It's Steve (now in blog form)

It’s been about a month since I’ve posted anything, so a quick catch up is probably in order.

I don’t drive much and I like palindromes.  After 5 years my car just hit 22,222 miles. Hurray!

Cirque du Soleil is in town with their show Kooza.  It’s just amazing. Here’s a picture of their giant circus tent.  As the show was starting I realized that Harrison Ford was sitting about 50 feet in front of us.  He narrowly avoided a serious accosting.  He should consider himself lucky that his seat was in the middle of the row, denying me easy access to harass him and run away.

Madi has started smiling.  It’s a good thing as it helps to counterbalance her almost superhuman ability to vomit.

Disneyland is a pretty accurate reflection of the American population at large.  They appear to have a poor handle on the effectiveness of camouflage.

“Don’t worry, I’m a ninja.” You bet you are, buddy.

Ben got invited to ride in the cockpit of the Disneyland monorail.  Having kids gets you into all sorts of exciting places.

This is basically the universal view as a parent.

I sure hope this guy is a podiatrist.

It’s exhausting being 2.

Here’s a merekat.

You are now caught up.

My obsessions with signs continues. Here are some I’ve come across recently.

Caught this in Toon Town at Disney Land.  The economic meltdown is much further reaching than I’d imagined.

The cafeteria at work sold me this when I asked for green Jell-o.  This is definitely not Jell-o.  It has been my experience that when food comes with a cartoon character wearing a sombrero, that’s the international sign for diarrhea. 

You should be careful of guard arms in parking lots

Special thanks go to Jake for shooting this one over.  I like labels that clearly show the item’s function.

I admit it, I like Disneyland.  Ben likes to run around like an insane person, and I appreciate highly engineered experiences.  I thought I’d point out a couple of things that struck me the last time I was there.

These people are very sad- The Disney newlyweds are not uncommon. They are, however, tragically sad.  Thank god they found each other.  Now if only we could keep them from propagating…

This is brilliant- When I was in high school we had a class trip to Disneyland.  It was one of those overnight events.  The evening was notable on two fronts: gross misbehavior and the opening of the Indiana Jones ride.  Let’s talk about the Indian Jones ride.  While we waited in the two hour line, we all got special decoder cards.  They associated to the hieroglyphics throughout the ride.

Here’s the crazy part.  Do you remember the scene from “A Christmas Story” when he decodes the radio message and gets “Don’t forget to drink your Ovaltine”?  These are exactly the same.  AT&T was the launch partner for the ride.  All of the script decodes to messages about choosing the right long distance provider.

The amazing bit is that when AT&T obviously didn’t renew the promotion agreement, Disneyland just stopped handing out the cards.  They didn’t remove the ads from the ride.  They just stopped having them be decodeable.   So brilliant.  I wonder if AT&T wanted to cut another check if they’d start passing them out again.  Now that is a cool integrated marketing program.