Like a door to the mall being closed for a little while. (If you’ve already seen it, then go watch iPhone vs. HTC EVO & HTC EVO vs iPhone4.) (via)

There is no arguing with exultation.
 — Shirley Hazzard, The Great Fire

Disneyland. Like many another native of Los Angeles, I have a vexed relationship with The Happiest Place on Earth.¹ A childhood spent in pure enchantment during every trip to Disneyland gave way to an adulthood plagued with guilty doubts about that special Disney brand of child consumerism and corporate greed. My love of fine graphic design dates, I think, to an appreciation of the gorgeous layout and palette of the precious book of Disneyland tickets. And what of Grad Nite, the annual Southern California ritual where the park is closed down to all but newly-minted high school graduates for a party that lasts all night long? My beloved then-boyfriend Michael and I had a divine Grad Nite, and kissed on the Matterhorn bobsled as it hurtled around on this crazy, blatantly artificial mountain, with fireworks exploding in the night sky. Yes, yes, a thousand times yes and no regrets; even though I grew in time to recoil at those dimwitted Disney Princesses incapable of solving their own problems-mooning around until some fey-looking guy in tights showed up on a horse to fix everything!-I could never deprecate the pleasure of the saturated candy colors of Alice in Wonderland melting slowly into my brain, one lazy weed-scented afternoon in an old theater in downtown Long Beach.

So last week I chaperoned my daughter Carmen’s Grad Nite at Disneyland. When I emailed Michael to tell him so, he replied, ‘Isn’t that when we got high on the sky cars? Don’t tell Carmen!’ (Which I can’t even remember, but probably? We never did get so very stoned back then, truth to tell, on the weak pot that came in “lids,” which meant a plastic baggie full of mainly carpet sweepings, roughly the size and texture of a sofa cushion. They don’t even have the Disneyland Skyway anymore, allegedly because of some engineering mishap or other. I have my own theories about that. The shenanigans that went on up there, as we dangled along between Fantasyland and Tomorrowland-were truer words ever spoken?)

Once you have a kid, the relationship to Disneyland becomes still more complex. Kids love that freaking place. One of the many Lucite-framed photos on my mom’s refrigerator is of me at Disneyland, with my then-four-year-old nephew Max riding piggyback. Even now, every time I see it, I think that whatever is responsible for the radiant expression on that beautiful little mug (his, I mean) just can’t be wrong. And then Carmen has always been very keen on Disneyland, far more so than her step-siblings ever were. She may be a card-carrying indie chick who was voted “Biggest Rock Star” by her graduating class, but even now I don’t think anything outside of a live performance by The Mighty Boosh could keep her away from Disneyland.

I have a number of friends with kids who resisted completely, who 100% refused, who HATE Disneyland and all things Disney and make a big point of saying so and wouldn’t buy one single “cheap, plastic, commercial, ugly, sexist…” I know, I know. But that is a somewhat biliously high-minded position to have to be holding so fiercely for years on end. With everything in life as flawed and compromised as it is, shouldn’t we let our children, encourage them, even, to take their pleasures where they may be found? Within reason, of course: today’s steady diet of Skittles may become tomorrow’s steady diet of meth, so you have to watch it. But still. There’s little enough pleasure in this world.

Grad Nite started in 1961, just a few years after Disneyland opened. It’s a very complicated business to arrange, with all sorts of extra security precautions and elaborate paperwork, dozens and dozens of chartered buses from all over California and even as far away as Arizona, and so on. Our kids, on fire with the excitement of their graduation ceremony that afternoon, departed from school on three buses, each with a few wary chaperones on board. We had all kinds of stuff we were supposed to read to them about throwing out all their drugs and booze in the parking lot, OR ELSE. They were all way too wound up to give a damn what we said, naturally. I wandered through the bus, handing out colored wristbands and exhortations to simmer down, would you for pete’s sake. One kid was yelling very loudly about that South African artificial vagina dentata condom-thing. “It will cut your balls right off!” he shouted, suddenly catching my eye and shooting me a guilty look.

“Oh, I read all about that,” I said. “Indeed, you’d best watch yourself. It’s a dangerous world. “

“I love and respect women!” shouted Vicki’s boyfriend, whose name escapes. Great big kid. They look like adults but they’re just not, is the thing. “All women! Except Vicki!” Vicki, sitting next to him, rolled her eyes at me in a matey way.

Vicki is a tennis prodigy; in elementary school a gawky, shy giantess, and now a most elegant figure, surpassingly graceful, with the same tender, gentle expression as always. I hugged her so tight, reflecting maybe for the last time. These kids won’t have such a lot of opportunity to see one another again, maybe. “Well I love Vicki,” I said. “And I have, since she was a little girl. “

Once you get to Disneyland for Grad Nite, they make you take everything out of your bag or backpack and pop it into a clear plastic bag a bit bigger than the airport kind. Then you must be patted down with great thoroughness, kids and adults alike. An attempt was made at the gates to deprive me of my cigarettes; though there are smoking areas in the park, the rules are different for Grad Nite. I’m a far-from-heavy smoker and can certainly do without for a few hours, but I panicked anyway, just at the sight of all that peremptory authority. “I’m about a thousand years old!” I shrieked at the security officer, a stern-looking Russian woman in heavy makeup. She called over a “supervisor,” who turned out to be a boy about half her age. “She’s trying to take away my cigarettes!” I bawled. “Chaperones are okay, it’s okay,” he said. “But you’ll have to smoke outside the park.”

Seriously, the Man is everywhere; gone are the days when the worst consequences of casual sex would require a course of penicillin, and you could sneak a feeble joint onto the Disneyland Skyway. I clutched my plastic bag protectively. Three or four kids, over the course of the night, caught sight of my cigarettes through the plastic and tried to bum. “But I’m eighteen!” they tried. I went with: “NO.”

Sometimes they book too many kids in and there are long lines, but our Grad Nite was blissfully underattended. There was some godawful Top 40 music blaring, and there were a bunch of extra dance floors with MTV dancers performing, plus Paramore and a few local bands. Certain attractions were closed (no Enchanted Tiki Room, alas) but most all of the big rides were open, with no lines to speak of. The moment I got in, I zoomed straight onto Star Tours and just sat down without waiting even for one moment-unheard-of luxury. A rowdy boy with a thick accent sat near me, shouting at everybody, “Hevf you got a green card?! Vhere are we going?!” “ENDOR!” screamed two lovely girls in the next row, for all the world like a couple of fourth-graders. I hoped they’d all stay as happy as this forever. In fact I felt rather like a fourth-grader myself, as we whizzed so thrillingly through the ice tunnels of outer space, etc.

Soon I’d met up with the rest of the chaperones from our school, including an imposing blonde Amazon of a mom, Lydia, whom I’ve known for over a decade; she teaches third grade by day. Tiny did I realize that behind that martial façade lay a goofy little girl who, at the conclusion of our second ride on Space Mountain around 3 a.m., would be bounding up the stairs two at a time and clamoring for more. We and four other doughty parents spent pretty much the whole night on the rides.

I have to hand it to that union-bashing, chain-smoking FBI informant, Uncle Walt. Disneyland really is fun.

Our fellow-chaperone Ed, a portly, robust fellow in a red jacket who knew the exact location of every attraction and loads of park trivia, was hilariously scared of the “fast” rides. But he was braver than I when it looked like an altercation was brewing among some kids unknown to us, and he dashed right over in full Dad mode. He came back with a crazy story: he’d gone up to them saying, hey, what’s going on here? It’s OK, one of the kids says, we’re security. A kid in a hoodie.

Security? says Ed skeptically. Oh yeah? Then show me some ID. And the kid opens his hoodie, flashing an official-looking Disneyland security badge! Undercover fake kids, if you can believe. Dis-narcs.

So I text this info to Carmen, who replies, omg I think they talked to us! And I’m all @*($!! She said they’d been approached by some weird kids who said, “Hey, ya got any pills?!” And with, no doubt, the withering disdain peculiar to teenagers, “We go uh, no? And they’re all, yeah you do! Come on, you have pills! And we go, um. No. We don’t have any pills. Freak.” Which if all of this were true is it legal, even? Is Disneyland like an embassy or something, or its own country, like the Vatican?

At about 4 a.m., as Lydia and I were woozily enjoying our complimentary chaperone breakfast at the Plaza restaurant, her phone rang. One of our kids was apparently petitioning for permission to leave the park early. Oh sure, we say-Albert is leaving now; his parents sent a car service along for him, because he is off to Russia this morning. No; it’s not Albert?! Who the hell is trying to leave? They all came with us on the bus, nobody was allowed to drive to this thing on his own. So we pop down to the Main Street office they’d set up. It is full of costumed Disneyland apparatchiks also a bit the worse for wear, with slightly smudged makeup, a little shiny and sleepy. Okay, someone called us, who is this who is trying to leave early?

Here she is. A kid we’ve never seen in our lives! Tall, freckles, looking very nervous. Who the hell is she?

“If you drove yourself, how’d you even get a ticket?” I ask pointedly. They’d all been given out at school with the form-checking solemnity of passport stamps, right in front of the buses, by me and a few other parents.

So we put two, two, six and a half and three together, and eventually figure out that Alice, one of our own kids, has quite sneakily wangled an extra, unpaid-for ticket and gotten this Freckles in by totally nefarious means. So Alice is now in the deepest possible shit; I’ve known her since she was six or seven, and quail at the thought of the firing squad she will face when she gets off the bus back at school. We phone Freckles’s mom, who sounds reasonably calm. But she wants the kid home, which is Hermosa Beach. Well, fine, but the Disney people won’t let her out of there until 5 a.m. without a parent’s signature. Lydia and I tell Freckles she’ll have to phone her mom back and deal with the mess herself.

“Thanks for trying,” she said, shaking like a leaf. As well she might. Poised on the knife-edge between childhood and adulthood, where there are consequences to be faced that grow ever hairier than the occasional Time Out. Here it comes, Alice and Freckles. The first, no doubt, in a long succession of post-grad lessons.

Lydia and I exchange raised eyebrows as we leave the office. “Whatever. Let’s go on Space Mountain again.”

¹ Once ubiquitous around the park, this smug old slogan is hardly to be seen in Disneyland of the present day, I was interested to note. Maybe that is because Denmark is supposed to be the Happiest Place on Earth, as I read somewhere, though really it’s just that the people in Denmark are happy, which is another thing entirely.

Maria Bustillos is the author of Dorkismo: The Macho of the Dork and

Act Like a Gentleman, Think Like a Woman.

This is, to put it very plainly, a huge gay catastrophe! The tween clothing line that Madonna and her daughter Lola are doing for Macy’s is getting pimped to high heaven, because it hits stores soon, and the latest bit of marketing is… a blog post. Written by Lola herself-a “From The iDesk of Lola” kind of thing, to rile up the tweens. It’s sort of heartbreaking, actually. Beginning, as it does, “Helluuur thurrrr, I’m Lola and this is my first blog entry so it’s kind of like ummmm…..”

That’s almost an expression of thought! LISTEN, let me say also, that when I was her age, I was probably incoherent while both writing and speaking! I bet she’s a vital and smart young woman! And this is not entirely a new thing… but it’s a thing we’re encouraging.

There is some talk about fashion. I guess that’s good that she cares about fashion?

So I want to know what you guys think about rompers… is that like a hit or miss, ‘cause I’m not sure. If you comment, be sure to tell me what you think. OK but no joke gladiator sandals are OUT. They came out in summer 2008 and I was like, ok those are really cute. Then 2009 comes around and people are still wearing them so I’m like, ok whatever it’s just a phase. BUT NOOOOO. Because good old 2010 is now coming along and people are STILL wearing them, and then I was just like OK NO! It’s been three years people COME ON!!!!!!!!! I’m just like what????

Now, admittedly, some of us are twice (oops, thrice? Yikes!) her age and we write like this too sometimes! But overall this makes me feel really bad for her and the youngs and the Internet and the future and everyone involved.

The journalism startup NewsLabs, which called itself “the platform for new journalism” and told writers that it would “allow you to focus on your craft while we focus on the tools and infrastructure for growing your online readership and brand,” announced its demise today via a couple of regret-filled internal memos. The money quote is probably this one, from chief technology officer Nathan Chong: “In retrospect, I now believe that we should never have made promises about building your online brand or large amounts of traffic (early email threads about how to deal with large number of comments now seem very ironic).” Ouch.

What was NewsLabs again? A puff piece on it from the Nieman Journalism Lab makes it seem like a slightly classier Examiner.com or Associated Content — journalists, some of whom brought long, storied careers to the table, were given the technological platform to run free (with no assignment editors or pesky copyeditors!). Once the journalist’s “personal brand” was done being built, the money would come in via ad revenue. A rundown from the much happier days of March:

The unbundled news product is one thing; what NewsLabs is proposing is, essentially, unbundling the journalistic process. Revenues will come mostly from ads, Biggar says. “We take a cut out of the money that we earn for them,” meaning in the end that the journalists “get 80 cents out of every dollar that is earned by their content.” (The ad specifies a $30,000-$70,000 “salary” for participating journalists, but notes: “We help journalists make money online, and earn a small portion of the proceeds. So while this isn’t a paid position, we only earn money if you do. (So the 30K-70K is an estimate, not a concrete figure).”) “It’s difficult to know for certain,” Biggar acknowledges, “what our major revenue is going to be in the long term.” Much of NewsLabs’ success — or lack of it — will depend on the individual journalists who sign on to the service, and to the quality and popularity of the journalism they produce.

Aha! But the quality of content, as any journalist who’s been employed by a web-based publisher can tell you, is actually never the case when it comes to ultimately deciding a publication’s success or failure — because marketing an online venture is a much more difficult affair than simply throwing up a few articles and a couple of Tweets and asking the interns to start multiple Digg accounts. Even the most entrenched online brands out there have stumbled when launching new sites in recent months; take a look at CocoPerez.com, the fashiony spinoff of Technicolor-haired Internet scourge Perez Hilton’s eponymous size that atracted some 160,000 unique readers in May. That’s a paltry number when you notice that the big P’s flagship site ranges from 1.7 million to 2.3 million uniques. (And don’t get me started on his dismal track record when it comes to promoting music.) It is very difficult to get readers regularly returning to any site; it takes a blend of pumping out the content and getting linked by high-profile sites both in and out of its immediate topic — and a not-insignificant amount of luck — in order to do so. Internet behaviors can be very entrenched things!

Not having that infrastructure in place would, of course, affect the writers, since it was their salaries that were tied to however many eyeballs they were attracting — note also that any money being made was also likely being used to fund things like basic supplies and reporting costs, whch in the old days would have been subsidized by media organizations. Indeed, in the memo announcing NewsLabs’ demise, the CTO basically admitted, “whoops, we didn’t really study the model sites we were looking at all that closely!”

We liked to use TechCrunch as a good example of an online brand… but I don’t think it was ever made clear how difficult it was to build Arrington’s work into the brand you see today. It certainly wasn’t an instant success and it was incorrect of NewsLabs to give the impression that we could easily replicate this for you.

It was also incorrect of NewsLabs’ own executives to have that impression, apparently, as the whole enterprise was given a whopping three months to thrive — and for a good chunk of that, founder Paul Biggar was off on his honeymoon. (His “sorry everybody” e-mail was much more terse than the one put out by his colleague.) But maybe I should be nice to him, because he was learning too:

by Graydon Gordian

There was no reason for me to be at the NBA Draft. I cover the San Antonio Spurs, which had the 20th and 49th picks in the draft. Any players drafted that late weren’t even likely to be there (the Spurs selected James Anderson and Ryan Richards, neither of which were). Any player drafted that late is not likely to have a significant impact on his team (although, in Anderson, the Spurs may have plucked some starting-caliber wheat from amidst the chaff). And any player that did happen to be there was either too well coached or too nervous to say anything of interest. (Every interview I have ever done with a rookie prospect is, at heart, an anxiety-ridden, forward-looking variation on this work of art.)

There was no news for me to break; ESPN televised the event live, and its far better-connected bevy of reporters were excavating every nook and cranny for any previously unpublished detail. There was very little meaningful analysis to be done; It’s difficult to follow both collegiate and professional basketball with the same amount of dedication (or at least I find it to be), meaning any “insights” I provided to my readers were basically repackaged versions of whatever I had read on Draft Express.

I had a terrible time. I was bored and annoyed, and left somewhere in the mid-second round, before the Spurs even made their second pick.

Despite all of that, I have to go back next year. And I have one nagging question that must be answered: Who the hell are these people and what are they doing here?

By “these people”, I mean the drunken, rabid, listless NBA fans who came early, stayed late, and, while they were there, booed incessantly.

Anybody who has watched the draft has heard the booing, every year, or has at least heard NBA Commissioner David Stern and ESPN’s live commentators make reference to it, but I don’t really know if you understand its scale and intensity through the TV. I’ve been watching the draft since I was a child and I certainly didn’t.

* * *

I couldn’t see Stern walk onto the stage (my seat was tucked behind an ESPN backdrop that blocked my view of the podium), but I heard his arrival. The building erupted with animosity. The boos were deafening. It’s the growl I imagine a crowd of French peasants would have made if Louis XVI strolled to close the edge of the Tuileries.

But while I understand the Third Estate’s frustrations with the French monarchy, I’m not clear on why these fans hate David Stern so much. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve never been his biggest fan. And pretty much every commissioner in professional sports, whether it be the NHL’s Gary Bettman, MLB’s Bud Selig or the NFL’s Roger Goodell, is a frequent target of derision.

But, when Stern took the stage, the jeering was so instinctive and prolonged that I felt like something deeper than the casual fan’s distrust of league front offices was at play.

Oddly enough, ever since the 1985 Draft Lottery, NBA fans outside the Tri-State area are fond of characterizing Stern as a Knickerbocker in management’s clothing. It’s common for fans of small market teams to believe Stern is always plotting on behalf of New York, Los Angeles and Boston. But why a crowd of mostly Knicks fans would harbor such bitterness towards the man is, at least to me, not immediately obvious.

Then again, it hardly ended with Stern. Boos were still raining down from the auditorium over three and a half hours into the program, when I left. The first four or five picks — highly anticipated players such as Kentucky’s John Wall and DeMarcus Cousins, Ohio State’s Evan Turner and Georgia Tech’s Derrick Favors — received a mixture of cheers and jeers. But whatever little positivity the crowd contained was expended quickly and before long the announcement of each pick was met solely by bile.

For all their outrage, those in attendance — mostly young men who looked to be in their late teens or twenties — were not without a sense of humor. Deputy NBA Commissioner Adam Silver was met with the chant “Sexy Silver,” while former Knicks head coach and ABC/ESPN play-by-play analyst Jeff Van Gundy’s name became an anthem for the crowd.

At other moments, however, their nastiness passed the point of excusability. In particular, their response to foreign-born players, who they booed even louder and more virulently, was distressing. Fan xenophobia is an increasingly common concern for NBA observers, and the crowd did little to disprove the allegation.

Still, they didn’t simply boo foreign players, or league management, rival franchises or misguided selections. They just booed.

What is so wrong with Luke Babbitt or Craig Brackins or Daniel Orton? To me, these guys are just names I vaguely remember from the NCAA tournament in March. To the fans at MSG, they were an enemy, an outlet, an opportunity to take someone who will almost certainly be wealthier and more famous than they are down a peg or two.

At least that could be their motivation. I really don’t know. That’s why I’ve got to go back.

Graydon Gordian writes about sports here and still hasn’t updated his website.

My favorite item in The Daily Beast’s look at plastic surgeries that are so idiotic out-there that they make me ache all over when I read about them (seriously, iris implants?): Gummy bear breast implants. No, they don’t affect the flavor of the implantee’s nipples. (Sorry. On the bright side, I’m sure someone’s working on that innovation as I type this!) Instead: “Cohesive silicone gel implants, nicknamed ‘gummy bear’ implants, are fake breasts that can more easily be molded to form the natural teardrop shape of women’s breasts… [T]heir texture and consistency is similar to that of the sweet treat.” Natural fakeness! But can you order them in green? After the jump, a song to commemorate this miracle of modern medical technology.

Today Gizmodo carried a slightly confusing item about an “application” called “Foursquare Monopoly,” taken from an interview earlier this month with Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley’s brother, Jonathan. Here is a transcript of that part of the interview: “There’s an application I’m planning right now called Foursquare Monopoly. And um because Foursquare’s open and everyone can build applications on top of it, there’s a guy in New York, his name’s Christian Bovine, and he built an application in which — so you take 20 venues that you hang out with, 20 venues that you hang out at, and you take 10 of your friends to compete in this game, and everyone’s given a certain amount of like fake cash, like $3000, so when you check into a venue, that’s part of Foursquare Monopoly. You can buy it, if no one’s checked in there yet….”

Oh go on?

“And when you buy it, you own it like Monopoly. So let’s say I buy this bar that we go to, right? And I own that personally. And the next day you go and you check in and you’re hoping that you can buy it but when you check in you see that I own it and then you pay me rent. So it’s all about like who can get a certain amount of money before everybody else. And then the winner is who can get like $5000 first. I think that’s a really clever way of like taking a classic game like Monopoly and like layering that on to real life hanging out, like in a real social environment in New York City.”

One note on this?

From the CNN profile of Foursquare, all of three weeks ago:

There are no winners and losers in the game of Foursquare.

And that’s intentional.

As Rainert, Foursquare’s product manager, put it: “It’s not about winning; it’s about doing more stuff.”

Crowley put it more bluntly.

“You don’t want to tell people they’re winning at life or they’re not,” he said.

The secrets of the liberal media e-newsletters will be revealed! Now that there’s a $100,000 reward offered by new media top thinker Andrew Breitbart, I would absolutely cough up a complete archive of JournoList just as fast as I could upload it. (Or at least as fast as a very binding contract could be drawn up between my lawyer and Breitbart.) Why, that’s probably almost half of JournoList member Eric Alterman’s annual salary! Fortunately for the liberal cabal down in Washington, I’m not a member. But if anyone wants to give the JournoList archive to me for the reward, however, I’ll totally donate half the money to an abortion clinic! Still, I do appreciate Breitbart’s point: “$100,000 is not a lot to spend on the Holy Grail of media bias when there is a country to save.” When will we save our country and take it back from the liberal commentators, who are not allowed to discuss their liberal comments with each other, except on their blogs, where they already do? And shouldn’t it be public anyway? I mean, how will we live without reading the rambling late-night e-conversations of Alterman and Mike Allen?

by Seth Colter Walls

So Prince is releasing a new CD, 20Ten, inside the pages of the July 22 issue of Rolling Stone … in Germany only. According to your McChrystal-dooming domestic RS website, the album will also be a cover-mount bonus in England’s Daily Mirror, Scotland’s Daily Record and Belgium’s Het Nieuwsblad. (Yes. Prince is playing some dates in Europe this summer.) Forget the fact that the last few Prince self-leaks have been pretty bad — a new disc from the dude is always cause for internet fun. But guess what — the best review of the forthcoming record has already been written.

You have to go to the German RS website to get track-by-track details on 20Ten. I don’t speak German, though, so I plugged the page into the translation machine doo-hickey Google Translate. There’s probably nothing left to say.

“His best, consistent album since the ‘Love Symbol’ plate in 1992? Sure.”

Sure! Why not? I mean, it’s all been sixes and sevens since then, no? (Though you might make a case for The Gold Experience, and I will defend most of 3121.) But how about that last track — “Untitled Bonus Track”? No critic needs to offer a judgment about it, ever, because:

“[E]ven though Prince himself and his hometown of Minneapolis here in hip-hop style and with pleasing clear words presents: ‘From the heart of Minnesota, here come the purple Yoda!’ A hard track…”

I guess we’ll see how hard! Though this gives us a hint:

The catchy, resolute synth riff smells of fresh hair spray and leather gloves. Prince licking the ear of the listener literally, this time in duet with himself, in a sleazy chanting: “Come on, darling, let’s get down to the beginning endlessly!” What type of universal enlightenment he preached here, you will soon notice.

Oh I see.

Meantime, Janelle Monae covered “Let’s Go Crazy,” and Prince seemed to be pleased with it.

But this, from the Guardian? “But even when it comes to 20Ten, the Purple One calls it ‘old music’. ‘I’m already three albums past that,’ he told Het Nieuwsblad.” UM, PRINCE: you did know you were running an expensive and mostly pointless subscription website, right?

Remember the recent terrifying video, Aggressive Maneuvers for Autonomous Quadrotor Flight? WELL. Put that together with the above, and you know what you got: Folding, Flying Death Robot Machine Terminators.