fu dogs and paper ephemera and holograms
Holy shit, it is unseasonably cold out. I am going to keep saying this until it stops being so. Climate change: totally not fake. The manatees are having survival problems again, the aquifer's low from all the farmers dumping water to keep their crops from freezing, but in Orlando you're still allowed to run immense decorative fountains. OUR PRIORITIES, WE HAVE THEM IN ORDER.
They do everything big in Orlando. You can find the biggest McDonald's in the world, which is on the same street (or in the same neighborhood anyway) as the biggest Checkers. That's Rally's for those of you further north. The convention center is bigger than some towns I've visited and there are at least six roads going through it. I4 expands from two lanes each way to four, in places, and there are plenty of other highways and frontage roads that still can't handle all the traffic.
"I have bad luck with bananas," said Jen, and although she had a perfectly logical reason to say this, it's funnier if I don't explain. So I won't.
She and Bleu and I trucked up to Orlando on a sunny Saturday morning as Bleu had business to attend to down at Disney. She'd volunteered to do something at some kind of marathon, or half-marathon, which she plans to run next year. The organizers, allergic to licking postage stamps, had told all volunteers that they needed to go to a specific place in Disney to pick up their informational packets. Bleu minded that about as much as I'd mind being told to go to the ice palace on any given day, so off we went.
We walked into the ESPN Big Sports Whatever Thing with crowds of cheer squads and dancers and people half our age wearing twice as much makeup as any one human face that isn't on a stage reasonably should. There were people wearing giant three-fingered white gloves at the gates, waving all the folks in, and somewhere Jen and I lost Bleu. We were walking, we were chatting, and when Jen turned to Bleu to say something she was not there. What followed went a bit like this.
Text from me to Bleu: Where the hell are you?
Jen: "I see her, she's over there!"
Me: "I'm buzzing, she's -- she's calling me. Allo?"
Bleu: "Where are you?"
Me: "Where are YOU?"
Jen: "She's over here!"
Me: "I have Jen."
Bleu: "WHERE ARE YOU?"
Me: "I -- oh! OH! Turn around."
Bleu: "What? Oh."
Jen: *giggle*
Bleu: "I thought I was talking to you until I looked over and I was talking to some guy instead!"
Me: "Hi."
What I wasn't expecting was a princess convention. Apparently the theme for the half-marathon was princes something something or other, and there was lots of... princessing. There were women in fairy-godmother outfits scampering about with glitter-filled wands and plastic face shields; they'd put the shield over a victim's face, then liberally coat them with silver glitter from the wand while reciting something from, I think, Cinderella. We avoided the glitterfairyemployees. Bleu wouldn't have allowed me back in the car if I'd been seasoned like a ham. This all took place in a ginormous building which was VERY VERY HOT, where lots of stands were set up to sell all manner of running-related apparatus. They offered shoes and socks and headbands and sweatbands ("I'll get you one of those next year," I said to Bleu, pointing at something covered in peace-signs; "I don't want one," she told me) and Wii Fits for some reason, and it was this big hot maelstrom of people. So as soon as Bleu was done, I led the retreat because OMG TOO MANY PEOPLE.
Sadly, only the runners got to get little tiaras and purple princess backpacks. I was disappointed on Bleu's behalf; she was probably relieved that I could not insist she wear a tiara all day.
After that we had a day to kill in Orlando, so the logical thing was to get food and decide what to do next. We got food and we decided, and what we decided was what I had been hoping for the whole time.
That's right. We went to the Ripley Museum. And it was brilliant. We saw funhouse-mirrors and puzzles and visual mind-teasers and pushed buttons for sound effects. There was as twenty-six-foot-long snakeskin, a sign from a Welsh village with a ridculously long name, a shirt originally owned by Robert Wadlow, photographs of three-legged sideshow freaks, shrunken human heads, decorative whatsits carved from skulls, Tibetan executioners' swords that looked like gargantuan kukhris, a real medieval iron maiden, elaborately decorated wooden penis sheaths from New Guinea, a rickshaw made entirely of jade, a 1920s car made entirely from matchsticks, a dinosaur skull, a Komodo dragon skeleton ("They drool more than my dog!" I said excitedly,) a room where the perspective was all wonky that made me and Jen feel queasy, a taxidermied conjoined-twin pig, a piece of the Berlin wall, wax busts of people with big noses or three eyes or horns or trepannings they kept candles in, all manner of fortune-telling devices that cost fifty cents, a penny-smasher (I got the one with the shrunken head, of course), the world's biggest Goodyear tire, a large and surprisingly comfortable chair, Canadian newspapers talking about the Titanic disaster, a Boston Mummy which cost forty dollars and was 'made of local materials,' preserved rats and cats and bats, a horse statue made from five thousand pounds of horseshoes, a Mona Lisa made of bits of toast, a full-size statue of Vlad Tepes, sculpture inside the eyes of needles, and most bafflingly a wall full of bedpans.
AND ALSO? THE FEEJEE MERMAID.
At the end, the last thing you go through is a spinning tunnel full of mirrors and lights with a stationary walkway down the center. Jen vanished somewhere, and Bleu and I looped back through that thing about four times trying to find her. Turns out she'd scampered off to the ladies'. I did not just survive the Ripley tunnel, I survived it four times in a row. And I took long-exposure pictures of it, which came out all swirly.
I've got about a frillion photos to sort through -- I'll post my favorites here when I've got them all online. But it was brilliant. I'm happy we went. Jen picked up a shark in a jar full of formaldehyde at the gift shop; I resisted doing the same but now I'm sort of wishing I'd got one, because what can't you do with a fetal shark in a jar?
The best thing, though, was right in the beginning. They've got a little office-study looking room set up, and a hologram in the middle of old Ripley. He sits at his desk, and as the hologram moves around and interacts with the environment, books flip open and lights go on and the chair turns this way and that. It's all delightfully low-budget and done with tripwires and things, and I adore stuff like that.
"And he guessed he would take a roadside attraction, no matter how cheap, how crooked, or how sad, over a shopping mall any day."
They do everything big in Orlando. You can find the biggest McDonald's in the world, which is on the same street (or in the same neighborhood anyway) as the biggest Checkers. That's Rally's for those of you further north. The convention center is bigger than some towns I've visited and there are at least six roads going through it. I4 expands from two lanes each way to four, in places, and there are plenty of other highways and frontage roads that still can't handle all the traffic.
"I have bad luck with bananas," said Jen, and although she had a perfectly logical reason to say this, it's funnier if I don't explain. So I won't.
She and Bleu and I trucked up to Orlando on a sunny Saturday morning as Bleu had business to attend to down at Disney. She'd volunteered to do something at some kind of marathon, or half-marathon, which she plans to run next year. The organizers, allergic to licking postage stamps, had told all volunteers that they needed to go to a specific place in Disney to pick up their informational packets. Bleu minded that about as much as I'd mind being told to go to the ice palace on any given day, so off we went.
We walked into the ESPN Big Sports Whatever Thing with crowds of cheer squads and dancers and people half our age wearing twice as much makeup as any one human face that isn't on a stage reasonably should. There were people wearing giant three-fingered white gloves at the gates, waving all the folks in, and somewhere Jen and I lost Bleu. We were walking, we were chatting, and when Jen turned to Bleu to say something she was not there. What followed went a bit like this.
Text from me to Bleu: Where the hell are you?
Jen: "I see her, she's over there!"
Me: "I'm buzzing, she's -- she's calling me. Allo?"
Bleu: "Where are you?"
Me: "Where are YOU?"
Jen: "She's over here!"
Me: "I have Jen."
Bleu: "WHERE ARE YOU?"
Me: "I -- oh! OH! Turn around."
Bleu: "What? Oh."
Jen: *giggle*
Bleu: "I thought I was talking to you until I looked over and I was talking to some guy instead!"
Me: "Hi."
What I wasn't expecting was a princess convention. Apparently the theme for the half-marathon was princes something something or other, and there was lots of... princessing. There were women in fairy-godmother outfits scampering about with glitter-filled wands and plastic face shields; they'd put the shield over a victim's face, then liberally coat them with silver glitter from the wand while reciting something from, I think, Cinderella. We avoided the glitterfairyemployees. Bleu wouldn't have allowed me back in the car if I'd been seasoned like a ham. This all took place in a ginormous building which was VERY VERY HOT, where lots of stands were set up to sell all manner of running-related apparatus. They offered shoes and socks and headbands and sweatbands ("I'll get you one of those next year," I said to Bleu, pointing at something covered in peace-signs; "I don't want one," she told me) and Wii Fits for some reason, and it was this big hot maelstrom of people. So as soon as Bleu was done, I led the retreat because OMG TOO MANY PEOPLE.
Sadly, only the runners got to get little tiaras and purple princess backpacks. I was disappointed on Bleu's behalf; she was probably relieved that I could not insist she wear a tiara all day.
After that we had a day to kill in Orlando, so the logical thing was to get food and decide what to do next. We got food and we decided, and what we decided was what I had been hoping for the whole time.
That's right. We went to the Ripley Museum. And it was brilliant. We saw funhouse-mirrors and puzzles and visual mind-teasers and pushed buttons for sound effects. There was as twenty-six-foot-long snakeskin, a sign from a Welsh village with a ridculously long name, a shirt originally owned by Robert Wadlow, photographs of three-legged sideshow freaks, shrunken human heads, decorative whatsits carved from skulls, Tibetan executioners' swords that looked like gargantuan kukhris, a real medieval iron maiden, elaborately decorated wooden penis sheaths from New Guinea, a rickshaw made entirely of jade, a 1920s car made entirely from matchsticks, a dinosaur skull, a Komodo dragon skeleton ("They drool more than my dog!" I said excitedly,) a room where the perspective was all wonky that made me and Jen feel queasy, a taxidermied conjoined-twin pig, a piece of the Berlin wall, wax busts of people with big noses or three eyes or horns or trepannings they kept candles in, all manner of fortune-telling devices that cost fifty cents, a penny-smasher (I got the one with the shrunken head, of course), the world's biggest Goodyear tire, a large and surprisingly comfortable chair, Canadian newspapers talking about the Titanic disaster, a Boston Mummy which cost forty dollars and was 'made of local materials,' preserved rats and cats and bats, a horse statue made from five thousand pounds of horseshoes, a Mona Lisa made of bits of toast, a full-size statue of Vlad Tepes, sculpture inside the eyes of needles, and most bafflingly a wall full of bedpans.
AND ALSO? THE FEEJEE MERMAID.
At the end, the last thing you go through is a spinning tunnel full of mirrors and lights with a stationary walkway down the center. Jen vanished somewhere, and Bleu and I looped back through that thing about four times trying to find her. Turns out she'd scampered off to the ladies'. I did not just survive the Ripley tunnel, I survived it four times in a row. And I took long-exposure pictures of it, which came out all swirly.
I've got about a frillion photos to sort through -- I'll post my favorites here when I've got them all online. But it was brilliant. I'm happy we went. Jen picked up a shark in a jar full of formaldehyde at the gift shop; I resisted doing the same but now I'm sort of wishing I'd got one, because what can't you do with a fetal shark in a jar?
The best thing, though, was right in the beginning. They've got a little office-study looking room set up, and a hologram in the middle of old Ripley. He sits at his desk, and as the hologram moves around and interacts with the environment, books flip open and lights go on and the chair turns this way and that. It's all delightfully low-budget and done with tripwires and things, and I adore stuff like that.
"And he guessed he would take a roadside attraction, no matter how cheap, how crooked, or how sad, over a shopping mall any day."