Author: Goldpanner

The Banishment Of Evil at the Magic Kingdom: Bears

copperbadge:

I am having an awesome time at Disney – we did Epcot on Tuesday, including Spaceship Earth, Ellen’s Energy Adventure (I wonder if Bill Nye feels bad about or if he was just like BILL NYE GOTTA GET PAID YO, SCIENCE AIN’T CHEAP) and like at least three times on Mission To Mars or whatever it’s called where simulated G-forces make you feel like your ribcage is eating your internal organs. Also we went on the new Frozen ride, which is spectacular but also very, very short. You do go down a waterfall backwards in a simulacrum of a viking longboat, however.

Yesterday we went to Magic Kingdom where I made everyone go on the Haunted Mansion twice in a row because it’s my favorite ride maybe in the history of ever, and we went on the Mine Train and the big log flume ride, but kids.

Siblings.

Ancestors.

We as a culture – nay, we as a species – need to talk about the Country Bear Jamboree.

I have developed a theory about the Country Bear Jamboree. My theory about the Country Bear Jamboree is that it is both a necessary and a terrifying exorcism ritual which protects the Magic Kingdom, and perhaps all of humanity, from suffering the wrath of dark, dire forces.

Stay with me. Country Bear Jamboree bills itself as an animatronic concert filled with bears who sing and dance and play various down-country style instruments. Grand Ole Opry with animatronic bears. That’s not the mystical part.

At one point, about two thirds of the way into the performance, a soloist bear on a guitar comes out and sings a forgettable country song about something, but right at the end, after he’s taken his “bow”, you hear sudden drumbeats, and green light begins to flash rhythmically behind him. There are no other drums in any of the performances. The bear begins to sway to the drumbeats, and then the curtain falls quickly.

It’s very weird.

But then another bear appears, with a very out of tune blues guitar, and he sings a song. It’s a song that may actually exist in folk music canon; I’m pretty sure I’ve heard it before and may have sung it at some folkie get together or other. The song is about how there was blood in the water, blood in the sand, blood all around, blood on the ground. I think it’s about an old-timey murder. 

It’s just one chorus or verse. But it’s very unsettling. There is nervous tittering from the audience, including me. Between the drumbeats and the song about OH MY GOD SO MUCH BLOOD, my ears were pricking a little and my what the hell alarm was going off.

Then the concert just…continues.

UNTIL, at one point, SERIAL KILLER BLUES BEAR comes back to SING THE BLOOD SONG AGAIN and literally every other bear in the performance appears out of whatever animatronic locker they keep them in, and all the bears all sing their individual songs to drown him out in a cacophony of country crooning.

And that’s the grand finale!

We walked out of the Country Bear Jamboree wide-eyed, and I immediately turned to my companions and went, “The fuck was that?” Only it was Disney so in concern for The Children I said “The heck was that?”

But I’ve worked it out.

Everyone who works at Disney is super cheerful and I think the vast majority of them actually mean it, which is a little bewildering to me. People clearly don’t HAVE to wish me happy birthday when they see my IT’S MY BIRTHDAY button, but they do. And so many of them, at eleven at night, seemed joyous to stand on the sidewalk and wave us goodbye as we left. People seem to love to work at Disney and while I don’t think that in itself is weird, the level of good cheer in what must be a very frustrating customer service job is startling. I commend them for it, I’m just confused by it.

So I have a theory. And my theory is this: Country Bear Jamboree is a swirling vortex of evil. The extra darkness, the crankiness, the ill-humor that normally one would develop working at Disney, and indeed perhaps some of the exhausted ire and weariness that people might develop just attending the Disney parks (Meltdown Hour is apparently around 6:30 for toddlers) is sucked down into Frontierland. It seeps through the dusty streets of a fake frontier America, and it enters the Country Bear Jamboree. It is absorbed into this one, brave, robot bear, who takes the evil into himself and sings his mournful song. And then, with drumbeats and singing, the evil is drowned out by the other bears, banished to some ether, an other-world whose only glimpse into ours is through the parks of the Wizard, Disney, whose fierce hairy country-folk guardians forever keep it locked away.

Woe betide us should the Country Bear Jamboree ever leave the Magic Kingdom. Misfortune unto us should the bears fall silent. The bears must sing, or God or Disney must have mercy on our souls.

What did you uncover in the swamplands, Walt?

four incredible endlessly repeating moments on ‘if you are the one’

grassfire:

grassfire:

– when a guy is doing really well until the third video featuring his friend’s testimonials plays, immediately causing every women to turn her light off.
– when one of the creepy stalker dudes gets on the show obsessed with one woman only who shuts him down immediately. he ignores everyone else to the extent of being rude, while maybe two women leave their lights on for some unfathomable reason. he then rejects them, makes one last attempt to woo the woman who hates him, and inevitably does the dateless walk of shame off the stage.
– when a guy is such a clueless spoilt manbaby that everyone – meng fei, the two commentary panelists, and all 24 women – gang up and mock him mercilessly until he leaves pouty and dateless when his first video has barely finished.
– cringeworthy sinoboo foreigners who crash and burn so hard that they leave a smoking crater in their local love life.

– talent show sections performed by men with no talent and no self awareness
– “you have a hunan/chongqing/gansu look about you”
– gifts to favourite girls that leave you, the viewer, melting into the couch with unfiltered secondhand embarrassment

sespursongles:

I like this article from The Economist about how het couples who have sons are more likely to stay together than those who have daughters, and the way fathers think of their sons vs. their daughters, because it basically provides confirmation and statistics for stuff we all notice anecdotally.

Gordon Dahl at the University of California, San Diego and Enrico Moretti at the University of California, Berkeley noticed more than a decade ago that men are more likely to marry, and stay married to, women who bore them sons rather than daughters. In an analysis of American census data, they found that men were more inclined to propose to their partners if they discovered that a baby in utero was a boy, and they were less prone to getting a divorce if the first child was a boy rather than a girl. In the event of divorce, men with sons were more likely to get custody [ie to ask for custody], and women with daughters were less likely to remarry. […] This effect can be seen in data on households across a number of rich countries, which show that adolescent boys are more likely than girls to live with both biological parents.

Highlights:

  • “Results from the most recent poll, in 2011, were startlingly similar to those from the first [from the 1940s]: Americans said they favour boys over girls by a margin of 12 percentage points. This preference is driven mainly by men; women are largely agnostic.”
  • “Mothers usually lavish the same amount of time on their sons and daughters, at least when they are younger, whereas fathers devote more to sons from the get-go.” A study found that “fathers were twice as likely to take paternity leave for a son than a daughter”, and “married fathers with a child between six and 12 years old spent nearly 40 more minutes per day with sons than with daughters. In married families with two children of the same sex, fathers with sons spent between 22 and 27 minutes more per day on child care, and said they had less leisure time than those with daughters.”
  • “This extra help has a measurable impact on the quality of a marriage. When Giuliano delved into the reasons why more couples with a son stayed together after three years than those with a daughter, she found that fathers of boys were not only more likely to say they were excited to become a parent, but also more helpful around the home. Mothers of boys, in turn, were more likely to praise their husbands as fathers, and were happier in their relationships than those with only girls.”
  • “Sons also seem to push fathers to be more productive. Studies of Americans and Germans born after 1950 found that having a child of either sex spurred fathers to bring home more bacon, but the difference between a son and a daughter was considerable: nearly 110 hours a year for Germans and around 70 hours for Americans”, which suggests that fathers are “keener to provide for families with sons. Parents of sons seem not just to earn more but also to spend more. An analysis of American consumer expenditure data from the 1990s found that married couples with one son aged 18 or younger spent 4-7% more on housing than those with a daughter, and consumed more of everything from plane tickets to meals in restaurants. Intriguingly, families with sons also spent more on “women’s goods” such as jewellery and personal services (eg, manicures and hair salons), indicating that mothers benefit when there is a boy around.”
  • “Men are much more gendered in their behaviour, and in their expectations of the behaviour of their kids, than women are”
  • A dad saying “I’ve taken my daughter to ballgames, but she doesn’t really know the difference between basketball and baseball. If she was a boy, I have this feeling that it would’ve been easier to interest her in those things.”
  • Another dad saying men want a son so they can have a friend because men are incapable of making friends? and women can’t read the newspaper over breakfast? (”The possibility of shaping [my son’s] preferences to match mine is attractive. It’s why we play sports together, why we read together. I’m already envisioning trying to get him to read the newspaper over breakfast. I think that there’s a very significant desire for friendship that’s heightened for fathers with sons given how few other outlets we have to create friendships.”)
  • One man was relieved to have a daughter because having a son would have made him nervous about having to “constantly prove his masculinity around him” men are honestly such a joke
  • A mum saying “I have two daughters. When I asked my husband if he thinks this made a difference in how much he helped out, he said, ‘Yeah, I probably would feel more of a sense of responsibility if we had a son.’ It actually hadn’t even occurred to me before.”