Dave and Buster’s is basically the giant collision of a restaurant/bar, a video arcade, and the Jersey shore. The food there is about Chili’s level – not bad, not spectacular. I thought my build your own chicken tacos was pretty good; Natasha found her fried shrimp to be about equivalent to dive bar food. I haven’t sampled the specialty booze yet, but given the number of variations on the Long Island Iced Tea available, I will definitely be visiting during happy hour at some point. Service was fast and good.

The bar has some rather innovative tables that have beer taps built in. You get to pay before you pump so you can set your limit. Seems party friendly, if you ask me.

The gaming area has a collection of the expected coin-op games, basketball hoop things, and skeeball mashed up with a lot of gambling-lite type things like coin drops and variations on roulette type things. The prices on the games vary, but our $12 each basically bought us about an hour of gaming. Other than the arcade games, most everything you play earns you tickets based on your success, which you can redeem for prizes.

I have fond memories of playing coin drops at my school carnival and the Jersey Shore. A lawyer friend of my grandmother taught me how to win at the quarter drops. (Yes, lawyers always know how to drain the most money out of anything.) He advised me that if you put the quarters in your mouth and got them nice and wet and sticky before you dropped them in the machine, they tended to stick better to the platform in the machine and the other coins and wouldn’t slide on top of the other coins quite as much. Gross, yes, but I ended up winning $50 (and putting most of it back) at the carnival. (My first gambling lesson learned.) Unfortunately, as an adult, I didn’t really feel comfortable putting Dave and Buster’s coins in my mouth. Damn maturity!

In the end, if you’re not into playing some games and getting rewarded with some candy or a wicker finger trap, D&B isn’t for you. But for a date night or some time out with the kids, it’s a fun stop.

I’ve seen very little of the attractions yet. The line for the Forbidden Journey ride was two hours long at 7PM, so I’ll skip that until the crowds get shorter. Ditto on the rather annoyingly small Ollivander’s Wand Shop show and the Honey Dukes/Zonko’s shop. I really don’t feel like waiting in long sweaty lines to shop. I’d feel different if I was a Potter fanboy, I’m sure. I did hear where they said J.K. Rowling insisted the shops be small to be more authentic. Really, J.K.? Have you NEVER been to a theme park in Florida? It’s hot. Blisteringly, annoyingly, pass out from the armpit smell hot. Air conditioned space is like a Patronus spell when you’re surrounded by starving Dementors. Those shops NEED to be bigger.

From Harry Potterland at Universal

We ate at the Three Broomsticks restaurant, which is really the re-themed Enchanted Oak, which used to be one of my favorite places at IoA. And here is my biggest beef. Enchanted Oak felt like an Inn in the Shire. It was kind of welcoming, with lots of little booths and a distinctly positive magical feel. The Three Broomsticks is kind of…dingy. It feels like a dungeon inside now. It’s much darker. Lots of antlers hang on the walls. It’s not really someplace I feel like slouching about for a nice meal. The food is pretty much the IoA cloned menu of ribs, chicken, or ribs and chicken, along with some British flavor. Natasha had the pasties and wasn’t enchanted. I had the ribs, which I’ve always thought were quite good. The Hog’s Head brew was quite good — nice, mild beer in a collectible mug. Butterbeer is suitably sweet, like cream soda with butterscotch in it. Ultimately though, Three Broomsticks just isn’t someplace I’d want to spend a lot of time. I mean, it’s kind of nasty in the movies, isn’t it? It’s one saving grace is that they back porch is covered in tables with umbrellas over them, and that same porch has a great view of the castle.

From Harry Potterland at Universal

Again, not a huge Potter fan, so you might feel differently about Three Broomsticks if you own a wand. =) Hey, I’ll admit it, if there was a Death Star restaurant, I’d eat there…lots…

There was a great choir of Hogwarts students performing with their singing frogs. Very catchy, upbeat, musical show. And you can get your pic taken with them afterwards.

From Harry Potterland at Universal

Ultimately, Potterland is amazing work. If you’re a Potter fan, get your time turner and get there yesterday. Or maybe find some way to travel into the future, when the lines are shorter.

I don’t have kids, and generally I have time to go. For me, not going to the theater is all about the quality of the experience. Netflix and a reasonably nice TV trumps a crappy quality version of the film (you know, with all that schmutz flying by on the FILM!), sitting behind talking people and being charged 3000 times more than the bucket of popcorn is worth. So, if I go, I tend to be critical. I want the experience to blow me away.

So what did I see? Two ends of the animated spectrum: The Princess and the Frog and Avatar.

Have to say, neither one of them really engaged me much. Both were absolutely beautiful films. I liked the story of Frog better, mostly because I liked the characters more. Disney (the company whose theme parks I work for) did a nice job reinventing the classic princess story. I respected Tiana and her belief that hard work was way better than any magical spell. And I really like contrast they set up between her and Charlotte, who happens to be exactly the spoiled, cliched princess the movie is aimed at skewering. Charlotte is one-dimensional and yet not painted as worthless or evil. That’s tricky to pull off.

What’s regrettable is that the music in Frog is so … meh. I can’t say I remember any of it. No “Be our guest, be our guest…” here. Despite a nice number for the villain, and the swinging zydeco bit for the HSAs (happy, singing animals). Randy Newman’s effort just doesn’t cut it here, which is a shame considering the movie is set in New Orleans, which is really a paradise of music. (If you’ve never been there, and you like music, why not?) There’s just something too Disney and not authentic enough in this soundtrack.

Overall, Frog was enjoyable. A good movie, just not a great one. That left me especially sad, because I really wanted this movie to prove that the difference between success and failure in animation has nothing to do with traditional 2D versus shiny round 3D. Frog is a gorgeous movie. It deserved to be richer in story and song.
Avatar. Hrm. $300 million for that movie confuses me. Let me start by saying, I am firmly in the “3D is a gimmick” camp. After about 15 minutes wearing the glasses annoyed me. This may be partly because I have had 20/15 vision most of my life, and wearing the glasses feels like an imposition. But I also feel like 3D depth in a movie is mostly wasted on me. If it’s not John Candy’s old cheap 3D tricks from SCTV, I don’t really see the point.

Part way through the movie, I got tired and tilted my head and half the screen went blurry. Yeah, call me when you don’t need glasses.

Avatar’s a TREMENDOUS achievement in terms of special effects. There are some shots that are just amazing mixes of the real and the virtual. And there’s also some stuff that reminded me a lot of the old video games that had full motion video in them. It had that, “shot in the same warehouse” feel that those did. Maybe it was the 3D, but some of it just looked sort of cheesy.

Reading the WIRED article about how Cameron was reinventing effects made me hope we might now have a cheaper way of making movies of the “unfilmable” fantasy novels out there. Watching the densest credits ever roll by at the end, I realized this movie was great because they spent a TREMENDOUS amount of time, effort, and money on it, so I don’t know how much of an improvement it will be for people who can’t command the incredible budgets Cameron can.

Story? There’s a document making its rounds on the net that satirizes the fact that Avatar is basically Disney’s Pocahontas. That pretty much speaks to it for me. The sci-fi elements were unique, but they weren’t particularly challenging or thought-provoking. The characters were pretty thin and cliched too, which made it really hard to want to identify with anyone strongly.

So I’m back to my monastic Netflix existence until the next big event pictures come out.

Got the movie Pi: Faith in Chaos from Netflix over the weekend, because once in a while I like to watch a movie that stretches my brain beyond the three dimensions it usually thinks in. It’s by acclaimed director Darren Aronofsky, whose The Fountain I also checked out just recently. The movies are not for the cinematically timid. They’re meant to blow your mind and make you think. Mostly, Pi made me think, “Wow, the guys who make LOST sure lifted a lot of stuff from this Aronofsky guy…” Pi’s got nosebleeds after flashy trips and significantly powerful numbers that are meant to save humanity. I kept waiting for Hurley to walk into the movie and say, “Dude, nice haircut. What are you doing with that drill?”

Ultimately, I think I’m tired of these deep, meaningful films. I like to have my mind stretched, which is why I read stuff like the books of Michio Kaku about string theory and quantum physics. But I think in my fiction I prefer to have something  with a little more chocolate cream or baked apples, dude!

I had some trepidation about the new movie. First off, though I think JJ Abrams has got creative chops, his work hasn’t always clicked with me. I really love LOST, but technically he only created that, and then left it in the able hands of Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse. I really enjoyed Alias when it was focused on the whole spy thing, but when they went off the fantasy deep end, looking for mysterious artifacts and blowing up the entire setup they had created in the first season, I got tired of it really quickly. Next, [minor spoiler] there’s time travel involved. I hate time travel stories. (Yes, I know I said I really like LOST. It didn’t start out as a time travel story, and they have balanced my general hatred of time travel stories by saying “You can’t change the past/future”. They tend to look at time travel from a fairly deep physics perspective, and also from a fairly deep thematic perspective. So, at least so far, they failed to disappoint me.)

Ultimately, I thought the cast was fantastic. (Karl Urban’s McCoy especially.) The story was good, although in the end the villain is kind of ultimately forgettable. The action was awesome, although occasionally it suffered a bit from the “Oh, look, someone is hanging over a very high drop…again. Remind me again why there are no railings on these spaceships? And why they don’t build floors instead of just tiny little walkways?” Oh wait, that’s right, JJ Abrams promised he would bring more Star Wars to Star Trek. So I guess that explains it.

The most pleasing thing to me about the movie is, there’s a return to the old values of Trek. With a diverse group of people working together to combat evil. There’s even kind of a thematic thing going on, where this new story kind of kills off the dark Trek that we had been living with for all those years. In the end, it’s a reboot and gives us the chance to enjoy the kind of Roddenberry-esque Trek I’d been missing. I’m really hopeful that the planned sequels (and possible TV rebirth) will be a return to the sort of positive stories that have been missing from entertainment lately.

One other minor note to the filmmakers. Those light on the bridge that sort of blind the camera at the beginning of every shot? Not cool. They suck. Stop it. I go to the movies to actually be able to see what’s going on, not for your kewl lighting effect.

From Midway Mania

Yes, I like Wii games, but I don’t go to theme parks to play them. When I go to a theme park I want to have that “Mission:Space” or “Soaring” experience, where I get to do experience something, I get to have a rush of emotion and experience I can’t possibly recreate at home. “Midway” just feels like an annoying way to play a video game — what with the spinning and long waiting in lines with sweaty tourists. If I wanted that, I’d wait an hour to play Wii Sports with my air conditioner turned off and a packet of liverwurst open in front of me. And then when I played I’d have my wife spin my recliner in random directions between levels.

Don’t get me wrong, I have great respect for the folks who put together these rides. It’s hard and it’s expensive. There’s no question in my mind that it’s an incredible challenge if you’re trying to make something a game and interactive and entertaining and also make it a big enough experience that people walk out thinking, “I may never do that again in my life. That was incredible.” And maybe Midway isn’t meant to be that kind of experience. But it’s hard for me to accept that you would build anything nowadays in a theme park that wasn’t that for someone at some level of thrill.

My suggestions? For Midway — it needs a better story. The game is fun, but where’s the “Buzz has been stolen by the evil carnival owner and the only way for me to get him back is to score high on these games and win him!” And then where’s the total twist on that, where’s the point where I won Buzz, but the evil carnies realize what I’m up to and I have to throw baseballs and pies to escape the carnival before we’re all caught. Just a blue-sky, not perfect. But I really feel like there needs to be a more emotion-grabbing resonance somewhere. The story that comes first and engages me in the game.

Maybe they’ll give away some liverwurst free with the Wii version.

So it’s good news to me that the inventor, James Dyson, has been awarded a knighthood.

The Barenaked Ladies (BNL) just released a new album called, amusingly, Barenaked Ladies Are Me (which, evidently, is meant to be read “Army”, in reference to folks like me, who are part of their ever growing legions of fans).

Over the last couple of years, this band has really matured. In cooking terms, it’s like when you first make the hummus; if you eat it then, it’s good, but the flavors really haven’t had that chance to intermingle and become something other than individual ingredients. With this album, the hummus of the band has been in the fridge for a day or two, and all of the flavors have come together and become turbo hummus.

The band has gone from having two vocalists, Steve and Ed, to having pretty much everyone take a turn at the lead. (Well, except Tyler, but he’s too cool to sing, I think.) The mixture of different lead stylings allows the album to take some unique turns.

My favorite songs off the album?

• Sound of Your Voice – a Steven Page sort of 50s-ish almost spiritual that really lifts me up
• Take It Back – this is Natasha’s favorite too; she likes the sparkly piano and we both like the lyrics, more on that below
• Fun & Games – an anti-lying politician song — the world needs more of these
• Down to Earth – a fun, sort of poppy happy song

I’ve got a lot more I like, and there are also a bunch of great singles, like Easy, Wind It Up, and Bank Job (who wouldn’t like a job about a bank job foiled by a surprise case of angst caused by a mob of nuns?), which I didn’t mention, since I think you might be hearing them a bunch soon.
I think Natasha’s favorite lyric, and one I really like as well, is from Take It Back:

Long lines and warning signs
Think of all the lives saved by plastic knives
It’s naive but make believe
We will never lose if we remove our shoes

A cute little snapshot of the era of fear we live in nowadays.

If you want to be REALLY geeky, I recommend picking up the CD the way I did, and grabbing the 27 track FLAC version of the CD. FLAC is a lossless audio format, so you get exactly the same quality you would get had you bought the CD in the store. (And you get more tracks — the physical CD release in most stores has 13 tracks.

Burning the tracks to CD is easy. First, download the FLAC codec (a codec is “translator” software to allow your computer to “speak” a specific format) from the FLAC site. If you’re using a Windows-based PC and the Nero Burining software, FLAC will integrate with Nero so you can burn directly to CD from Nero. You can then re-rerip the CD to MP3 or iTunes AAC format. For Mac users or people using other burning software, if you’re geeky enough to try this, there are lots of other options on the FLAC site.
If that all sounds too difficult, you can download MP3s from the BNL site, and probably be perfectly happy with the sound quality.

Kewl thing about BNL is, they are definitely a group on the forefront of the music industry in a positive way. Notice that the deluxe version of the album has a lot more tracks than most releases, and that if you buy the album directly from them, you can get lossless tracks with no DRM, or MP3 tracks, which also feature no Digital Rights Management (DRM). I’d like to see BNL succeed, as they are really taking the tack of trusting their fans. It’s a big leap to offer for sale things that could easily be offered on a P2P file sharing service and leave you with no compensation for your art. Of course, I think the band also does this because sharing music is a great method of promoting yourself, and generating new fans who might pay for your music.

There’s a great article in WIRED magazine this month on how BNL (and Terry McBride, CEO of Nettwerk Music Group) is leading the digital music revolution. If you’re interested in the future of the music industry, check it out.

Everest is, at it’s heart, an amazingly well-designed roller coaster. It sits somewhere between Big Thunder Mountain and Rocking Roller Coaster in terms of thrill level. What takes it beyond is how the thrill elements of the coaster are integrated with the storyline of an encounter with the Yeti, the protector of Everest’s highest peaks.

From the first roll out of the station to a thrilling encounter with the Yeti near the end, Everest’s action never fails to thrill. There are surprises all through the ride, and I don’t want to give away any here, but you will leave the ride breathless, amazed, and ready to ride again.

Once nice thing about the ride is the way the story kind of permeates it. There’s no place where the Imagineers hit you over the head with dialog or anything that says, “Oh my goodness! Look! A Yeti!” The stand by queue (which I recommend you hop on first — skip the FastPass to get the full experience) winds through a small Tibetan town filled with Yeti shrines. It then moves in through the office of one of the two Everest tour guides and ends up in a Yeti museum, a funky, colorful tourist trap which features examples of Yeti history and sightings. The ride itself builds slowly, playing with your emotions up front before diving straight into a wild, crashing ride through the frozen peaks.

One of the things I really like about this ride is, since there’s no cheesy voiceovers anywhere you can absorb as much of the story as you want and experience it in your own way, making it feel all the more real. Compare this to Mission:SPACE: although M:S is a great thrill ride, it annoys me that all the collateral material leading up to the ride bill it as a “simulation”, which just steals from the excitement of the ride to me. I think you want people to feel like they are really going on this adventure, not “really going on a simulation.” Expedition: EVEREST has that authentic feel, like you are stepping into an adventure.

I’m going to post some pictures tomorrow, but don’t wait for them! Get down here now! See the mountain, and the Yeti!