We’d gotten them catnip toys in Holland but they were totally not interested – for them it was the American stuff or nothing.

Last week we spent an afternoon at Downtown Disney. We looked for the Good Kitty / Bad Kitty nip toys but could only find these new ones.

We’re still unpacking from the trip and these were sitting in a bag downstairs. I noticed Arby rooting around in the bag – when I checked, I found the toys. We’d forgotten about them so Arby found them himself!

It’s still good stuff. Disney catnip is the best!

Disney’s Youth Educational Series and NASA have developed an online program known as the Space Ranger Education Series. It includes fun educational games for students, as well as materials for educators to download and integrate into their classroom curriculum.

Here’s the ‘trailer’:

 
Since 1985, NASA’s Toys in Space project has used toys flown aboard the shuttle and the International Space Station to help children learn science and mathematics.

Veteran astronaut Buzz Aldrin personally trained Buzz Lightyear for this important mission:

 
Buzz Lightyear will return home with the crew of STS-126, on the space shuttle Endeavour, which is scheduled to launch no earlier than November 10th.

Two years ago Arthur wrote about the bad food at DLP. We were dismayed to find not much had changed since our last visit. Most counter-service (fast food) restaurants continue to serve the same limp sandwiches and unappealing salads. During our first day in the park, we went to Cowboy Cookout in Adventureland for lunch. This is a barbecue place with chicken and ribs on the menu. Since we don’t eat meat anymore we split an omelette sandwich, fries and salad. The omelette sandwich was a bit strange, like an Egg McMuffin but on a hamburger bun. This would have been a lot better on a hard roll. The salad was nearly devoid of taste, consisting of lettuce, a few corn niblets, two rubbery slices of egg and two miniscule and surprisingly tasteless cherry tomatoes. The fries were okay. The bad food was only part of the problem at Cowboy Cookout as we discovered the service was also dismal.

Most fast food restaurants at DLP have a very strange set-up for ordering and picking up food. Cashiers sit at small kiosks a few yards in front of the counter and take orders. Each kiosk serves two lines, which usually ends up confusing customers who think they are next in line only to see the cashier turn away from them just as they reach the front. The system of having cashiers handle two lines in this way is really bizarre.

At Cowboy Cookout Arthur ordered by saying something like this: “One omelette sandwich, one salad, one fries, and one (short pause) cola light.” The cashier said the total and Arthur paid, but I noticed that the bill was a bit more than it should be. We looked at the receipt and saw we were charged for two drinks, so back to the cashier we went. The idea that customer is king was completely unknown to the cashier. We politely pointed out the error and he immediately told us that we ordered one cola light and one Coca Cola. Ahem, we most certainly did not. So we got our change back with a roll of the cashier’s eyes and proceeded to the counter, now holding two receipts (the original one and one showing the correction).

Anyway, after placing your order with the cashier you proceed to the counter where you hand over your receipt so your order can be fulfilled by the most incompetent fast food workers on the planet. We handed our receipts over to one of two cowboys helping the lunchtime crowd. Yes, it was nearly 12pm and there were two people preparing customer lunch orders. Our guy read our receipts for a good long moment and shouted to the kitchen: “Omelette!” And then he went to the drink machine and filled up a cola light and a regular Coke. Brilliant. He would have given them both to us too, if we didn’t point out what the receipts indicated. He also gave us our salad and fries, and we proceeded to wait for the omelette. Chicken and rib orders were being filled all around us as we patiently waited. Someone ordered a beer (it’s five o’clock somewhere) but the tap wasn’t delivering so our cowboy spend the next 10 minutes playing with it. Meanwhile we heard the cry of “omelette” coming from the kitchen – yay our food was ready! The other cowboy was still filling orders and when he was taking the receipt from the customers behind us, I tried to get his attention by looking him in the eye and saying loudly and clearly, “excuse me”. He ignored me. A minute later, after our guy finally got the tap to work, he proceeded to help the next customers! We managed to butt in and ask for our omelette, which had by then been sitting under the heat lamp for five minutes. Of course our fries were by now cold. Oh well, what do you expect for 25 euros?

The next day we had pizza for lunch at Pizzeria Bella Notte, themed after Lady and the Tramp. Cute restaurant. Sparrows flew in and out of the dining area, picking up pizza crust crumbs. We found this very cute but I can image health authorities might not feel the same way. Anyway I actually enjoyed my slice of four-cheese pizza here, but Arthur did not. I admit it did taste a bit ‘off’ but I figured one of the four cheeses was a bit older than I am used to so I tried not to think about it too much. We also got an order of garlic bread here, which was also of acceptable quality.

Besides the sandwich shops, chicken-and-ribs places and pizza parlors, there is also a Mexican restaurant called Fuente del Oro in Frontierland. Every time we visit DLP we think about eating there, to see how badly burritos can be prepared, but this restaurant never seems to be open. If you are reading this article and you have eaten at Fuente del Oro, can you let us know, is it any good?

On a very good note, there has been an improvement in the ice cream department at DLP. Ben & Jerry’s is now offered at a few locations, including Gibson Girl on Main Street in the Disneyland Park. In Arthur’s original article he suggested that DLP bring in outside providers for catering, so bringing in Ben & Jerry’s is definitely a step in the right direction. How about a Taco Bell in Frontierland, maybe a Long John Silver’s next to Pirates of the Caribbean, and a McDonald’s on Main Street?

To view larger photos visit our photo album.

Download full report (PDF)

Here’s the top 20:

Our very own De Efteling, a very nice fairy-tale theme park here in the Netherlands, makes the global list at number 29, with 3,200,000 visitors last year.

I thought it would be fun to compare the theme park attendance to country population. After some cutting and pasting in Excel I got the following result. Numbers 1, 2 and 4 are in Denmark and number 3 is in Sweden! Does this mean that Scandinavians are crazy about amusement parks? I think it does!

Disadvantages of the old design were that it was only 780 pixels wide, there were lots of nested tables and tiny images that made the pages very large, and the font size was very.

I’ve now changed the width of the page to 960 pixels, which gave me more space and allowed me to increase the font size. Along with the rounded corners and bright colors the site now has a more web 2.0-type look.

A new ‘Leave a comment’ area on each of the 1,000+ title pages lets users leave comments. I rebuilt the site from ASP to PHP earlier this year, and I just *love* PHP!

For instance, the function strip_tags allows me to strip all HTML code from the message field. I could never do that easily in ASP, but now it’s just one simple line. What I actually did is compare the length of the message with the length of the message with the HTML code stripped out, and if this is not the same then I give an error message “Please remove the HTML tags from your message”.

Another brilliant PHP function that I actually didn’t use but may use later, is to check that an email address is correctly formatted. I found the following function to do this:

if (ereg("[[:alnum:]]+@[[:alnum:]]+.[[:alnum:]]+", $email)) { echo "email correctly formatted"; }

I’ve also added some JavaScript and CSS in places to hide and unhide certain information on the page. On the country pages, for instance, I have a list of all the titles in that country, and titles can either be active or cancelled. What I’ve done to allow users to dynamically change the list between all, active and cancelled titles, is give each row in the table a unique ID based on the title ID number from the database, like this:

Earlier on the page I have used PHP to put all, active and cancelled titles in three seperate arrays, and then put these arrays in a JavaScript that will output like this:

function toggle(action) {
var allTitles=new Array("227","681","682",...);
var allActive=new Array("845","226","1180",...);
var allInactive=new Array("227","681","682",...);
if (action=='all') { switchRows(allTitles,''); }
if (action=='active') { switchRows(allActive,''); }
if (action=='cancelled') { switchRows(allActive,'none'); }
}

The switchRows JavaScript function goes through an array and switches the display value of each row in the array to ” (visible) or ‘none’ (invisible):

function switchRows(theArray,value) {
for (i=0; i < theArray.length; i++) { document.getElementById('r'+theArray[i]).style.display=value; }
}

Fun stuff. The next thing I plan to add is RSS feeds to all title pages and country pages to keep track of the comments. I already made an RSS feed of all comments for myself, which was surprisingly easy to set up.