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Disney hols 2024 (Pt 1)

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As the saying goes, when life gives you lemons, go on a Disney cruise. Never mind that we booked the trip long before the citrus items in question arrived (straight after we came back from our last one, why do you ask?) - what better way to combat the greyest, boringest time of the year in the UK (NFL playoffs excepted) than getting the hell out?  Some might frown upon pulling your kid out of school for a couple of days, but my mum and dad took me out of school for weeks at a time and it never did me any hurm. Pre-ship We decided to top and tail the boat-based fun with a brief stay in a couple of different WDW resorts. The consensus take from the blogs and guidebooks on Caribbean Beach (CBR to those in the know) is that it’s huge and confusing to navigate, something we’d suspected on our previous visits when we’d Skylinered over from our regular haunt of Pop Century. Turns out said prevailing view is bollocks – it’s a few minutes walk from any room to the reception area and there’s an
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State of the MCU

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So the latest Marvel blockbuster looks set to bomb at the box office, while the rumblings of discontent about Marvel Studios’ output grow ever more ominous. Seems like a good time to take stock of the MCU. The Marvels: not bad 😐 Re The Marvels itself: C haracter overload? The MCU has so many characters now that this is no surprise. Brie Larson may well have been miffed to be sharing top billing, but when you choose to make a character so powerful, how else are you going to create jeopardy other than giving them weaker companions to look after? It’s more or less the whole premise of Doctor Who. Production troubles? Director Nia DaCosta has played down rumours of friction, maintaining that the movie was designed to last 105 minutes (super-brisk for a modern blockbuster). But a definite lack of coherence and skimpy character motivations suggest that several scenes have been cut. It was hardly worth Samuel L Jackson turning up. But: despite all this, it’s still enjoyable enough. If Marv
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Disney World 2023

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Yes, we went to Disney World again. Get over it. As usual, for reasons of space and sanity let’s concentrate on what was new and different. The heat Florida in August is a furnace. No matter how many times you tell yourself this, the reality still blasts you in the face like an angry, sweaty fire god. On the first afternoon I was briefly reconsidering the entire trip. Being a shopping and entertainment district, Disney Springs was not designed with shade in mind; unfortunately, Gideon’s Bakehouse has carved itself such a unique artisanal niche that cookie-craving customers must line up in the sun-baked asphalt for aeons. Thank God for their Nitro Cold Brew’s immense restorative powers. Also, late stage capitalism offers innumerable heat-defeating products, from cooling towels to the ubiquitous neck fans, through rehydration tablets all the way down to chafing sticks. After the first couple of days, once we’d got into the rhythm of downing a bottle of water and reapplying our sun
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Some Barbie thoughts

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It’s fun, obviously. Not everything works - a sub-plot with evil Mattel CEO Will Ferrell and his boardroom of male cronies goes nowhere, Helen Mirren’s narration gets mislaid for long periods. But considering the sheer weirdness of the marriage of IP and director, it’s an achievement for this movie to exist at all. Many have bemoaned the likes of Marvel hiring indie directors and subsuming them into their meat grinder formula. If only they were given (mostly) carte blanche! (Edgar Wright’s Ant Man is the Great Lost Movie in this regard). Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is the actual answer. But is it really as radical as you might think? Yes, Gerwig and partner Noah Baumbach are to be congratulated for making a subversive feminist parable about a plastic doll into a billion dollar movie. But the megalithic toy corporation who gave them full backing will be even more ecstatic. Rather than being damaged by this spotlighting of their flaws, Mattel and Barbie’s stocks have rarely been higher. The Ba
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World Cup 2022

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Football fans who tend to get their news nourishment from limp-wristed, knitted-sweater, bleeding heart leftie liberal outlets (or pretty much anything to the left of the Daily Stormer) will probably have noticed a consensus. Certain topics now appear in articles with increasing regularity, like a checklist of targets to hit: FFP or lack thereof, the super league fiasco, ticket/subscription/merchandise prices, all sorts of shady oligarchs, arms dealers and human rights abusers (some of them actual state actors) waltzing through the laughable fit-and-proper-person test, and so on. Many of these will seep into the pieces that are ostensibly about on-pitch happenings, and all of it nudges you towards one inescapable conclusion: Football is shit.  Perhaps the most hot-button topic of all, and one that adds a very modern moral quandary to the game, is sportswashing. The Saudi takeover of Newcastle has been a major catalyst, since it came hot on the heels of other naked sporting power plays
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Disney World 2022

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** NOTE TO READERS : This post is entirely self-indulgent and likely contains little of relevance to anybody outside my immediate family. But I love Disney World so much I’m not quite ready to let it go again yet, so here we are. ** For the sake of time/space/energy I’ll try to stick to aspects of our trip that were new or different. And there certainly has been plenty of change at WDW – since the Covid-enforced closures, many features that were previously free have either returned at a cost or have disappeared completely. Only a cynic would suggest that the global pandemic provided perfect cover for new CEO Bob Chapek to implement all the cost-cutting measures Disney hadn’t dared to previously – and I am one, so that’s good. Coupled with some major PR mis-steps , it’s fair to say that Bob’s start has been rocky. Before you even get on site, Disney’s free Magical Express airport transfer service is now gone, replaced by the fee-charging Mears Connect coaches – ie the same vehicles
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