MY LATEST TRIP TO DISNEYLAND

Here I am again, this time on a cloudy day.

I was so happy that on the park trolley I broke into the J. G. Wentworth song. I was surprised to find that others on the trolley joined in. Apparently lots of people know the lyrics: "I have a structured settlement and I need cash now."

"Call J. G. Wentworth! 877 CASH NOW!!!"

"They've helped thousands, they'll help you too-oo!"

"One lump sum of cash they will pay to you."

"Call J. G. Wentworth, 877 CASH NOW!"

'It's your money! Use it when you need it!"

After that we blitzed the area around the trolley stop.

Holy Mackerel! My head is about twice the volume of the park attendant's.

We ended up in The Animation Academy where an animator teaches the audience how to draw Mickey.

I didn't get to draw because I was too busy taking pictures of the set.

Wow! I'd give a lot to have wooden shelves like the ones on the stage.

Check out the rug on the floor.

From a distance the pattern looks like a faded, old-time Sunday comics page like the one above. When you see it up close though, it's just an abstraction. Even so, the idea is an interesting one. I've heard you can get custom patterns printed on throw rugs and the price isn't steep.

Yikes! I've reached the end already! Maybe I'll continue this on another post.

NEW YORK CRIME

These are all pictures from a recent book of old New York Post photos called "New York Noir."

The Post's staff artists frequently drew recreations of crimes using the real backgrounds.  Here a man temporarily blinds his victim by throwing pepper at her.

Here (above) a woman has been shot by an unknown sniper.

This man (above) has been recaptured after a jailbreak.

This guy's wife caught him cheating so she gathered up the kids and threatened to leave him. That never came to pass because he shot her. One impulsive act changed his life forever.

Above, a policeman looks on as two tough kids (above) take a cigarette break. Two soon to be wasted lives.

In this picture a whole family has been wiped out. But why? No one knows.

Above, two cop killers after interrogation.

I'm supposing this man was a well-known criminal of the time. Here (above) a Physiognomist offers her opinion about why the man went wrong.

This dapper gent (above) is, believe it or not, the District Attorney. He dresses the way crooks in the movies dress.

Wow! New York used to look like one big noir movie set. I wish it still did.

NEXT POST TUESDAY

THE AMAZING GALAXY S4

Have you seen the latest Galaxy phone, the S4 model? It has something called
"Drama Shot" which allows for a burst of character exposures, all in the same picture. You get pictures like the one of the dog above, or...

...or like the Playtex Living Girdle ads (above) that were in every bus when I was a kid.

Geez, I wish I had an S4! If I had one maybe I could persuade my friends to smash into the ground for a photo like the kid above.

But the Samsung isn't the only technological marvel. Steve Worth introduced me to a new kind of camera called the Ricoh Theta. It's a $400 camera that takes 360 degree pictures without distortion...well, I should say with a minimum of distortion.

The picture taken by the double fish eye camera comes out distorted like the picture above and an easy-to-use computer program straightens it out and makes it presentable...normal looking, even. On your laptop screen you can scroll right and left or up and down and see everything in all directions that surrounded the camera when the picture was taken.

One use for it might be internet who-dunnits with clues in the pictures. The pictures are pixel hogs, though. One of the pictures Steve showed me was a jpeg and it still took up over 6 MB. Isn't Blogger's limit 10 MB? That would mean only one spherical picture per post.



Last but not least (above), a home virtual reality viewer called "Oculus Rift." It looks like Microsoft has already made a deal with the Oculus people to do an Xbox game in that format.

Here a 90 year-old woman experiences virtual reality for the first time. Imagine that...she  was born into the world of The Charleston and Flappers and now she's looking at a virtual world in our time.

DEATH MASKS

With the approach of Halloween I looked up "masks" on Google and inadvertently stumbled on these. They're death masks, probably of well-known people, but I don't recognize them. 

They all look like people I'd like to have known. How sad to see them like this, with their nobility intact but bereft of life.

In a comment Steve Worth says this (above) is Beethoven,

 The faces are so striking. A passage from the Bible comes to mind: "What is man that Thou art mindful of him?"

 This man (above) looks like death came on him in his sleep.

 This woman (above) appears to be smiling. Could that be? Would anybody ever smile at the moment of death? In a comment Kelly Toon has this to say about the mask:

The smiling woman has a very interesting history. She was a girl of about 15, whose body was taken from the Siene river. Her face had such a serenity and peace despite her tragic end, that she became a well-known and sought after mask. Many artists used her as reference and inspiration. 

The faces also remind me of the lines from Hamlet: "What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals. And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust?"

DISNEYLAND PRINCESSES

I just visited Disneyland again, and here we are (above) at Princess Island, or as I call it..."Princessneyland." This is the part of Disneyland devoted to little girls who wear princess costumes and come to hobknob with adult princesses. The place is just crawling with royalty!!!

Oh, yes...the "censored" symbols are there to cover up a friend who wandered into camera range and got into the shot. None of my friends will allow me to post their pictures so I'm forced to cover them up with these stupid signs.

Here's a theater where, between shows, kids get to chat with adult princesses. This is a terrible photo but I put it up so you could catch a glimpse of the three peasant girls who dance to entertain the people in line. They twirl around in flare skirts like they were at a ball dancing to a Strauss waltz. I wanted to stay to get a better picture but my friends were getting antsy. Princessney Land was just not their thing. 

 As you would expect, princess outfits were sold.

Now here's the interesting part...in the back of the princess shop I stumbled into a photographer's dream...the kind of thing the old LIFE magazine would have assigned their top photographers to. I refer to the fact that Disneyland has set up a beauty parlor there just for little princesses.

Imagine that...a kids' beauty parlor in the middle of Disneyland!

I could easily have spent an hour taking pictures but the place creeped out my friends who practically pulled me out of there.

 Outside, adult princesses were all over the place.

Boy, it looks like this little girl (above) has fallen head over heels for the Prince.

Here's (above) the princess with the hardest job: Snow White. She not only has to smile all day, but she has to speak in a high-pitched voice, like the character in the film.

After all these years Snow White is still a big attraction. Interesting, eh?

PICASSO THEATRE

The set design in "Rabbit of Seville" is great, but who did it? I'm guessing Maurice Noble designed it and Phil DeGaurd (spelled right?) painted it, but maybe I'm wrong. Anyway, whoever did it was obviously referencing Picasso.

[Thanks to Roberto who commented that Gribbroek was responsible.]

Even before Picasso some set designs looked like they were made of cardboard. They looked like blown-up versions of the little paper tabletop models designers liked to make. Picasso seems to have taken a like to that look and accentuated it rather than covered it up.

You see that in Picasso's theater sketches. The sets look like paper dollhouses.

I couldn't find any sketch that looked exactly like the one in the Jones cartoon, but I came up with some similar ones.

Geez, that chandelier looks obscene!