I eat my Nutter Butters like I eat my Oreos, some are eaten like a sandwich and some are split apart.
One big gripe I have about Disney+ and something I can’t believe wasn’t implemented at launch is a “Continue Watching” feature. Parents and kids start, stop, leave, and come back to viewing apps all the time.
The TICKET morning show broadcasted from KidZania on Friday morning in anticipation of their grand opening over the weekend. I never heard of it before but decided to research it, and upon doing so, I decided to take the family.
Admission was $40 a child (ages 5-14) and it was supposed to be for a four-hour pass, but we stayed for about six and there was no sort of notification system we were aware of to tell us when our time was up. The price is well worth it when you consider the quality of the facility and experience, IMO. However, a parent must also purchase a ticket for $20 if they want to attend. Somehow only WifeGeeding had to purchase one and I was given some sort of visitor pass for free which allowed me to hang out for the entire time.
KidZania is located in Stonebriar Mall Center in Frisco. Outside the entrance is the front of a real airliner and a pretend airport facility. See, to get to KidZania, everyone must “fly” there. Just as in real life, you buy a ticket and go through security, but you don’t have to remove your shoes.
Inside, the whole thing reminded me of the Venetian Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. There’s no sunlight, no way to see outside, but the ceiling is painting in cloudy blue skies.
When tickets are purchased, kids are given some KidZania currency, which is printed on it’s on high-quality paper. Kids can spend the money on goods and services. If kids want more money, they have to get a “job” and work for it. Some jobs are simple, like being a mail carrier delivering packages from one business to another using a map, or window washing with a rolling water bucket, squeegee, and paper towels. Other jobs require training, like becoming a police officer, firefighter, doctor, dentist, bank teller, fitness instructor, and a bunch of other stuff. Most of the businesses are sponsored, like Planet Fitness runs the mini-gym, Colgate for the dental business, WFAA for media, and Texas Health for the hospital and prenatal facilities. The medical stuff was pretty impressive with very lifelike learning dummies. Jobs run about $4 per task. However, kids went to college and obtained a bachelor’s degree (in this case, from SMU), they are paid an extra $2 per task, and if they obtained a masters, they got an extra $4 a task. BoyGeeding decided to go to college but DaughterGeeding decided not to. Kids also got a chance to buy insurance and do their taxes.
In this particular job, DaughterGeeding was taught how to count money, verify if it was fake, what to accept (some currency was torn and damaged in other ways), and to deposit it in a vault.
One of the cooler experiences was training to be a pilot and the kids get a chance to use a pretty realistic flight simulator. In this pic, well-mannered BoyGeeding was raising his hand to ask a question.
Several restaurants were inside, such as MooYah’s and Pie Five Pizza. Their registers were down (opening day problems) so all food was free. The prices aren’t jacked up like at a theme-park because you are trapped inside, but that was a pretty good saving when you consider we had four meals and two snacks total.
Another cool experience was a scenario in which the local match stick factory caught on fire. To the kids playing police had to cone off the area while the kids riding in a mini-fire engine arrived to put shoot real water a pretend fire.
We kept running into a filming crew and a few times told we were “in their shot.” At one point they deployed a drone and it was pretty darn interesting how many people never noticed it fly overhead.
LeBron James son (LeBron James Jr.) and one of Dwyane Wade’s sons (Zaire Wade) are teammates on a high school basketball league.
My daughter drew that for me. I’m not going to say she’s weird, but she’s a very unique kid who has a touch of Wednesday Addams in her at times.
The government is now funded until December 20 which means I’ll continue to be employed for the time being. If the president and the Senate didn’t approve and sign last night, I wouldn’t be working today.
I finally got around to watching the first two episodes of Disney+’s The Mandalorian. It’s great, there’s so much to like about it. Other than the big reveal at the end of the first episode (which has got to sell a plethora of Christmas toys), I’d say the most surprising thing was Nick Nolte’s performance. I had no idea it was him nor did I think he could pull off such a performance.
I think the Mandalorian is the Batman of the Star Wars universe. Pablo Pascal does a great job of acting with the disadvantage of never being able to see his face. His body language carries a lot as well as his voice.
The music for The Mandalorian is great. I mean, it’s not enjoyable, but it really helps sets the tone and helps carry the story. Also, the storyboard images displayed during the end credits are a great touch. Man, that Jon Favreau is telling a great story. I’m curious how long he’s had the overall concept, and I loved the Indiana Jones hat-tip in the second episode.
The special effects are fantastic and I started to wonder how much it must cost to produce such a great series. It turns out Disney is using new technology, some sort of innovative projection system which is going to change the industry, and it even fools people on set. For instance:
“It was really funny as we had an executive from The Walt Disney Company come down early in the process because it’s one of those things that is difficult to explain until you walk into the environment to see how it’s working. And he stepped in, and he looked around, and he said, Jon, I thought you weren’t going to build anything. And he had no idea he was standing in a virtual set. That’s how unbelievable it is.”
“It means that if you want a big establishing shot in Iceland, and you don’t want to take 700 people, spend four months prepping a set because you only want to do the establishing shot and you can bring everything back to shoot interiors on a stage, that becomes very meaningful on big, huge projects and small projects. So the interesting thing with Mandalorian, the fact that we tested this technology inside of television and not on the big screen was the way we felt that we could take a big risk but not a giant risk.”
I would not like to be a congressional staffer who is filmed sitting behind a congress representative for several hours during an impeachment hearing. Knowing I’d be on camera, I don’t think it would be possible for me to act “normal” and wondering if my neck fat is showing, my tie is on crooked, or the glare on my head causing the cameras to go out of focus.
Random fashion prediction – In the next decade, capes are going to be in fashion.
But the results showed that music industry workers were no more likely to develop difficulties hearing in a noisy environment than people working in the finance industry.
This surprises me as I would have thought almost all musical industry workers would suffer from tinnitus. I’ve hard of fighter pilots, for example, George W. Bush, have suffered permanent hearing damage. It’s hard for me to believe the likes of Mick Jagger and his crew not be more susceptible to their decades-long exposure.
The doctors punctured the passenger’s bladder and improvised a makeshift catheter using a plastic tube from a portable oxygen cylinder, a syringe from the plane’s first-aid kit, a plastic straw from a milk carton and some tape.
However, Zhang discovered the syringe needle was too thin. He then siphoned out the urine using his mouth, sucking most of the fluid over half an hour and then spitting it out into an empty wine bottle. “It was an emergency situation. I couldn’t figure out another way,” Zhang was quoted as saying. “When I saw that the man could hardly bear the pain any more, my only thought was how to get the urine out of his bladder,” he added.
The latest Silicon Valley trend is dopamine fasting – having a break from anything pleasurable in order to “reset” your brain chemistry.
I like how AccuWeather breaks down their allergy forecasts. It provides the option to see the counts for different types of pollen. But as bad as my allergies have been the past few days, I’m surprised the pollen counts haven’t been higher.
JFK, blown away, what else do I have to say.
Here’s something for those of you who are fans of prayer, Mr. Rogers, and Tom Hanks. I’ve qued this video up for you. You’ll hear how Mr. Rogers has inspired Hanks, Savannah Guthrie, and her daughter to pray for others every night. It all has to start somewhere. [Insert planting seeds metaphor here.]
