this case by bus, was out from Oxford to Blenheim palace.

John Churchill was a great general who won the battle of Blenheim. If you know nothing about that, or him, you should look it up. The whole period of the Restoration and the following years is fascinating. (I will give you a tip to remember succession at the time: cheeseburger. James I, Charles I, Commonwealth, Charles II, James II. As in bun, cheese, meat, cheese, bun. Granted it’s not the world’s greatest mnemonic device but you’ll just have to work with me here.) These people were politics and intrigue up the wazoo, let me tell you. Anyhow, Churchill was rewarded for his victory over the French with the title Duke of Marlborough, and also with this nice pile in the countryside, which is one bloody amazing palace. (And yes, Winston was a descendent, but was not himself Duke. Nonetheless Winnie was born in the palace. But he’s another story altogether, and another one worth studying.)

The palace is divided into two tours. One, you walk through and see the house in its glory, checking out all the noble knickknacks. With the other, you walk through a sort of theme ride where video actors discuss the house’s building and subsequent owners, something of a walk through Carousel of Progress. My favorite thing in part two was when Marborough (i.e., the present Duke, who lives there in rooms one cannot visit) comes on the telly at the end to thank you for visiting. If you had to imagine the perfect modern English Duke, this is it. He is wearing stripes, checks, polka dots and ziggurats in every color under the sun, and he looks like he just ate a lemon. His Grace dresses like everyone who doesn’t care how they dress if they happen to own a palace. But Brits seem to be like that in general. When they don’t have to dress up, they make Americans look like Milan during Fashion Week. But on the other hand, for sports and the like, they dress up at the drop of a helmet. They’ve got cricket clothes and riding clothes and ruggers clothes—but I (uncharacteristically) digress.

Not only is there the palace at Blenheim, with its formal gardens and the like, but there is the rest of the grounds, designed by landscape architect (i.e., gardener on the grand scale) Capability Brown. Now there’s a name to contend with. I like a name like Capability, and would like to see more like it. His real name was Lancelot Brown. What can I say? He’s no Ashmole. Anyhow, you walk these grounds and I have to admit it is absolutely stunning. Trees are planted over acre upon acre of land in such
a way that everywhere you look there’s a vista, with incredible color detail. We were there in the height of spring and the photo gives you a sense in a sort of abstract way of what you would see everywhere. Normally I don’t care one way or the other for gardens (although I like photographing them) but even I was impressed by this one. Plus it was an absolutely gorgeous spring day, there were sheep grazing in the hillside… [Sigh!]

Blenheim, not far from Oxford—definitely worth a visit.

Day 1: Oxford

The afternoon we arrived in Oxford (the official symbol of which is an ox fording a river) it rained a little bit. It never rained again for the remainder of the vacation. I would like to thank whoever is in charge of the weather for a superb performance.

Oxford is, as you might know, a college town. Dozens of them, actually, comprising the university. And they all look like Masterpiece Theatre, with a classic gothic building surrounding an open green quad. Come to think of it, the shops are big on selling Inspector Morse guidebooks, for those Mystery fans who have watched the shows (or read the books) so many times they want to see every crook and nanny where there were all shot. Whatever. I like Morse (and Lewis) as much as the next person, provided the next person isn’t the type to have bought one of those books. I gather they also give a Harry Potter tour of the burg, because some of the movies were shot there, not because Hogwarts is one of the colleges. Again, whatever. On the other hand, it is nice to roam around in a town where, once, the Reverend Dodgson taught mathematics and wrote a fanciful book or two (I really wanted a Tenniel Cheshire cat ball cap, but alas, none was found), as did JRRT and assorted others. Some stars are still roaming around, for that matter, but I didn’t see any of them.

I have read of Oxford, which is certainly a one-industry town, as being very much a place where you are either a part of It or you’re not, i.e., a student/tutor or a schlub servicing students/tutors. Perhaps. I mean, who wants to live in Hollywood and work at a gas station? As a tourist, there is no question that access to the town industry is severely limited, unless one connects up with a guide, an abundant enough resource. Under these auspices, we saw chapels and dining halls and quads and all sorts of things inside the walls, which made us feel very learned. You even get to see people toddling about in their gowns and whatnot, looking also very learned. There were various graduations while we were there, so in addition to these students there were also tons of proud parents. Very lah-di-dah. Our guide, a Lebanese immigrant who was very impressed by the fact that there were not only non-Brits but also women in both the student body and in positions of power, could not pronounce the word epitome correctly, but otherwise he did a good job, so our sightseeing tour was quite enjoyable.

There are various museums and whatnot, the most famous of which is the Ashmolean. This is named after Elias Ashmole. Let me tell you: if poor Elias were around today, the first thing he’d do is change his last name. Thank God I don’t have to announce that one at award ceremonies! Anyhow, the Ashmolean is actually a serendipitous collection of collections rather than a straightforward museum as such, and it’s quite fun. Things like a Stradivarius (plus step-by-step instructions on how to make one), paintings, old scraps of ancient pots and pans, you name it. Not terribly demanding, but worth a trip.

We spend a lot of time planning our meals on vacation. We don’t haunt the fanciest restaurants, but we do keep an eye out as we roam for likely dinner candidates, and we do enjoy our sit-downs at the end of a long day on our feet seeing this and that (and often outright hiking hither and yon). In Oxford there’s a new Jamie Oliver restaurant (called Jamie’s, naturally) that everyone was lined up for our first night (they didn’t take rezzes for twosomes), and we were intrigued but when I looked it up online (I had wireless in all the hotels for the duration) they said it was overrated so we decided not to go the next night, but then we changed our minds since it wasn’t so crowded that Sunday and it was one of the best meals we had over the vacation. Don’t believe everything you read on the internet! (Including this.)

DDA Interlude

I just found this great blog posting (with YouTube videos) on the building of Disneyland, if you're interested.

From Newark Liberty to London Heathrow to Oxfordshire

All right. We’re back in business. Although this seems to be becoming as much of a travel blog as a debate blog. Sorry about that, but you’ll just have to learn to roll with the punches. Nobody ever said that life in the VCA was going to be easy.

Our trip was planned to cover a number of locations in the UK. The problem is, international travel at this particular moment is plagued by wrath of the Icelanders, spewing the rest of us with their so-called “ash cloud.” As if. The truth is, their economy went bust, and none of us, certainly not you and not even me, as close as I am to these people, sent them even a single ruble to help them get over it. So now they are wreaking their revenge, the frigid bastids. We were planned to take off at around 9:00 on the starting Friday night. Thanks to the “ash cloud,” which was apparently generated by the same special effects group that photographed “man landing on the moon,” our flight was delayed over two hours. As it turned out, this was not a bad thing. By the time we were in the air it was midnight, and I was out like the proverbial (northern) light. Of course, I drifted in and out of sleep as I tend to do (I don’t need a plane to be an insomniac), but overall we both did pretty well, despite the usual squeezing in like (northern) herring. Needless to say, I spent the next two weeks tracking the “ash cloud” in the news, figuring that we would be stranded at Heathrow for a couple of months when we wanted to get back home. The good news was that, aside from an article claiming that the ash cloud was, indeed, an “ash cloud” in quotations (the Brits are just as good as anyone in doing Monday morning tabloid quarterbacking), there was nothing. But I will admit, I was worried. Add to this the threat of a strike on BA (which we weren’t flying, but strikes among furriners tend to be contagious, especially among the French which, thank God, the Brits aren’t), which in fact did come to pass the day after we arrived back home, and I spent much of my vacation in what my friend Jules would call a state of permanent depression, but, as it turned out, all for naught.

Our first port of call was Oxford, which one accesses from Paddington, after first taking the express from Heathrow to that station. The Heathrow Express is one of the wonders of airplane travel, probably the fastest and easiest airport to city center there is, and certainly the fastest I’ve ever used. 15 minute trains every 15 minutes. Hard to beat. So after getting through customs in record time—because our flight was delayed we didn’t hit the rush—we were on either one train or the other, et voila! Oxford! Our hotel (actually B&B) was a short walk from the station, and before long we were checked in, washed up (as in clean hands and face, not on the shore like a piece of driftwood) and on our way. It was cool and slightly rainy, which was the last we saw of rain for the next two weeks. Perfect England weather? Whoda thunk it? In any case, we had arrived, and we were on vacation.

Let the revelry begin.

New York State Debate Coaches' Assocciation

If you're a NY debate coach, you should join the NYSDCA. Write Cruz for details (I'm offline for a while.)

Disney Debate Adventure Conclusion

One of the reasons we ended up with the schedule that we did is the minimal running of Fantasmic at DHS. This used to be every night; then it was some nights; when we’re going it’s hardly any nights. Our only chance to see it that made sense was Sunday, and there was no way O’C and I were not going to see it (we sing along with it on my iPod). So, day two of the trip is to Disney’s Hollywood Studios by default.

Dining here was tricky originally. There’s interesting theme dining, plus there’s one of the best restaurants on property, the Brown Derby. My daughter solved this dilemma (too much food in too little time) by pointing out that the Sci Fi Diner is totally an attraction, while Brown Derby is mostly just food, and you can get food anywhere, but attractions are few and far between in one’s daily life. That argument was totally persuasive.

By now process of elimination starts to point to Epcot for the next day. The Unofficial Guide has a two-day plan, one starting in the morning and ending midday, and the other starting midday and ending in the evening. Makes sense, so on the Monday, we start early and go through to lunch, mostly hitting the E tix in the Tomorrowland side of the joint. Lunch a choix as the Frenchies say, any of the counters on the World side. Then it’s off to one of the high points of the trip, the miniature golf tournament at Fantasia Gardens. I think we should play for money, just to make it interesting… After the heart-stopping athletics here, we’ll mosey back to the park for dinner at the Biergarten, which is a buffet with entertainment of the German persuasion. And so to bed, relatively early (keeping in mind that there is always the bar back at the hotel) for the Longest Day, Tuesday at MK.

There’s not much to say about MK for the DDA group. We’ll bypass the kiddie stuff, but there’s plenty of adult stuff. My single goal is Jungle Cruise at night; otherwise, it’s all standard. Drop that rope and we head off into Space Mountain, emerging in the night after the fireworks. I do expect to take a midday break and monorail over to a hotel for some peace and quiet and lunch or tea or something. One needs a break in the middle of all of this.

The final day will be Epcot part two, doing the countries, with dinner by the volcano in Mexico, and later watching Illuminations as the Grand Finale of the week. I can already see the tears in O’C’s eyes. Then we leave on the next day (although I’m hoping to squeeze a little Blizzard Beach into that morning, which is why I scheduled a late afternoon flight).

So, there you are. A week of fun and games for a group (extended) that is usually dedicated to fun and debate. I haven’t gone into such things as the mandatory hat purchase on arrival, for instance, or the insane fever of the pin purchasing, but I will blog everything in toto when the time comes. And, of course, photographs will be taken and shared.

And you thought all we cared about was getting the rounds out on time.

The Disney Debate Adventure Part 1

WDW has just conveniently offered the dining plan free for our dates. Please pass the mashed potatoes! Suddenly everyone is getting very serious about making reservations because this is a limited offer, and nobody wants to actually pay for those mashed potatoes. Can’t say as I blame them.

The first order of business in sculpting a WDW trip is figuring out how much exactly one wants to do. You could go down there and, with one thing or another, spend a couple of weeks if you wanted to see and do everything from “It’s a Small World” to Cape Canaveral. After all, Universal has 2 full parks (including the new Harry Potter area), SeaWorld has a whole day’s worth, there’s an overabundance of swimming parks (on and off the WDW grounds), plus there’s things like golf and riding horses and racing stock cars… Quite a menu, in other words. Sure, amusement/theme parks are at the heart of the experience, but you are smack dab in the middle of a resort, after all. In the case of the Disney Debate Adventure, I was thinking that this was going to be as much an in-and-out as possible. I don’t have a lot of days off available, for one thing, and the point was fairly pure Disney. By my way of thinking, this is five full days, one each for MK, DHS and AK and two for Epcot. If we had little kids with us, I might adjust that to include another day at MK and go down one at Epcot, but realistically, not even O’C is going to want to ride Dumbo all that many times. And the two Epcot days are, in fact, halves, allowing us a little breathing space in the middle of all of this. Keep in mind that I do Disney commando-style, at least for the first half of the park day. The last thing I wish to do is wait on a line, so I’m willing to prepare and act accordingly. I swear by the touring plans in the Unofficial Guide. They’ve gotten us through in the past, including during the most crowded times, and there’s no reason to believe they won’t work again. Put on your walkin’ shoes, mama, ‘cause we’re a’ headin’ out on foot!

Our first order of business was to find a hotel. The range at WDW is pretty wide. There’s the cheap ones, there’s the moderate ones, there’s the fancy expensive ones. The cheap ones, while having the advantage of price, tend to be the most kid-intense, and while the rooms aren’t terribly different from the most expensive, the hotels themselves have pretty much just basic amenities. So they’re okay pricewise, but they’re nothing special and they have a lot of kids running around (which makes a difference especially when you’re packing into a bus at the end of the day to get back to your hotel). On the other end, given how little time one will spend in one’s room, paying a lot just doesn’t make sense to me. Sure, being on the monorail for MK and Epcot is cool, but if you go to DHS or AK you’re back on a bus, so so much for that. The luxury resorts have great restaurants and character dining, but we could easily schlep over for the former if we wanted it, and we didn’t want the latter, so that was no attraction. So while I was telling the DDA folks that they could stay wherever they wanted, I was recommending a moderate hotel, and the one I was recommending was Port Orleans, which I stayed in ages ago and liked quite a bit. As it turned out, everyone else seems to have followed suit, so that’s where we’ll be. The moderate rooms are about what we pay for debate hotel accommodations, so they’re not terrible.

Next up was getting together on arrival. That one wasn’t so hard. The Downtown Disney area (formerly Pleasure Island) has plenty of restaurants and is easily accessible. Paradiso 37 was the one I chose. It looks casual, fancy drinks with fruit in them, tapas and the like. Sounded just about right, and they don’t take reservations, so we wouldn’t have to worry about when exactly to do what. If someone’s plane is late, so be it. Anyhow, that meet-up will kick things off on the Friday night.

Our next area of analysis was the park to start with. There are two schools of thought on this. One school says that MK is the purest Disney experience, so start with that. After all, MK has wall-to-wall E ticket attractions. I understand this philosophy, but I do not support it, especially if you’ve got noobs on the trip, or, for that matter, kids. If you start with MK, you’ve had the ultimate, and everything else, good as it is, sort of pales by comparison. Parks are not seen in the light of what they are themselves, but as compared to MK, and they inevitably are seen as lacking. They don’t have as many E ticket rides, they’re not as overwhelming, they’re not pure Disney, so they can appear second rate. On the other hand, the other parks, if seen in a vacuum, would blow away pretty much anybody. In fact, even comparing the other parks to one another, one would be hard-pressed to say this one is categorically better than that one. After much discussion on this on our trip listserver, we agreed not to start with MK.

My choice of a starter was Animal Kingdom for a couple of reasons. First, it’s an easy park to do in a day, so you’re not starting with a day of terrible exhaustion. After a little running around early in the day to take in the handful of E tix, it’s a mostly a lot of leisurely walking around taking in the animals and occasionally sitting down to watch a show or a movie. In fact, it closes at 5:00, so you couldn’t kill yourself if you wanted to. It’s also a great place to photograph, and an easy one, although for some reason pictures of the Tree of Life never seem to get it right. Whatever. We did have some discussion that O’C would forgo this park in favor of Cinderella’s autograph, but I think he’s gotten over that. After different initial plans, we decided to go for African buffet for dinner at the AK Lodge, which makes great sense after a day looking at lions and tigers and bears, or at least tigers. And Yetis. Might as well go to a restaurant where lions and tigers and bears (and Yetis) are on the menu.

Early to bed that night (sort of) in preparation for a long day coming up.

Animal Kingdom

The last of the major WDW parks to be built was Animal Kingdom. (There are also minor ones like the two water parks, and the virtually extinct Pleasure Island, home of the Adventurers’ Club, which we won’t go into.) For once it seems as if Disney Corp was on its own track, neither banging up against some local competition or reviving/extending some idea from the past, until you remember all the True Life Adventureland programming from the old Disney days, and the fact that the studio pioneered nature programming. The TV show was divided into those 4 categories: Adventureland, Frontierland, Fantasyland and Tomorrowland. I’ve already admitted that Fantasyland was my favorite. Frontierland came in second. This was back at the height of the popularity of Westerns, remember, into which Disney tossed the Davy Crockett mythos, which became one of the first real television fads. If you’ve ever wondered why Westerns were so popular in the 40s and 50s, it might help to recall that the parents of adults in those years were, indeed, the pioneers of history. The so-called Old West wasn’t that long ago from their perspective. So the tales and culture were still fresh, with recent generational spin on them. It wasn’t old history, it was virtually the history of the people watching it. There’s more to the popularity than this, metaphorically and culturally, but that’s not an insignificant part of it.

My third favorite “land” was Tomorrowland, and I did eventually become quite the SF fan as a youth. Unfortunately, if you watch any of those old science shows today, I guarantee you will not be able to stay awake. Many people credit Disney as one of the people who made the space race happen, instilling in the youth of America a desire to explore the moon and Mars and whatnot, and that’s certainly true, but still, you’ll need lots of Red Bull today to get through them. They’re just…stodgy. And dated. Let me tell you, that Wernher von Braun was no Davy Crockett!

And finally there was Adventureland, the 50s version of the Nature Channel, which was my least favorite. Later on as an adult I got into this sort of thing, but as a kid, watching dancing scorpions was a lot less interesting to me than watching dancing hippos. What can I say? When the adventure was somebody Indiana Jonesing through the great unexplored, fine, but when it was True Life? True life was as stodgy as Wernher von Braun. (If you don’t believe me, ask Mrs. von Braun.)

So Disney was a pioneer in nature programming, although they did get a lot of flak over anthropomorphism. Today in this kind of programming you see animals doing whatever animals do; back then, the Disney folk thought you had to make, ta-da, a narrative out of it. Big surprise. In any case, nature is in the Disney DNA, so the idea of a nature park isn’t a stretch at all. Originally the plan was to combine real (extinct and active) and imagined animals in separate lands, but of course that never happened. Animal Kingdom comprises a DinoLand (a take on the roadside Dino park of the Southwest, the sort of thing you’d see on Route 66), an African quarter (with a safari and a walking tour), an Asian quarter (with another walking tour and Expedition Everest, a coaster visit with the Yeti), and some odds and ends, making it, in essence, a Disney zoo (which is a word that they don’t like to use, but let’s call a place with a lot of animals that you walk by and look at in simulated environments what people usually call it). AK is the least popular of the parks with the general public, who see it as a half-day park, because it doesn’t have all the E-ticket attractions of even DHS, but I like it quite a bit. In fact, it’s how I’ll open the Disney Debate Adventure.

As I’ll explain next.

Disney Hollywood Studios

Universal Studios had tours back in the silent cinema days, as we’ve said, and Disney himself had considered a studio tour/park in the 30s. In the 60s Universal brought back its Hollywood tour, no doubt inspired by the success of Disneyland down in Anaheim, and over time it grew to include all sorts of attractions and shows. I was there on my trip to LA with my cousin that I mentioned earlier; there were stunt folks and a tram ride and strolling Frankenstein and Dracula types. There was also a strolling Invisible Man, but I actually didn’t see him.*

After WDW’s great success, Universal next decided to go big time in Orlando, planning on opening Universal Studios Florida, where you could “ride the movies.” Disney Corp, at this point under the leadership of Michael Eisner, didn’t like the looks of that, or so the story goes. Disney-MGM Studio raced to beat Universal to the punch; the former opened in 1989, the latter in 1990. I guess you can say Disney won the race. (There were other theme parks that tried, unsuccessfully, to cash in on WDW’s success, by the way. Not far down the road was a circus park, which failed and was replaced by a baseball park, which also failed. There was Splendid China, and there was also going to be a new age park where people would levitate, and I even vaguely remember a Jesus park. The SeaWorld folks, already in operation elsewhere, opened in Orlando in ‘73, making them one of the earliest and, of course, one of the few successful competitors to WDW other than Universal. Some folks believe that the Seas attraction at Epcot is nothing more than WDW’s water revenge…)

Disney-MGM Studio, obviously a joint venture like so much else under Disney’s park management, combined the classic films of MGM with the classics of Disney (especially featuring animation), plus there was active filmmaking from Disney’s real functioning studios. For that matter, real animation happened there; if I'm not mistaken they were pushing Aladdin one time when I was down there, which I gather was mostly being created there. In other words, there was some real studio work going on there (as there was at Universal, home of Nickelodeon). While Universal went for recreations of various films and some theming, DHS (let’s call it by its present acronym, Disney Hollywood Studios—MGM is out of the picture these days) went for recreating Hollywood in its heyday with full-blown theming. It’s an interesting experiment to walk down the streets of Universal and compare that to walking down the streets of DHS. Every now and then Universal pulls it off, but somehow it seems to lack the thoroughness of the Disney approach. Given that much of Universal was built by WDW grads, one should expect it to come close. Certainly many of the attractions are absolutely top drawer. But what DHS had going for it in the beginning was the glue of MGM, which was a lot sturdier than the glue of Universal. MGM meant Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind (and when Turner bought the library, a combining with Warner to include Casablanca and the old Cagney films). Universal went more for the latest hits, like Jaws and ET. Not bad, but not with the same cultural resonance. Still, both parks are fine, and my preference for DHS is an offshoot of my connection to those old films, a bit of which is lost nowadays without the MGM connection being active. One would be hard-pressed to explain why the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror ought to be in one park rather than the other, or why it would be any different if it were. What DHS does have now to cement its Disneyness, imported from Disneyland, is Fantasmic, which is a nighttime show that puts it all together, with all the Disney characters paraded out in a son et lumiere that simply blows you away.

DHS is in transition as it Pixarizes itself. While there is a little Pixar everywhere in WDW (some might say too much, but I disagree, as this is what kids today are seeing first and loving the most), at DHS it will eventually dominate. I have nothing against DHS, and I like it a lot, but I don’t love it. It’s got some great attractions, though. Star Tours (in Tomorrowland in Disneyland), the vastly entertaining Aerosmith roller coaster, Twilight Zone (which they keep plussing, as Disneyspeak defines improvement), the Sci Fi Diner, the aforementioned Fantasmic. (I haven’t seen Toy Story Midway Mania yet.) All good stuff. A fine park to enjoy, but not one to die for. I wouldn’t mind going during Star Wars Weekends, though, when the place is crawling with cosplay types and armies of stormtroopers and dancing Darths. I mean, that I could love. Especially in the company of O’C, who himself might be in dancing Darth attire. One never knows.

*This is what some people affectionately refer to as a joke.

Epcot

Epcot fit the World’s Fair pattern perfectly. First, it was a collection of pavilions pushing one or another look at science or the future or both, presented by a major corporation. (Those attractions cost money, and Disney has always been big on sharing the expenses, going back to ABC TV investing in Disneyland.) You had Horizons, showing us how we’d live in space, on deserts and underwater in the future (extending the same family as the one in Carousel of Progress). You had the past and future of communications in Spaceship Earth. You had lots of hands-on stuff in Communicorp, you had dinosaurs in Energy, you had whimsy (and 3D) in Kodak, you had modern farming in the Land. Any of these could have been built at any World’s Fair of the day, except that these were permanent, and therefore better. Calling Epcot a permanent World’s Fair, in fact, was pretty common. Matching the futuristic stuff there were exhibits from various countries displaying their wares and their people and their culture, a modern ethnographer’s (and theme park’s) look at countries, a little more sophisticated than savages in a zoo and a little less sophisticated than Michelangelo’s Pieta. With restaurants, of course. The countries that participated did, indeed, like the corporations, front money to Disney for the privilege. Hell, it made me want to go to Norway, so I guess it worked.

Epcot, opening in 1982, closes the connection between Disney and Fairs, connecting back to Disney’s father in 1893, to Disney himself in 64-65, and to all the business of fairs in between. By this time, World’s Fairs were certainly no longer what they used to be, and while they still existed, no one cared much. Epcot was good enough for most people.

Epcot when it opened got the reputation as being the educational park, and a lot of folks avoided it. We took Kate there her first time, in 1984, and she loved it. Unlike some of the scary aspects of MK, Epcot was very bright and friendly and welcoming. No witches lurking behind the rocks, for instance. But for most people, the idea of an educational park was anathema, and over time Epcot has revised itself into more entertainment and less World’s Fair, to its detriment if you ask me. Mission Space has none of the depth and sense of wonder of Horizons. It’s okay, but it doesn’t make you wonder about living in the future, it just makes you think that they’ve taken special effects and done a good job of plunking you into them. There’s a big difference. Still, I enjoy the park, and set aside two days for it. I love roaming the countries, I love the food, I love Illuminations (the nightly extravaganza). The attractions are all fine, but as I say, more theme park than World’s Fair, which in my opinion is the wrong direction, but what are you going to do? It is what it is. And one thing it isn’t is what Walt himself had envisioned. From this point on, WDW was a machine that ran on its own, separate from its namesake. At its best, it reflects that namesake. At its worst, it’s just another ride. Those of us who go back a ways love it at its best and make the best of it at its worst. We are going, I think, through a good period, with a lot of promising new stuff coming up. Time will tell.

Which leaves us two other parks.