Thank you.

When I got home today my cable internet and television were out. I called up your tech support line and got a recording saying there was a “service interruption” in my area.

Since I couldn’t play WoW, read my email or surf the web, I didn’t quite know what to do with myself. And then I thought now would be a perfect time to return my digital cable box that I haven’t used since the end of the Tour de France a month ago.

Because of your service interruption, I will no longer be paying you $25/mo. for something I use one month out of the year. I know you interrupted my service just so I would have an excuse to return my cable box, that you are only looking out for me, your customer, even if it’s at your own expense.

Thank you,
Grant Henninger

Despite the debacle last weekend and the lines down Mainstreet the past two days, I ventured to Disneyland with the express purpose of riding the revamped Pirates of the Caribbean. For those of you that don’t want to know anything about the ride before you get a chance to see it for yourself, please stop reading now.

Even though the lines have been very long the past two days, the lines this evening were short, just 20 minutes. They were short enough that after riding it once I turned around and hopped back in line. I have no doubt that in my two rides I missed a number of additions and changes, but here is the most notable items that I noticed:

• The voices of all of the characters in the ride were much more clear and understandable
• The music throughout the ride has changed, they have removed the singing just after the drops, so you no longer hear, “We pillage, we plunder, we rifle, and loot,” although the music is still playing.
• Davy Jones (from Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Mans Chest) is projected onto a screen made of fog that the boats go through in one of the tunnels.
• Captain Jack Sparrow shows up in three places in the ride: near the Mayor as he gets dunked in the well, in a barrel just after the scene where brides are being sold, and at the very end (this is what the picture is of.) He is also painted on the wall just inside the door next to the line off to the left.
• There is also a new voice as you climb up at the end of the ride that just doesn’t fit.

Overall, the additions weren’t extreme and fit in quite well. In no way did Disney destroy the ride as they could have with these additions. However, there are a few things that should have been changed but weren’t:

• The food needs to be removed in the area where the women are being chased by Pirates. This is a ridiculous move that Disney did when they tried to make the ride more politically correct, and needs to be undone.
• The hidden Mickey that use to show up in the shadow of the ship’s captain in the fort scene needs to be returned. This was one of the few hidden Mickeys that a lot of people knew about and made them feel like part of the ‘in’ crowd.
• Many of the boats that take guests through the ride need to be removed, there are just too many of them. There is constantly a backlog of boats stacked up all the way back to the jail scene. Every time another boat comes they run into the boat in front of them and jerk everybody around a bit. It’s like having somebody start hitting you in the back of the head in the third act of a movie and not stopping until the credits start to roll. It was my biggest complaint about the ride before and it would be easy for Disneyland to fix it, they just refuse to.

While I thought these additions were alright, there are rumors that there will be more changes made to the ride, with the addition of both Kira Knightly’s and Orlando Bloom’s characters to the ride. Hopefully this won’t be a precedent for Disneyland, changing classic rides to fit their recent movies spawned from the ride. Disney is currently working on a Jungle Cruise movie based on the ride, and I would hate to see them change the ride to reflect the movie.

The movie was shown on a screen erected in front on the Ol’ Mill on Tom Sawyer’s Island with bleachers across the Rivers of America right next to the entrance to Pirates of the Caribbean. Today, both the scaffolding for the screen and the bleachers were still in place, blocking the walkways for guests and making it a crowd control nightmare. In fact, today was the worst display of crowd control I’ve ever seen at Disneyland.

The walkway along the Rivers of America that go between Frontierland and New Orleans Square was closed down, if you wanted to get from Frontierland to New Orleans Square or Adventureland you had to backtrack all the way to Main Street. The problem was that they were not stopping people from walking down that walkway, so people were hitting a dead end and either walking through River Belle Terrace or were jumping the barricades.

All in all, I must say that having the movie premiere in Disneyland was a terrible idea for Disney. If they wanted to do it, they should have had everything cleaned up and back to normal by the time the park opened this morning. This is no way to treat park guests on the first weekend of summer just because Disney wants to throw a big party for a few select people.

(There are more photos after the jump.)

If you would like to get involved, you can RSVP online for their meeting on Tuesday or find other ways to help on their website.

I found this via A Joshua Tree In Every Pot via Boing Boing. (For those of you who don’t have a login to the NY Times, grab one at Bugmenot.) China has recreated Orange County using houses that are “designed by Southern California architects, with model homes decorated by Los Angeles interior designers. The basement pool tables are American. The appliances are imported. The tiles, wood siding and wall sconces are from the United States, too.” (Yes, I know, we don’t actually have basements in Orange County, but we can’t expect them to know that.)

Maybe this will mean Orange County can be exported to other places, there is a ton of empty land up near Lancaster, that seems to be a perfect place for another OC. Whatever makes it so fewer people want to come here.

Yesterday on my way home, there was a surprising amount of traffic on the Northbound 55. Everybody had been talking about how light the traffic was on the freeways because of the immigrant strike, even I posted about it yesterday. At first I figured the traffic would speed up once I got past the 5, as it normally does, but that didn’t happen. The traffic just wasn’t working for me on my way home, and I was a bit annoyed.

However, once I got to the overpass just before Katella I found out why the traffic was so slow, it was because of god damn signs lashed to the fence on the overpass. People were slowing down to read the tiny print on the signs that said “Tan. STOP Illegal Immigration.”

Well, Tan Nguyen, slowing down the traffic and making it take an extra 15 min to get home is no way to endear the voters to you. The Liberal Orange County is right Tan Nguyen is making our cities look like crap with all of his signs, and on top of that he is making my commute even longer.

The play was about a ballet choreographer and his two dancers. He was considered a brilliant choreographer but was paralyzed by his own feeling of inadequacy. Nothing he did he felt was good enough to live up to the acclaim of his previous works, and in the process of his madness he slowly drove his dancers mad with frustration.

Despite his brilliant choreography, the choreographer is unwilling to show any of his dances. He went so far as to stage an entire production and then never raise the curtain, and when he was done with the dance between these two dancers, he just quit, without ever performing it anywhere.

While this doesn’t sound like a thrilling story, the actors draw you in. They spend a good deal of time talking to the audience, making you feel as if you are a part of the story. That’s one of the great things about the South Coast Rep, the theater is so small you get the sense that you are right there in the middle of the play, not watching people that look like ants on a giant stage.

The Studio is running for another week. Next month I get to look forward to The Real Thing, for which I have tickets in row B dead center. Not great seats in all theaters, but the best at the South Coast Rep.

As I’ve mentioned before, I support immigrant worker’s rights, even illegal immigrants. However, I don’t think a one day boycott will help their cause. Yes, they contribute a lot of capital to our economy, but they cannot withhold that capital for extended periods of time. What I mean to say is that the American economy needs the works as much as the workers need the American economy. Right now our system is in a comfortable equilibrium, we cannot kick out the illegal immigrants without our economy collapsing, but they also can’t stop working otherwise they will starve.

It took fourteen years for the Civil Rights Movement to run its course, from the time of Brown v Board of Education (1954) until the Civil Rights Act of 1968 was passed. It will likely be just as long a fight for immigrant’s rights, and today is something akin to the Montgomery Bus Boycott, it is just the start. One thing is becoming increasingly clear, our current equilibrium is about to be disrupted. There will likely be legislation that pushes this issue back and forth over the coming years, but as Winston Churchill famously said, “The Americans will always do the right thing… after they’ve exhausted all the alternatives.”

Last night on my way home the 91 East was shut down between Lemon and the 57, right where the changeable message sign is. It looked like a very bag accident, fire trucks and ambulances. I have no doubt that the changeable message sign was involved in it.

Going that way earlier in the day I know that the traffic was suddenly slowing down right there so people could read the sign. These signs always slow down the traffic, causing everybody to get on their breaks suddenly. I can imagine somebody reading the sign and not paying attention to the person in front of them slowing down to read the sign and then slamming into one another.

Not only do changeable message signs cause more traffic than they alleviate, they also are a traffic hazard in their own right. I understand the idea behind them, but they clearly don’t work and only make things worse. Sure, it’s nice to know how long it will take to get places, or that there is an unusual amount of traffic on an upcoming freeway, but they don’t help that much. When you include all of the times there is an Amber Alert or other wanted car displayed on the signs, or just a message that say, “Click it or ticket,” they cause much more traffic than they can ever hope to eliminate.

Wednesday night I had the opportunity to go to Fullerton College and talk to some students as part of a panel on transferring to a four year school. I had attended FJC for two years after high school, before transferring. While I was there I worked on the Measure X school bond campaign for the North Orange County Community College District. This week was the first time in over three years that I’ve been back on campus and I finally got to see the changes and additions to the campus that the bond money afforded.

As a recent student, I understand the trials of parking, so I was happy to see a nice new parking structure on campus. It’s not open yet, but looks to be almost complete and will definitely be open by the fall, if not for summer session. They are also tearing down the old library to build a new student center, it will be nice to come back again when that is done.

The really amazing addition was the new library. It is huge and gorgeous. It has kept the same style as the old WPA buildings on campus, which is much better than the other, boring buildings that have been built over the years.

It is nice to see that the money I worked hard to get the school is going to good uses that will serve the students well. The bond campaign was fun, and I got a lot out of it, but it is very rewarding to go back to campus years later and see what that money built.