i am not a crook

On this day in 1973 during a press conference delivered at the Contemporary Resort Hotel at Walt Disney World in Bay Lake, Florida Richard Nixon made the declaration addressing his declining job approval ratings with the pall of the Watergate scandal eroding public trust and confidence (see also) to an Associated Press annual convention being held there. The rather impromptu one-hour live broadcast was wide-ranging and was specifically prompted in response to a question raised by one of the wire service’s reporters regarding Nixon’s taxes and self-dealing, launching into the line of questioning, “I have earned every cent—and in all my years of public life, I have never obstructed justice… People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I’m not a crook. I’ve earned everything I’ve got.”

7x7

reaction faces: a cavalcade of overly dramatic cats—via Miss Cellania’s Links

split infinitives: learning wild to verb

what the dormouse said: a virtual creation of Disneyland’s1958 “Alice in Wonderland” attraction

clandestine laboratory enforcement team: an assortment of rare US Drug Enforcement Agency mission patches

apparel appeal: a series of interventions to make fashion greener

outhouse: inclusive public facilities in Tokyo reference ancient, ambiguous spaces

supermarket sweep: an investigation into one of the more memorable duo’s of the game show—via Super Punch

scientific method: a feline physics experiment

be our guest, be our guest

Via Nag on the Lake, we are treated to an appropriately scathing reaction to Disney’s irresponsible decision to reopen its biggest theme park in the midst of a resurgent pandemic with this arrangement of its promotional piece that references visually and musically the 1994 ABC (the network I guess owned by Disney now as well) miniseries of Stephen King’s The Stand, starring Molly Ringwald and Gary Sinise and Rob Lowe. At work, there were always abundant crows but now they absolutely rule the roost with most staff teleworking and the sight for me always evokes a haunted image from the television saga.

rock ‘n’ roller coaster

The other day I caught a new Line Rider animation (previously) set to the Queen classic that I had somehow managed to miss before, but this virtual thrill ride (use your indoor voice only please) that some clever person designed with Roller Coaster Tycoon makes for a pretty cool rendition as well and makes me wonder about the potential (with some reserved trepidation albeit) for more cross-over formats for bands and franchises. The image to the side is the musically synchronised loops and dips mapped out.

mars: the ride

Via the always interesting Kottke, we find ourselves transported to the desert hills of the Gobi where a company called C-Space has recently opened a simulated Martian base as an education and outreach facility and tourist destination, with a space-themed hotel and restaurant. Though perhaps more of an amusement park than practical training centre, vis-à-vis institutions like Space Camp and similar programmes especially, we ought not to underestimate the power to inspire. Browse an extensive gallery of the base and its features at the links above.

superstation or dateline: land of the lost

Before it was home to the CNN Center, the anchoring attraction of the downtown extension of the Omni Coliseum in Atlanta, Georgia was fleetingly the World of Sid & Marty Krofft—one of the first all-indoors amusement parks.
Despite some of the frenetic, psychedelic rides and attractions, including a multi-storied, variegated carnival atmosphere and a colossal pin-ball game and appearances by signature television characters like the Banana Splits, Witchiepoo and HR Pufnstuf (whose fungibility prompted possibly the intellectual-infringement lawsuit ever with the Krofft’s franchise taking RonaldMcDonaldland to court) plus musical interludes, the park tragically did not prove the drawn that the producers and backers had hoped for—the whole experience could be taken in in just a few hours and after initial positive reception, families questioned whether it made sense to make a trek to a less than reputable section of downtown for less than a full day’s commitment.
Besides, the city’s zoo and aquarium were close by and cheaper alternatives and other amusement parks were cast out into the suburbs—with ample parking. Only six months after its grand opening in May of 1976, the park closed and it wasn’t until a more than a decade later when Ted Turner occupied the complex in 1987. Not many traces remain of the original arcade—other than, that is, the monumental, free-standing escalator (still the largest one in the world) that formerly delivered park guests to the highest levels of the Krofftian universe and are still part of the cable news network headquarters tour.

pavilion or point-of-sale

Though planners pared down the aspirations for Epcot from an actual, functioning city of the future (the utopian Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow) down to a theme park with futuristic attractions.
Before the Epcot was demoted to a sort of permanent World’s Fair with any kind of opening delayed until 1982, RCA pitched ideas to Disney on how it would support the city’s infrastructure to make what went on behind the scenes as authentic and state-of-the-art as what it seemed on the surface. Revolutionary for the late 1960s, proposals included the use of debit cards almost exclusively and eschewing cash. Even more interesting was how the notion of electronic money back then already connoted eroding privacy, since the money trail was anything but anonymous and carried a permanence. Around this time, at the height of the Cold War, a Georgetown think-tank, tasked to devise the most insidious yet invisible and voluntary state surveillance were they working for enemy, dreamed up a convenient system for the KGB that essentially mirrors our current network of automated teller machines and cashless registers.

5x5

markov-chain: a sub-reddit that harnesses the property of memorylessness by and for robots

memory & function (& memory): Nag on the Lake keeps us updated on what is afoot in Scarfolk, a township forever trapped in the 1970s

le grand huit: hundreds of brightly coloured café chairs form a static roller coast in Nantes

tempest in a tea cup: an interesting look at the anti-saccharine movement and the fickle sweet-tooth of Percy Bysshe Shelley who boycotted sugar and other staples that drove the slave trade in the Empire

spaceship earth: celebrating Star Trek’s pushing the envelop with George Takei

crocodile creek, neverspeak mountain

The ever intrepid team of Atlas Obscura presents an illuminating, nostalgic glimpse at the stellar rise and equally rapid decline of a gargantuan amusement park built in the southern marshes of New York state that opened in June of 1960 and closed after just four seasons, called Freedomland U.S.A. Civil engineer and architect of such ambitious family playgrounds named Cornelius Vanderbilt Wood, recently dismissed from his last project of putting another but more enduring pleasure estate in an orange grove—the successor would again be built in a swamp—and his role ultimately denied and disavowed, designed a huge area in the shape of the continental United States and placed several historical and cultural attractions and rides within those borders.

The park celebrated the cheerier side of manifest destiny, mercantilism and American exceptionalism, including the Great Fire of Chicago, the San Francisco Earthquake, the launch pad and mission-control at Cape Canaveral—plus a New Orleans where it was always Mardi Gras and live music acts for adults to enjoy. In order to attract and retain more, the educational character was quickly supplanted by more conventional rides but its decline was swift—despite the number of guests and a lot of fond memories. Some of the more conspiratorial-minded believe that Freedomland U.S.A. was never meant to be a commercial success but rather an experiment in urban development by real-estate magnates and large landowners in New York and was undertaken to demonstrate that the marshland could safely support large-scale construction projects—and in fact, just after the park was razed, a public housing and a shopping centre went up. I think it is more likely the case that people became much disillusioned with the notion of what their country was becoming with the string of political assassinations of those waning years, not to mention the competition from the nearby venue of the 1964 World’s Fair that was meant to cheer everyone up again. The in depth look at Atlas Obscura furthermore bounces the demise of Freedomland off of the other ruins of theme parks and presents an interesting retrospective on the culture and the times.

five-by-five

inside voice: dogs in Japan taught to soft-bark

staring-contest: crystal lattice whose patterns appear when one blinks

relocation: an interesting podcast on chaotic Moving Day in New York City, the annual event when all tenants’ leases expired simultaneously

PET-project: plastic bottles beautifully repurposed as artificial plants

playland: restaurant in Italy has an amusement park that’s powered by the momentum of thrill-seekers

englischer garten or alpengeist

The revelation that Chinese designers and architects were covertly taking measurements of the exemplary Austrian village of Hallstatt to recreate it as a pure tourist attraction in Guangdong province, to the much to the chagrin of many surprised residents, has been circulating for a while. I thought it was just amusing at first, thinking of the earlier, imperfect Chinese copies of a German town, a typical English village from the Cotswolds and even a Disney-esque fun park that came out a bit scruffy looking--or all the sometimes tacky and bordering on cultural stereotype installations put up in Western theme parks, casinos and in restaurants. A whole village, faithfully reproduced or like Bizarro World, however, is a bit unsettling--especially the shells of churches. Maybe imitation is a finer form of flattery and this attention will be good for tourism on both sides of the world, but I think having one's homeland cloned is karmic retribution for entertaining the sale of its mountain peaks. Though such a locale would have been prime real estate for a mad scientist's secret lair or a diabolical organization's headquarters, I don't think the buyer of such vanity property would have had that.

Es ist eine erstaunliche Enthüllung, dass chinesischer Ingenieure haben die vollkommen österreichischen Hallstatt gemessen und analysiert zwecks das Dorf in Guangdong Provinz als Tourismusbetrieb wieder herzustellen. Das ist ältere News aber viele Bewohner sind erschüttert. Das kommt mir komisch vor--gegenüber die dort (früheren) chinesische Nachbauten von anderen europäischen Städten und sogar von Disney Land oder die Abendlands Version von Kulturbegriffe wie im Spielbanken, Erlebnisparks und Restaurants. Das Kopieren eines kompletten Dorfes--originalgetreu oder unvollkommen) ist jedoch mehr störend. Was bedeutet es nun, wenn gibt eine Nachgebildung von eine Kirche? Vielleicht wird diese Nachahmung für den Tourismus an beiden Seiten der Welt gut sein--aber denke ich, dass die Klonierung von Heimat ist Karmagesetz gegen den versuchte Verkauf des ihre Berggipfel ausgeben. Allerdings wäre an einem solchen Ort es optimal, bei geheime Hauptquartier für verrückter Wissenschaftler aufzubauen. Ich denke nicht, dass der schließliche Käufer--oder Österreich--zustimmen würde.