The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World 2014 by Bob Sehlinger & Len Testa,

Whenever I'm looking to take a family trip to the Lands of the Mouse (whether in Anaheim or Orlando), I always make sure to check out the most recent Unofficial book on the subject during my planning. Sure, I've internalized most of the lessons at this point, but there are changes every year, and other things that I need to be reminded of. In 2011, during my year-long Book-A-Day string, I read a good-sized pile of guides to Walt Disney World (and then read two about Disneyland last summer), and the Unofficial books, in all of their varieties, are clearly the most useful and directly helpful of any of the books I've seen. Others sometimes have more facts and figures, but the Unofficial books tell you what to do, in conversational language, and incorporate not just a huge wealth of personal experience and Big Data computing power, but also anecdotes and ideas from dozens of their readers.

This year, I got The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World 2014 pretty much the second it was available, through the magic of ebooks, and read just about all of its 850 pages (I may have skimmed the chapters on things that don't really apply to me, like tips for little kids or the details of the cruise ships) on my iPad over the course of a little more than a week. And, yes, I did still learn some things -- so, unless you go to WDW substantially more often than I do (several times a year, for example), this book will still have useful things to teach you.

And my employer no longer publishes these books, so there's no reason for me to be politically nice at this point; I really do think the Unofficial books are excellent travel guides, and would buy more of them if they covered other locations I was going to travel to. Sure, it will be useless to you if you're not going to Orlando, but any travel guide has that handicap. And I have to think that, if you were trapped in a doctor's office for several hours with nothing to read but travel guides, this is the one you'd choose, and you'd be pretty well entertained along the way.

The DFB Guide to Walt Disney World Dining 2013 by A.J. Wolfe

"DFB" stands for Disney Food Blog, one of the resources I'm using pretty intensively to prepare for the family's annual fall vacation this year. (No points for guessing where we're going.) DFB has published several books -- delivered in PDF form, and sold directly from the site, in the age-old way of targeted non-fiction -- and I've bought and read both this one and a shorter, much more targeted "mini-guide" to the 2013 Epcot Food & Wine Festival, which will be going on when we hit the World. This book is updated annually, and covers, as you might guess, all of the restaurants, carts, stands, and other food-acquisition opportunities in Walt Disney World -- with both quick capsule reviews of all of the food locations and lots of themed chapters (where to get a good steak, what are the best snacks, how to eat healthy, how to work the Disney Dining Plan, special occasions, dining with kids, best drinking establishments, sample dining itineraries, and more).

I suspect that most of the material in this book originated on the blog, and could probably still be found on the blog with some effort. But I don't mind paying for it, for two reasons: First, it's important to pay for things that are useful to you, so that the people behind those things get recompensed and keep doing them. (If something's free, it's either a hobby rather than a business -- which means it may disappear at any time -- or that thing is not actually the product; you the customer are the product.) Second, assembling and organizing that information in a format that can be read easily offline is a major benefit.

The blog's writing is from the point of view of an enthusiastic and pretty well-versed amateur -- an eater rather than a cook or culinary expert -- and the photography is a bit better than that, with gorgeous views of things that you'll want to eat. It's probably not for top-end foodies -- there's are a few really serious cuisine opportunities in WDW, but many more "good eats" surrounding them -- but both the blog and the book are excellent resources for those of us who want to eat the best possible nosh while we're stuffing ourselves on vacation.

The Last Train to Zona Verde by Paul Theroux

Getting old means, more than anything else, that things are ending. Everyone knows this: that there's a last time for everything, and each last time marks another step toward death. Even something as small as realizing that forty is too old to go on a Tilt-A-Whirl any more is one small step, one indication that a once-assumed capacity and ability is now gone forever.

Paul Theroux has been a professional traveler for forty years, since his first unhappy journey across Eurasia was encapsulated in The Great Railway Bazaar. Some of the countries he's visited are now closed to outsiders, or too dangerous to visit -- each of those is an ending. But with The Last Train to Zona Verde, Theroux comes up against a larger ending, realizing that there are countries and types of travel and situations that he's just not up to anymore at the age of seventy.

Last Train declares itself Theroux's "Ultimate African Safari," and it's his farewell journey in Africa if not his last travel book entirely. Theroux was always happiest -- well, as happy as he ever allows himself to be seen as, which is not very much -- at the edges of things, out in wilderness of one sort or another, on a bad train or jolting bus or faraway from modern cities. Last Train doesn't give up on those things, but it could signify that getting to those places -- getting through the horribly overcrowded and corrupt Third World cities that are the gatekeepers of wilderness -- is just too much for him now, physically and emotionally. Those cities have gotten larger and more hellish in Theroux's lifetime, and Last Train culminates in Luanda, the capital of Angola, a city broken in more ways than even Theroux can deal with.

Before that, though, the journey begins in high spirits and hope, as Theroux plans a trip up the East African coast from Cape Town to match the similar journey down the west coast a decade before in Dark Star Safari. As usual, his plans are fluid and contingent -- he knows where he'd like to go, but doesn't plan exactly how he'll get there, or all of the stops along the way. So he planned to travel by land through South Africa and Namibia and Angola, and had vaguer ideas of how to deal with the war-torn countries north of them, and no clearly defined end-point -- this would be a safari that lasted as long as it could, and went as far as it could go. And Theroux finds joy along the way, in Cape Town and out in the bush on his way north.

Zona Verde, like all of Theroux's travel books (and nearly everyone else's travel books, too), is made up of episodes -- what he sees and does in a particular place before he moves on to the next stop. And each of those episodes is exquisite here, with a poignancy and clarity driven by Theroux's knowledge that this would probably be his last trip through Africa, a land he's loved since he was a young man. Theroux is still unparalleled when it comes to deploring dirt and corruption and thoughtlessness, but he's equally good in celebrating the simple joys of human existence -- as he writes, early on in Zona Verde, "the best of them [humanity] are bare-assed."

If we're lucky, Zona Verde will turn out to be Theroux's last African trip, but not his last travel book -- he's not young, but he's still writing as well as he ever did, and it would be a shame to have his eye turned away from the outside world, never again to stare intently at the things only he can celebrate or disdain this well.


Footnote: I've previously covered the Theroux travel books Ghost Train to the Evening Star and The Pillars of Hercules here.

Traveling by Map

I'm probably the only one who uses Google Maps to create completely implausible journeys, right?

What I mostly try to do is concoct the longest trip possible, and I think I've got a new high score -- walking directions from "Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa" to "Mataram, Indonesia." Total of 18,120 miles.

For those who like cheating, Google currently has a glitch (or hack, or feature -- take your pick) that allows "kayak across the Pacific" from the US West Coast, so I also worked out a trip from St. John's in Newfoundland to the furthest point in China I could find. (The cross-Pacific hack works for locations in China, but not for anything further West -- I tried to use Beijing as the mid-point of a Kansas City-to-London trip, and Google denied me.)

Oh, like your hobbies are so productive!

Two Small Guidebooks to the City of Angels

My family will be spending some time in Southern California in the near future -- mostly for theme-park activities in the Anaheim area, but with side trips elsewhere -- so I've been reading up on the various tourist traps in the vicinity. Along the way, I read two directly competitive pocket guides to Los Angeles, and thought that I might as well look at them together.

Frommer's Los Angeles Day by Day was written by Garth Mueller, and -- at the time it was published, last year -- came out from a venerable publishing house with which I am also associated. (Said venerable publishing house has since sold off that piece of its operations to the not nearly as venerable but vastly cash-rich data octopus Google.) It's pocket-sized -- slim but taller than a mass-market book, with a large fold-out map in a pocket inside the back cover and several other maps of specific areas in a three-panel fold-out from the front cover.

It's organized by interest rather than geographically, with chapters on shopping, dining, lodging, nightlife, outdoor activities, and arts & entertainment. But it opens with the author's curated "best of" recommendations -- first, suggested itineraries for one-, two-, or three-day trips, and then a half-dozen specialized day trips for particular interests (fans of movies, architecture, rock music, art, shopping, eating, or those traveling with kids). Assuming that Mueller's expertise is what it should be -- which I can't evaluate at this point since I haven't made the trip yet (and I don't expect to follow any of these suggested tours explicitly, anyway) -- this is the most useful part of Day by Day, giving travelers a template to start from when they plan their days in LA.

It has a crisp, authoritative look, with "tabs" for each section embedded in a color bar to make thumbing through easier, and there's a lot of color photos, though many of them are presented postage-stamp-size. The two-column layout presents a lot of data in a way that keeps it all easy to follow, and occasional sidebars give more detail on specific points.

The bulk of the book is written in capsule-review style, like listings in Time Out -- entirely useful, highly factual, but a bit dry to read straight through. The day-trips are more lively, with more anecdotes and factoids to spice them up. But this isn't a book to be read straight through to begin with; it's meant to be a reference and a guide, with each reader gravitating to the sections that she is most interested in. And, for that, it's very usable, with good maps embedded in the text to show where various places are in relation to each other. This book would be a bit bulky for a pants pocket, but it could easily go into a jacket, purse, or glove compartment for a trip around the city. Between the maps and the curated tours, it's an excellent (and clearly opinionated) guide to LA.

Lonely Planet Pocket Los Angeles has a similar form-factor: it's shorter (closer to the height of a mass-market), and both slightly thicker and deeper, with marginally thicker paper than Frommer's. Its inside-back-cover fold-out map has more density -- one side is mostly taken up by a listing of places, so it can function semi-independently from the book -- but lacks the large area maps Frommer's does. (Lonely Planet's map is also paper, and tears out from the book, while Frommer's is plasticized and sits in a clear plastic pocket in the back of that book.)

Lonely Planet is also clearly hipper than Frommer's is, from the open-shirted author photo of Adam Skolnick to its focus on neighborhoods (the trendier the better). It does have a quick "do this each day" section up front, possibly to compete with Frommer's, but the book is primarily organized geographically rather than by interest, starting with Hollywood and circling around to hit Beverly Hills, Downtown, Santa Monica, Burbank, and excursions to points further away.

Lonely Planet feels like it gives more space to shopping and nightlife -- again, aiming at a hipper crowd than Frommer's -- so visitors with those items high on their agenda will want to gravitate in this direction. It also is quite thorough in differentiating between the different strands of nightlife: old Hollywood, new Hollywood, LGBT, and so on -- to give the reader the best guidance as to exactly which trendy club she will be most comfortable in. But all that hip trendiness can make an older, stodgier, less shopping-obsessed reader -- your humble correspondent, for one example -- feel bored and out of place; this is not a guide for those who don't intend to make hitting boutiques and/or nightclubs a major part of their LA itinerary.

The design is bright and modern, with pastel headers and sidebars to organize sections, and lots of color photography -- as expected from Lonely Planet, it's entirely up-to-date in both tone and style. For readers who are equally up-to-date, this is the perfect guide to LA. (The rest of us may want something a bit more sedate.)

The Disneyland Encyclopedia by Chris Strodder

I recognize that most people are not like me; most people don't read encyclopedias -- even encyclopedias about theme parks -- for enjoyment, and don't embark on reading a dozen books for a family vacation. But I am me, and I do do those things.

And I can tell you that The Disneyland Encyclopedia is a really swell way to waste a dozen hours or so, if you have any interest at all in Disneyland, theme-park history, or just the ways that American icons morph and adapt over the course of a couple of generations of continuous operation. Chris Strodder's book contains over 500 entries, covering every element of the Disneyland park -- people, attractions, stores, lands, restaurants, events, TV shows, promotions, and less definable stuff -- with details of what it was (or still is), how it's changed, and what's interesting about it. Upfront, there are maps of the park as a whole and the various lands, with buildings and areas keyed to a list of the various things that have been there over the years -- this is sometimes a bit vague, due to major renovations, but generally is usefully precise. And the back of the book has an extensive index, a solid bibliography, and an appendix listing the entries by land and type (attraction, person, restaurant, store, etc.). Strodder also has included his own black-and-white photos of every element that's still in existence, though those those photos tend to be small in the book -- there are a few photos in color on Strodder's website, but it would have been nice to have had them all accessible there.

So this is absolutely the book for anyone interested in the history of Disneyland; I've never seen or heard of anything half as comprehensive or detailed. (I also note that I read the 2008 first edition, which has a blue cover; a second edition came out this summer and has an orange cover -- I assume, but do not know for sure, that the updates are primarily about changes since 2008 and not new archival information.)

The only major negative is that Strodder deliberately did not ask any questions of Disney officials; he hasn't interviewed anyone or done any original research, just read the primary documents and the already-existing books about Disneyland. (Readers will note that he relies very heavily on souvenir books as primary sources: he seems to be someone who started off as a souvenir-book collector and only afterward decided he wanted an encyclopedia of Disneyland, so wrote it himself when no one else did.) It would have been nice if he'd done some journalistic digging -- but, then again, the scope of Disneyland Encyclopedia is so large that he could be researching just Adventureland attractions for a decade or more. So that's something of a missed opportunity; I have to assume that Strodder has a list of questions he'd like to have answered, and there are certainly people still alive who could answer some of those questions, if he wanted to track them down and ask.

But that is a quibble: Disneyland Encyclopedia is now and is likely to remain the most comprehensive book on the park -- unless the Disney company follows Strodder's lead, opens their vaults, and does a similar book based on official archival materials -- and so is of strong interest to serious Disney fans, anyone interested in 20th century pop and cultural history, and Californiana.

Fodor's Disneyland & Southern California With Kids by Michael and Trisa Knight

Words can have very specific meanings within particular contexts -- for example, in the title Fodor's Disneyland & Southern California with Kids, the word "kids" means particularly small children: definitely those under the age of ten, and mostly those up to the age of six or seven.

Now, I have two children myself, but those sons are now fourteen and eleven, which means I have one "teen," one "tween" and no so-called "kids." So this book is not as closely tailored to my interests as it might have seemed. Luckily, I knew that going in, so I was able to triangulate as I went.

(And authors Michael and Trisa Knight do talk about the interests of older children along the way, somewhat -- but little kids are tyrants that can ruin an entire vacation without trying, so they need to be catered to, and their needs much more carefully scrutinized, than my older and more self-sufficient guys.)

If you're going to be visiting the Anaheim branch of Disney Uber Alles, and doing so with some rug-rats in tow, this is probably the most targeted, specific book you can get for that trip: it covers not just the two Disney parks and their ancillary leisure opportunities, but several other tourist traps in the close vicinity: Universal Studios Hollywood, Knott's Berry Farm, Six Flags Magic Mountain, Sea World San Diego, LEGOland, and even some quick tips about zoos and other "educational" stuff. The Knights cover all of the rides and shows, plus restaurants, lodging choices (in much less detail) and general tips.

This book is much less designed than you'd expect from such a big name as Fodor's: the "maps" of the parks are very rudimentary and practically useless, there are no photos, and the text just flows in big sections broken up by call-outs for "Insider's Secrets," "Fun Facts," and "The Scare Factor." Also, Michael and Trista Knight may have gone to these parks many times with their many children, but Fodor's Disneyland is purely based on their own experiences and preferences: there's no larger survey or data-collection effort behind this book. (Unlike, for example, the Unofficial guides.)

The Knights are good guides, if limited in their expertise: their recommendations are solid and defensible, but reading Fodor's Disneyland is more like having a long conversation with a family that really likes Disneyland than like getting tips from an expert. If you prepare for vacations through overwhelming preparation, as I do, this may be substantially less than you want and need -- but, if you're less obsessive, it'll probably be just right.

The Titanic Awards by Doug Lansky

Travel is expensive, complicated, and difficult -- so it's supposed to be sublime and wonderful. But of course things are very rarely what they're "supposed" to be in this world.

And so, in honor of the gap between what is and what should be, travel writer Doug Lansky put together The Titanic Awardsto dishonor the worst people, places, and things in travel -- the worst hotels, cities, airports, cruise lines, passenger behavior, tourists, and just about anything else you can think of. The Awards were given in three ways -- first, some categories were crowd-sourced through a survey taken by over 2000 people from 80 countries; others were from official statistics compiled by industry groups and associations; still others were Lansky's personal choices from years of bad travel experiences; and the last group were other personal reminiscences by other travel writers of the horrible experiences they've had.

So Titanic Awards aims to give a holistic, in-the-round view of bad travel and tourism: airplanes, ground transportation, hotels, food and drinks, destinations, and those pesky fellow tourists. And it succeeds quite well: no one will want to read this book straight through, but it's a lovely schadenfreude-filled voyage of discovery, in which only other people have horrible things happen to them. If you want to know who the worst drivers in the world are, or which major airline has the smallest seats, or which country's tourists are the most rude, or where the world's most crowded swimming pool is, The Titanic Awards is the book for you.

Travel as a Political Act by Rick Steves

Every man is the hero of his own life. [1] And they all are deeper than they look to others -- particularly when those others aren't paying much attention.

I know Rick Steves as an energetic, slightly squeaky-voiced host of a bunch of programs on PBS about traveling in Europe -- your experience may be similar -- and so I'd basically filed him as a modern-day Thomas Cook, most likely of use as a source for tactical tips (what hotels, what sights, and so forth) if I ever had a change to get across the Atlantic.

But I found a copy of Travel as a Political Act -- just less than a year ago, actually, on one of my last book-acquiring trips to the then-dying Borders chain -- which shows Steves in a different light: as a thoughtful, committed, politically and religiously centered man with an interest in making the world better in the ways he cares most about.

He's an interesting mix of devout Lutheran, reasonably hard-headed entrepreneur (he runs the company that produces his books and TV shows), and internationalist liberal, and Political Act is his (polite) manifesto about how international travel, done right, can connect people and cultures and make us all act better towards each other. Each chapter looks at one country or topic: the aftermath of the bloody collapse of Yugoslavia, Europe's social-welfare state apparatus, El Savador and its civil war, highly-taxed and highly-serviced Denmark, two faces of secular Islam in Morocco and Turkey, Europe's managed approach to drug laws, and the account of a trip to Iran.

Political Act is slightly potted -- these are clearly topics Steves has thought about, probably written about, and definitely given talks about many times before -- but it's filled with good photographs, and Steves is honest and good-hearted, which goes a long way. I do suspect he soft-pedals his views in several of these cases (particularly when he talks about Islamic countries, there's a little dance to avoid anything that could possibly offend the most hair-trigger of Israelis), but the man does make his living talking to the public, and he clearly has an interest in keeping that public willing to listen to him.

I agreed with Steves on pretty much all of his major points and a lot of minor ones, so I consider him exceptionally intelligent and insightful on world affairs -- though Political Act, since it was published in 2009, has more than a whiff of a pre-crash mindset -- and he is mild enough that even those who don't agree will find Political Act to be pleasant rather than hectoring. (Though I'm sure hardcore Greens are grinding their teeth at the very idea of this book.) If you actually still want to do good in the world, Political Act will give you some ideas of how you might accomplish that -- either for or against, depending on your tendencies.


[1] Women, on the other hand, are smarter than that, and less likely to be self-blinded.

Jerusalem by Guy Delisle

Everyone has their niche, their two inches of ivory that they work over so closely with a fine-haired brush. Some niches are larger than others -- project manager, superhero artist, war apologist, social novelist -- but they all bind, more or less, around the edges. Some artists fight against that niche, and some embrace it.

Guy Delisle is a cartoonist -- originally Canadian, though resident in France for some time -- whose niche is creating books about the strange foreign cities he finds himself living and working in. First was Shenzhen (see my review), about time spent working as an animation supervisor in that Chinese city. Then came Pyongyang (see my review), in which the same job took him to that very odd, constricted North Korean capital. And then there was Burma Chronicles(see my review), by which point Delisle had transitioned to a full-time long-form cartoonist, and was accompanying his partner (a Médecins Sans Frontières administrator) to the capital of the country that wants the rest of us to call it Myanmar. (Somewhere in between, he also published two books of unsettling, mostly sex-role related cartoons -- Aline and the Others and Albert and the Others -- which I also reviewed.)

Delisle's work typically has a crisp, clean line -- as one would expect from an animator working in France -- with a good eye for detail and enough description and narration to allow the drawing to be simple; he doesn't try to cram everything into either words or art.

Recently, Delisle's wife was posted by MSF to Israel for a year, and so, eventually, that experience turned itself into his most recent book, Jerusalem. It's larger and more diffuse than those previous books, over 300 pages long, and filled with lots of small stories about Delisle's and his family's life in a Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem. (And that location is the first manifestation of what will be a major concern of Jerusalem: borders, both physical and mental, and how they interleave themselves, through walls and checkpoints and bus routes and roads and prejudices.)

Jerusalem doesn't grapple directly with the legitimacy of the Israeli state, or of its treatment of Palestinians (or, conversely, with the actions of Palestinians and others against Israel), making it feel a bit politically naive at times. (Reading it in tandem with Sarah Glidden's How to Understand Israel in 60 Days Or Less -- see my review -- would be interesting; Glidden was in Israel for a short time, on a tour, specifically as a tourist on a heritage tour designed to make her intensely pro-Israel, and intensively questioned the Palestinian situation, while Delisle lived in Israel for a year, mostly among vaguely pro-Palestinian expatriates, and lives the physical discomfort of the occupation without engaging with it on a theoretical level.)

Delisle's job -- besides writing books like Jerusalem -- is a house-husband; he had two small children during that year, and just taking care of small children (even if they are in day-care part of the time) is massively time-consuming in ways that it's hard to describe. When you wake up with a toddler, you get through the day somehow, and then wonder, at the end, what you actually did during the last sixteen hours. So Delisle isn't as free to move around this year as he was in Shenzhen and Pyongyang -- but, then again, those were shorter trips, so he had more time to immerse himself in Jerusalem (and, before that, in Burma), more time to live in those places rather than just passing through them.

Jerusalem is a discursive, rambling book, equally about daily life as an expatriate in East Jerusalem and the physical problems of just moving around so militarized and controlled a country [1] as it is about Delisle's continuing attempts to sketch and draw and work on his cartoons when he has time away from his young children. It's a long, looping story, circling back to those same few concerns -- time to sketch, physical access, which day things will be open -- and is more obsessed with time (the right day, the right time of day, enough time to do something while the kids are in day-care) than one would expect. Throughout, Delisle is an interesting and thoughtful guide to Israel, showing us the things he did and saw and thought, and what it was like to live in that place for that time. I expect some people will be unhappy at Delisle's take on the Israel-Palestine situation -- people on either end of that argument, because as much as he engages with it, he's somewhere in the middle -- but that's an occupational hazard when you create books about your time in odd, contested, unlikely places. Delisle is always honest, and shows us what he sees and feels: you can't ask for more than that.


[1] His partner was posted in Gaza for most of this trip, and the one crossing into Gaza is more tightly controlled than any other gate in Israel.

Two Travel Books With Very Little In Common

The following two books are both about travel destinations somewhat near a place with "Disney" in its name, but that's about all they have in common. But I finished the two of them on subsequent days, and that's as good a reason as any to toss them together and see how they bounce off each other.

Fodor's Los Angeles: 25th Edition, edited by Rachel Klein

This book lists seven writers, an Editorial Contributor, and twelve various art/design/production folks, so pardon me if I don't name them all. I'm assuming Klein wrangled them all to turn their contributions into a book, so she'll get the credit here.

Fodor's Los Angeles appears to be a quite comprehensive guide to all of the things one might want to do while visiting the City of Angels -- quite a lot of those things seem to involve shopping for clothing, watching for moderately famous actors, or clubbing, none of which appeal to me, so I'll take the book's word for it that they are desirable activities. (My own tastes tend towards shopping for books, watching random unknown people, museum-ing, and wandering randomly, and those are totally different.)

I'll be in the LA area for about a week this fall, as part of the Hornswoggler clan's big annual trip. The main draw this time is Disneyland, but that's not enough for a whole week, so I'm doing some due diligence to figure out what else to do while we're there. (I am the official family entertainment planner -- if I don't figure out what to do, it won't be done.) Fodor's Los Angeles has a subtitle that promises coverage of Disneyland and Orange County, but that's quite secondary -- LA itself is the focus on the book, and there's a lot of city there to describe.

Fodor's is a classy, professional, long-lived travel-book series, with all that implies: a knowing tone, excellent design with lots of sidebars and charts, gorgeous color photography throughout, and a good-sized map stuck into the back. You could very easily use this one book to plan a trip and bring it along (to leave in the hotel room or chuck in the backseat of the rental car), and it would be quite valuable. Not quite so much for me, though, since my geographic focus is a bit south and west of LA itself. Still, it gave me a better grounding of the geography -- and, probably most important, emphasized that Anaheim is not LA, and getting from one to the other will take time and effort (particularly on freeways at rush hour).

The Dark Side of Disney by Leonard Kinsey

Switching gears entirely, Kinsey's Dark Side is a personal, apparently self-published guide to Walt Disney World (the one outside Orlando, Florida), with acceptable book design, some not-terribly-useful black and white photos, and more attitude than you could credit. Kinsey is a youngish man who combines in an unlikely way a deep love for all things Disney and the teenage hell-raiser's desire to find trouble and/or fun wherever he can.

Dark Side, in this one way like Caesar's Gaul, is divided into three parts: more-or-less legal and ethical ways to save money on a WDW vacation; ways to achieve sex, drugs, and rock n' roll in the parks; and a grab-bag of "tricks, tips, scams, and bugs." Kinsey's tone -- like that of a slightly less feral Jay from a Kevin Smith movie -- is the same throughout: he's discovered some totally awesome stuff to do, and he really wants to share it with you.

I shouldn't pick on Kinsey: many of his money-saving tips are smart, and a few were even both entirely aboveboard and new to me. And he takes great pains, throughout Dark Side, to keep clear what is and isn't legal, and to repeatedly advise his readers not to do the illegal stuff...or, at least, not to blame him if they get caught doing it. And Dark Side is a hoot to read, even if it's very short (156 pages of text, minus the photos I mentioned) and relies primarily on the author's own experiences, a few vaguely sourced stories, and a lot of hearsay. (David Koenig's Mouse Tales books, though not focused on giving tips to visitors of Disney parks, are much better at telling stories about what mischief people can get up to in those parks.)

If you don't expect a conventional guidebook, and are willing to loan Kinsey your benefit of the doubt, there's a lot to enjoy in Dark Side. But the definitive "dirty tricks" guide to WDW has yet to be written -- though it would likely take a team of writer-researchers at least as sneaky and smart as Kinsey is.

Greetings from High Above the Fabulous Las Vegas Strip!

I just spent the last hour cursing and trying to populate my other blog (Editorial Explanations, check it out regularly...just not right now, since there won't be any new posts until I can get back to a real computer), without much luck. The sticking point is images -- I can't seem to get them into the posts using my iPad, and that's all the computer I brought this time out.

This is deeply frustrating, since I know that I was able to blog -- including images, though the layout got a bit wonky -- last year from my conferences, and I hate to think that I've gotten technologically dumber in the past year. (I'm going to blame software updates, and not my fallible memory, if anyone asks.)

Anyway, I'm here in Las Vegas -- that most quintessentially American city, where everything is larger and flashier than a healthy person would want it to be -- and it, as usual, exacerbates my usual grumpy tendencies. I don't like people much to begin with, and, in Vegas, there are so many loathesome types of people -- ball-capped yahoos, pneumatic young women on the make, dull middle-aged losers on expense accounts, and far more corn-fed god-fearing middle Americans with kids in tow than I would have expected. (Especially in a casino hotel whose room keys promote its topless beach club.) I recognize that this is entirely my problem, but that doesn't actually help much.

The conference went well, as such things go: it's embarassing but wonderful to see how many financial professionals (here at IMA and at other shows, like last week's ACFE) know and respect Wiley as a publisher; they know our name and associate it with authoritative content and useful works, which is a tremendous compliment and goad to live up to those expectations. (Now, if only everyone were buying books the way they were a few years back, everything would be hunky-dory.)

Tomorrow is one of those unfortunate days eaten up entirely by travel that happen when going from left coast to right; my flight isn't until 11-something, so I don't get into JFK airport until nearly 8, so the day will be just about a total loss.

Now, I expect none of you actually care about any of this -- except perhaps my mother, who does read this blog; Hi, Mom! -- but inaction feeds on inaction as action feeds on action, so I want to get my fingers typing into this little Blogger box more often again, and build from there back to something worth reading. (I've got a long essay that's been half-written for nearly year; I need to get back to that, and everything else I want to do.)

I could waste time and space here attempting to be lyrical about the planes taking off from McCarran -- I can see it out of my 31st-floor window -- and the helicopters that similarly never stop buzzing by, and the mountains in the distance, and the city and suburbs bracketed by those landmarks, but I think I've rambled pointlessly long enough. The next blog entry should be from a real computer, back in my home, and, with any luck, it will also have more substance than this one.

Three Things Make a Post

Thing the First: Holidays
I hope you all had a happy Bloomsday, and are looking forward to a particularly festive Juneteenth.

For myself, this is one of the less impressive Father's Days I've had, since I had to get up at oh-dark-hundred to get to the airport for an 8 AM flight to lovely Orlando. (And, as long as I'm complaining, let me mention that I'll miss Thing 1's 8th-grade graduation ceremony on Tuesday, as well.) Woe, woe is me; I am made of woe. Someone pass me some ashes, and give me a hand over here rending my garments.

Thing the Second: Automobiles
Down here in Orlando, I'm driving a Ford something-or-other (whatever the full-size car is these days) that's probably supposed to be wine-colored, or dark purple, or something along those lines. But, to me, it looks exactly like the color of a bruise.

I'll try to get a picture of it with my iPod camera, and upload that once I'm back home.

I don't mind it as a car -- it's bigger than I'm used to, and the back window is too small, but it gets the job done. It's just that the color is more and more disconcerting as I go on; it's looking more and more thuggish by the moment.

Thing the Third: Amateurs
I never hate humanity more than when I fly, and the higher the proportion of people who don't know how to fly, the worse it is. Being stuffed into a metal tube with a hundred strangers is bad enough, but when those stranger don't even understand metal-tube etiquette, it's much worse.

I was particularly annoyed at the family who didn't realize that their toddler would be much happier sucking on something (to help pop the tyke's delicate ears) on the descent -- and even the kid knew what would help, since the rugrat was clearly screaming "baba" all the way down. The baby was in pain, and all the rest of us were annoyed -- perhaps it's a minor failure of parenting, but it's still a failure.

Amateur flyers don't know how to get on or off planes, or how (and when) to sit down. They don't know how to move through an airport. They never get out of anyone's way.

And I am now in Orlando, the Mecca of the amateur flyer, staying at a tourist hotel and commuting to a conference in a giant hotel/convention center that's about half tourist itself.

The only bright point is that I can remember last year, when this conference was at the end of a two-week, three-conference death march across the USA. This year, I'm only doing two of the three, and I get to go home for a few days in between.