Despite buy­ing two 12oz Pepsi’s to dou­ble my chances of win­ning the iTunes Give­way pro­mo­tion — sadly — I came back with noth­ing. I could have used the Tilt­ing Method, but I felt like all eyes were on me and refrained from being dragged out of the store by my toes.

Has any­one won this yet? It says on the front of the bot­tle “1 out of 3 bot­tles is a win­ner”. Read­ing this reminded me of the tele­vi­sion slo­gan for den­tists which then made me shud­der. I’ve got an appoint­ment with Dr. D this Fri­day to fill a cou­ple cav­i­ties and I can’t say I’m look­ing for­ward to it.

Sure, they seem nice. The front desk per­son­nel are always friendly, offer­ing their pen so that I fill out my next appoint­ments. The wait­ing room is com­fort­able, they always stock recent issues of Pop­u­lar Sci­ence and Oprah, or excuse me, O. At this point I flip through the pages grad­u­ally hop­ing I can slow time.

It’s the call that I dread, when the all smiles den­tal hygiene assis­tant clasps her clip­board and leads you into the white room. I will say they do have a poster taped to the ceil­ing for patients to look at while the Doc­tor jams her fin­gers into your gums and prods them with cold, metal­lic den­tal tools. She then gives me the final ver­dict, “You’re a mouth breather.” Unlike Airbag’s def­i­n­i­tion, she is refer­ring to the fact that like a good por­tion of the pop­u­la­tion I breath while sleep­ing with my mouth instead of my nose.

After­wards, the expe­ri­ence is finally over and at which point I casu­ally walk by the front desk per­son­nel and she kindly offers her pen to me. 

While vis­it­ing Cal­i­for­nia my wife and I ven­tured with our daugh­ter Zoe to Dis­ney­land. At first I had my reser­va­tions about tak­ing an infant to the park con­sid­er­ing she’s just under 3 months of age, but after much thought we decided to take her and make the best of the expe­ri­ence. After­all, theme parks were orig­i­nally built to feed the imag­i­na­tions of chil­dren around the world.

A great advan­tage of hav­ing a baby at Dis­ney­land are the Switch Passes. These are sim­i­lar to Fast Passes, the only dif­fer­ence being that they assume pri­or­ity over Fast Passes and allow up to 2 peo­ple to enjoy the ride with­out the cum­ber­some lines. The the­ory is that your spouse or sig­nif­i­cant other will have to wait with the rest of the Dis­ney pop­u­la­tion and upon return­ing from the ride they can ask for a Switch Pass to allow you to beat the long lines and scurry past the rest of the crowd.

My daugh­ter enjoyed both Pirates of the Caribbean and The Haunted Man­sion. It seemed like she found the Singing Statue heads to be the most fas­ci­nat­ing aspect of the ride as her eyes were fix­i­ated on this effect as the doom buggy con­tin­ued on it’s trek in the man­sion. When we reached the part where the buggy tilts back­wards she smiled at the cawwing raven which only tells me that she will prob­a­bly grow up enjoy­ing Haunted Man­sions and hayrides dur­ing Halloween.

After­wards we jour­neyed to the Inno­va­tions build­ing, which used to be Carousel of Progress back in the 1960’s. We were greeted by the ani­ma­tronic robot Tom Mor­row (voiced by the bril­liant Nathan Lane) and found our way into the rotat­ing building.

Inside the build­ing there are a vari­ety of hands-on tech­nol­ogy includ­ing a mod­i­fied Google engine which pre­vents access to any sites that aren’t linked to Dis­ney (odd, huh?) and a Seg­way exhibit. The Seg­way exhibit show­cased the ‘IT’ machine that appeared in 2002 as the “next big thing”. It allowed any­one after fill­ing out Seg­way release forms to ride the machine with assis­tance from a park rep­re­sen­ta­tive. I would have tried it out, how­ever Dis­ney­land only had two machines in use and the wait would have extended past 2 hours at least.

I’ll just wait until Ama­zon starts hand­ing out Seg­ways or the day when they depre­ci­ate to a more afford­able price. Sim­i­lar to those tiny scoot­ers that were released a few years back at around $200 a pop and which now sell for $20.00 or less. 

For the past two weeks I’ve been vis­it­ing Bishop, Cal­i­for­nia located south of the infa­mous Mam­moth and about an hour away from Lone Pine. The inter­est­ing thing about Lone Pine is that the loca­tion has been used numer­ous amounts of times for Hol­ly­wood pro­duc­tions. The town is noto­ri­ous and famous for it’s Alabama Hills; an area filled with oddly shaped rocks and for­ma­tions. It’s a per­fect shoot­ing loca­tion for West­erns and has been uti­lized for var­i­ous films and tele­vi­sion shows like Star Trek and Tremors.

Most of the land in Bishop has been owned by the City of Los Ange­les since the early 20s and because of this the land — while bar­ren and trash-ridden — is free of new home expan­sion unless it’s granted or donated for an edu­ca­tional project. Like­wise, a por­tion of land is being used for the Reser­va­tion and includes a casino ran by the Native Amer­i­can com­mu­nity where locals burn their money faster than a speed­ing locomotive.

I’ve been com­ing up here since I was a kid. Often my Dad, brother and I would visit Bishop for a two to three day trip. We’d stay at the Town­house Motel and make fre­quent food stops at the AM/PM across the street bring­ing back re-heated burg­ers and ice cream sun­daes. Through­out the week my Dad and brother would go fish­ing and I’d choose stay in the hotel and watch cook­ing shows and informer­cials. We’d eat at places around town and on sub­se­quent trips watched Bishop flour­ish dur­ing the tourist sea­son and revert back to it’s home­town roots in the off season.

It was an expe­ri­ence that I will hold dearly in my mem­o­ries. Today with me being in New York with my wife and daugh­ter and my brother in the United States Navy we’re not as close in prox­im­ity to eachother as we used to be. Yet, we all still remain close in heart and with tech­nol­ogy we’re only a video­phone call away.

Some­day I hope to bring my daugh­ter back here when she’s old enough to under­stand and share with her the mem­o­ries I expe­ri­enced with my Dad and brother. 

I’ve been read­ing Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, an in-depth exam­i­na­tion of the his­tory and dark side of the fast food empire. Scholosser’s research reveals gritty details includ­ing how a great per­cent­age of rob­beries take place in fast food estab­lish­ments and the perps are usu­ally employ­ees. It also reveals the hid­den agenda of these multi-billion dol­lar empires, focus­ing on their bleak adver­tis­ing cam­paigns directed towards chil­dren and the amount of chem­i­cal fla­vor­ings and tin­ker­ings that make a Spicy Chicken sand­wich taste spicy.

One such chap­ter deals with what is called the “white flight”, wherein a good por­tion of a pre­dom­i­nately white pop­u­la­tion will flee an over­pop­u­lated area and move to more rural or west­ern plains. Despite this escape, they usu­ally end up in small towns which are quaint and slow-paced but are over­run by Burger Kings, KFC and Taco Bells.

I’ll have to admit that Fast Food Nation has really opened my eyes to the true agen­das of these cor­po­ra­tions who orig­i­nally began with such hum­ble begin­nings. Their goals were quite dif­fer­ent in the mid-50s to late 60s when most of these estab­lish­ments were formed as a loca­tion con­vien­ance to the (at that time) freshly built free­ways and highways.

Today, how­ever, it’s evi­dent that money is what dri­ves these cor­po­ra­tions and heard­ing as much peo­ple into fast food restau­rants means expand­ing their egos and fill­ing their pock­ets. It’s inter­est­ing that a gal­lon of Coke syrup costs around $4.25. Add water and sev­eral bags of sugar and you begin to see why fast food joints allow con­sumers to have free refills.

As for me, I’m com­pletely con­tent with smaller Mom and Pop joints where the food might take 10–15 min­utes to make but tastes all the bet­ter. It’s home cook­ing that makes my taste­buds siz­zle and not the grease that sat­u­rates the wrap­pers of a ham­burger or the chewy fries that sat under the heaters for the past sev­eral hours.