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Here you leave today and enter the world of yesterday, tomorrow, and fantasy.
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Walt Disney Company
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To all that come to this happy place, welcome. Disneyland is your land. Here age relives fond memories of the past, and here youth may savor the challenge and promise of the future. Disneyland is dedicated to the ideals, the dreams, and the hard facts that have created America... with hope that it will be a source of joy and inspiration to all the world.
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Walt Disney Company
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Here is the world of imagination, hopes, and dreams. In this timeless land of enchantment, the age of chivalry, magic and make-believe are reborn - and fairy tales come true. Fantasyland is dedicated to the young-in-heart, to those who that when you wish upon a star, your dreams come true.
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Walt Disney Company
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I straighten and stretch my neck side to side. ‘I really need to hit something.’
Rafa’s mouth quirks. ‘I know what you need.’
‘In your dreams.’ I know where this is going: it’s been the same banter for about five decades now. Usually he saves it for an audience.
‘In my dreams, Gabe, you end up slick with sweat and moaning.’
‘I have food poisoning?’
He laughs, a beer halfway to his lips. Condensation drips from the bottle. He’s completely at ease here: three-quarter cargoes, frayed t-shirt, bare feet. ‘I’m just saying that if you need distracting, I’m your man.’
‘If I wanted to go places everyone else has been, Rafa, I’d take a trip to Disneyland.’
He leans in closer. ‘Yeah, but don’t you want to know why everyone loves Space Mountain?
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Paula Weston (Burn (The Rephaim, #4))
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It always rains on the unloved-wet dreams-a fishing expedition-she kisses wyverns (the disneyland analogy)-dinner etiquette and chocolate lovers-desire swears by the first circle-"things are changing"-what can possibly go wrong?
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Neil Gaiman (The Sandman, Vol. 7: Brief Lives)
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How I still see you in the rifts. The girl who still looks at me the same. No matter the form she wears, I still see you.
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Snow Liber Dionysus
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Remember; The rifts that remain open. For as long as I exist, you can never shut them. As time itself will never forget, those sad eyes you display.
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Snow Liber Dionysus
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Darling seeing you and holding your face, I would do it all again. But every time I see you in our rifts you give me those sad eyes again.
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Snow Liber Dionysus
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Just watch Snow White. Just visit Disneyland or Walt Disney World in Florida—he was laying the plans for the Florida park while he was on his death bed. People kept telling him his dreams were impossible. Walt knew better. He had wished upon a star.
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Pat Williams (How to Be Like Walt: Capturing the Disney Magic Every Day of Your Life)
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Tokyo Disneyland is an aspiring despot's wet dream.
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Our Man in Abiko (Chairman Mouse: A Tokyo Disneyland North Korea Fantasia)
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We acknowledge his place by actually following the Lamb as best we perceive him. That’s not a decision you can make once for the rest of your life. It is a continuous challenge in a hundred decisions made day after day as you learn how different his desires are from your own. The new creation is not some sort of spiritual Disneyland where your every dream comes true. It’s where Jesus’ every word and desire comes to pass.
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Wayne Jacobsen (Finding Church: What If There Really Is Something More)
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In a large sense, Main Street is the American origin story. It's an evocation of the American creation tale, and the kick is that the American origin story is a never-ending one, a perpetual tale of creation and re-creation, an eternal now.
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Leslie Le Mon (The Disneyland Book of Secrets 2014 - Disneyland: One Local's Unauthorized, Rapturous and Indispensable Guide to the Happiest Place on Earth)
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I have never been one of those girls who's always dreamed of Paris. Of being proposed to at Disneyland, getting trussed up like a Christmas cake on their wedding day, of a nice white kitchen with a French bulldog. It must be nice to want everything you're supposed to want.
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Celine Saintclare (Sugar, Baby)
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let's let the bombs go
I'm tired of waiting
I've put away my toys
folded the road maps
canceled my subscription to Time
kissed Disneyland goodbye
I've taken the flea collars off my cats
unplugged the tv
I no longer dream of pink flamingoes
I no longer check the market index
let's let 'em go
let's let 'em blow
I'm tired of waiting
I don't like this kind of blackmail
I don't like governments playing cutesy with my life:
either crap or get off the pot
I'm tired of waiting
I'm tired of dangling
I'm tired of the fix
let the bombs blow
you cheap sniveling cowardly nations
you mindless giants
do it
do it
do it!
and escape to your planets and space stations
then you can fuck it
up there too.
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Charles Bukowski (You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense)
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recorded his family’s experiences year after year. He did so in such an entertaining and original manner that his films have gradually become classics. In Disneyland Dream, the family – father, mother, and three children aged between four and eleven – enters a competition sponsored by the then-new Scotch tape. The winners are to be treated to a trip – by airplane! – to the recently opened Disneyland in Anaheim, California. Lo and behold the youngest child, Danny, wins first prize with the indomitable slogan: ‘I like “Scotch” brand cellophane tape because when some things tear then I can just use it.’ Excitement all round, and the Barstows’ neighbours step out into their front gardens to wave the family off. Then comes the thrilling
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Geert Mak (In America: Travels with John Steinbeck)
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On the face of it, life was God-fearing and respectable. Almost sixty per cent of American families owned their own homes, an unprecedented figure. The divorce rate was remarkably low, at 8.9 couples per thousand all told in 1958. According to Gallup polls, in 1940 a third of American adults went to church every week; by 1955 the proportion had risen to around half. To the ‘happiness question’, more than half of all Americans answered ‘very happy’ in 1957. Never had there been so much quantifiable happiness, and never would there be so much again. Anyone wishing to be catapulted back into the America of those years should take a look on YouTube at the home movie Disneyland Dream, filmed in the summer of 1956 by enthusiastic amateur filmmaker Robbins Barstow, who
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Geert Mak (In America: Travels with John Steinbeck)
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The Oreo cookie invented, the Titanic sinks, Spanish flu, Prohibition, women granted the right to vote, Lindbergh flies solo across the Atlantic, penicillin invented, stock market crashes, the Depression, Amelia Earhart, the atom is split, Prohibition ends, Golden Gate Bridge is built, Pearl Harbor, D-Day, the Korean War, Disneyland, Rosa Parks, Laika the dog is shot into space, hula hoops, birth control pill invented, Bay of Pigs, Marilyn Monroe dies, JFK killed, MLK has a dream, Vietnam War, Star Trek, MLK killed, RFK killed, Woodstock, the Beatles (George, Ringo, John, and Paul) break up, Watergate, the Vietnam War ends, Nixon resigns, Earth Day, Fiddler on the Roof, Olga Korbut, Patty Hearst, Transcendental Meditation, the ERA, The Six Million Dollar Man.
"Bloody hell," I said when she was done.
"I know. It must be a lot to take in."
"It's unfathomable. A Brit named his son Ringo Starr?"
She looked pleasantly surprised: she'd thought I had no sense of humor.
"Well, I think his real name was Richard Starkey.
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Melanie Gideon (Valley of the Moon)
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Evans [the landscape architect] took a transparency of the master plan and placed it over an aerial photograph of the property at the same scale. He marked all the trees that were not in the middle of the street or in the Rivers of America and tried to work around them. Evans tagged trees that were to be saved with green ribbons, and he tagged trees to be removed with red ribbons. His efforts were futile. As it turned out, the bulldozer operator was color-blind and they lost dozens of trees that were 50-100 years old. More than 12,000 orange trees were removed.
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Sam Gennawey (Disneyland Story: The Unofficial Guide to the Evolution of Walt Disney's Dream (Unofficial Guides))
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Using the castle to transition between lands was a visual trick Walt called a weenie. According to Disney historian Jim Korkis, during the development of Disneyland, Walt would come home late at night and usually enter his house through the kitchen, which was closer to the garage. He would walk into the kitchen and grab two uncooked hot dogs, or wieners, one for himself and one for his dog. Korkis said, "By wiggling the treat, Walt could get his dog to go from side to side, around in a circle, jump up and more. Both Walt and the dog loved the game and she was finally rewarded with the tasty and satisfying treat."
"Each of the gateways into the lands offered weenies. The spinning carousel through the portal leading through Sleeping Beauty Castle called guests into Fantasyland. The stockade gates, the steam bellowing from the Mark Twain stern-wheeler, and the seeming infinite horizon beckoned guests to visit Frontierland. Over in Tomorrowland was the clock of the World and the TWA Moonliner ready for launch. Only Adventureland lacked a weenie. It was thought that if guests knew too much, it would not be much of an adventure.
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Sam Gennawey (Disneyland Story: The Unofficial Guide to the Evolution of Walt Disney's Dream (Unofficial Guides))
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For many, it's a once-in-a-lifetime, long dreamed-of and longed-saved-for trip. Pennies have been pinched and sacrifices made to make the vacation a reality. All Guests' wallets will be separated from a great deal of money, like trout expertly filleted, but it will be a curious;y painless experience, for all but a few, the trip will be transcendently and sublimely worth every sacrifice and penny.
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Leslie Le Mon (The Disneyland Book of Secrets 2014 - DCA: One Local's Unauthorized, Rapturous and Indispensable Guide to the Happiest Place on Earth)
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Disney archivist Dave Smith said, "Disneyland's true appeal, we admit now, is to adults. Children don't need it. Their imaginations are enough. For them, Disneyland is only another kind of reality, somewhat less marvelous than their own fantasies.
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Sam Gennawey (Disneyland Story: The Unofficial Guide to the Evolution of Walt Disney's Dream (Unofficial Guides))
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Too bad you can’t earn a Ph.D. in dreaming!
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Jeffrey A. Barnes (The Wisdom of Walt: Leadership Lessons from the Happiest Place on Earth (Disneyland): Success Strategies for Everyone (from Walt Disney and Disneyland))
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must never stop dreaming.
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Jeffrey A. Barnes (The Wisdom of Walt: Leadership Lessons from the Happiest Place on Earth (Disneyland): Success Strategies for Everyone (from Walt Disney and Disneyland))
“
VR is not as new as it seems: It germinated inside Alan Kay’s research lab at Atari. The lab collapsed when Atari did, scattering Kay’s people across the Valley, but a young, dreadlocked, programming prodigy, Jaron Lanier, continued the research on his own dime. His original goal was to revive an old dream. Like Doug Engelbart and Alan Kay, Lanier wanted to create a computing environment that was immersive, flexible, and empowering. The difference was the interface. Engelbart invented the mouse. Alan Kay added the desktop metaphor. And in Lanier’s iteration, one donned goggles and gloves and stepped into virtual reality. Lanier actually coined the phrase. And the whole point of this new, all-enveloping interface was to be able to program the computer from the inside. There was just one problem: Once people got inside the computer, virtually no one wanted to code. There was a whole world in there, a cyberdelic Disneyland just waiting to be explored. Lanier thought he was building a next-generation programming language with the corresponding next-generation graphical user interface, but what people experienced was something a lot more fun. VR was The Well’s cyberspace made real. Taking advantage of the ensuing limelight, Lanier swiftly assumed a more Jobs-like role and marketed the heck out of his virtual reality machine, but in the end, the cost of an E ticket was just too high.
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Adam Fisher (Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom))
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I say, “This Nazi Disneyland stuff, it’s too cheap and easy. It’s like something the Kissi would dream up.” That’s hitting below the belt. Calling a Hellion a Kissi is like calling Chuck Norris Joseph Stalin. Buer looks like he wants to stuff the blueprints down my throat with a road flare. Obyzuth and Semyazah look at me like they caught me eating cookies before dinner. Marchosias raises her eyebrows, which is about an inch from her challenging me to a duel at dawn.
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Richard Kadrey (The Kill Society (Sandman Slim, #9))
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The original Tom Sawyer Island was perhaps the most deeply personal expression of Walt's own boyhood dreams to be found anywhere in Disneyland. Tom Sawyer Island is the playground Walt wished he could have had as a boy. It's the only attractraction in the Park that Walt himself drew up with his own hands, in his barn on Carolwood Drive.
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Jim Denney (Walt's Disneyland: It's Still There If You Know Where to Look)
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Today, the Main Street Opera House, the first building ever constructed at Disneyland, houses the park bench where Walt first dreamed of Disneyland.
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Jeffrey Barnes (The Wisdom of Walt: Leadership Lessons from the Happiest Place on Earth (Disneyland): Success Strategies for Everyone (from Walt Disney and Disneyland))
Jeffrey Barnes (The Wisdom of Walt: Leadership Lessons from the Happiest Place on Earth (Disneyland): Success Strategies for Everyone (from Walt Disney and Disneyland))
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And the bigger your dream, the bigger your dragon.
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Jeffrey Barnes (The Wisdom of Walt: Leadership Lessons from the Happiest Place on Earth (Disneyland): Success Strategies for Everyone (from Walt Disney and Disneyland))
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I’m living an “a-ticket” dream. That’s the ticket you would need back then for something lame, like riding the trolley, walking through the staircases of Sleeping Beauty’s castle, or sitting in the theater to watch an Abraham Lincoln robot put you to sleep. Four snores and seven years ago.
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GLEN NESBITT (SUS: Short Unpredictable Stories)
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I really like Disneyland, you know.” “Ugh.” I screwed up my face. “I hate it.” “I thought so.” He chuckled. As always when he laughed, his small round eyes went all black and his long eyelashes fluttered. “Nobody ever mentions the person inside the cartoon-character costume, do they? Everyone’s lying a bit. That’s what makes it a dream country. Our world isn’t any different, is it? Everyone keeps telling little lies, and that’s how the mirage is created. That’s why it’s beautiful—because it’s a momentary make-believe world.
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Sayaka Murata (Life Ceremony)
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All of our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them
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Jeffrey Barnes (The Wisdom of Walt: Leadership Lessons from the Happiest Place on Earth (Disneyland): Success Strategies for Everyone (from Walt Disney and Disneyland))
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Like newborn babies, your dreams, your ideas, your goals, your ambitions, and your visions must be guarded and protected.
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Jeffrey Barnes (The Wisdom of Walt: Leadership Lessons from the Happiest Place on Earth (Disneyland): Success Strategies for Everyone (from Walt Disney and Disneyland))
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Big dreams require big canvases.
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Jeffrey Barnes (The Wisdom of Walt: Leadership Lessons from the Happiest Place on Earth (Disneyland): Success Strategies for Everyone (from Walt Disney and Disneyland))
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Be excited about your dreams, ideas, and future. Trust the process. Most importantly, trust your passion.
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Jeffrey Barnes (The Wisdom of Walt: Leadership Lessons from the Happiest Place on Earth (Disneyland): Success Strategies for Everyone (from Walt Disney and Disneyland))
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Dreams, like children, don’t raise themselves.
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Jeffrey Barnes (The Wisdom of Walt: Leadership Lessons from the Happiest Place on Earth (Disneyland): Success Strategies for Everyone (from Walt Disney and Disneyland))
“
Heaven is a dream of Disneyland for those unable to act here on Earth.
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Samantha Hunt (Mr. Splitfoot)
“
Dreams, like children, don’t raise themselves. Like
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Jeffrey A. Barnes (The Wisdom of Walt: Leadership Lessons from the Happiest Place on Earth (Disneyland): Success Strategies for Everyone (from Walt Disney and Disneyland))
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Kids’ Bedtime Excuses 1. There’s a fly in my room. 2. Well, what time are you going to bed? 3. There’s no ice in my water and I clearly stated that I wanted ice water. 4. This is the wrong cup for my water. 5. I think one of my knees is bigger than the other. 6. My lips are chapped. 7. The tag in my jammies is bothering me. 8. “I’m having a bad dream.” “But you haven’t fallen asleep yet.” “Touché.” 9. I think someone stole my blankie. 10. My feet itch. 11. I’m wondering when we can go to Disneyland again. 12. My hair feels funny. 13. I’m worried that kangaroos bite. 14. Am I allergic to anything? 15. Can I have dessert again? 16. I want to sleep in your room. 17. You forgot to tuck me in. 18. My brain is telling me funny jokes and I need to share them with you. 19. My lamp is too loud. 20. My socks are too tight. 21. There’s a penny in my bed. 22. I can’t figure out why pudding is so delicious. 23. I forgot what comes after twenty-nine. 24. It’s not dark enough outside. 25. My legs are hot.
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Stefanie Wilder-Taylor (Gummi Bears Should Not Be Organic: And Other Opinions I Can't Back Up With Facts)
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It's whatever you make of it, whatever you want to take away. Because like all of the best virtual realities, Disneyland interacts with its visitors. It becomes what we seek, and we contribute.
Disneyland can be as simple as a fun place to spend a couple of hours. Ride a roller coaster. Wave to Mickey. Eat an ice cream cone. Watch a parade.
And Disneyland can be deeply important, as sacred, as the irreplaceable home of our deepest values and dreams, everything that's best, bright and beautiful in the human spirit.
As always,Walt said it best 'Disneyland is a work of love.
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Leslie Le Mon (The Disneyland Book of Secrets 2014 - Disneyland: One Local's Unauthorized, Rapturous and Indispensable Guide to the Happiest Place on Earth)
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If you can dream it, you can do it.
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Steve Walters (Biography of Walt Disney: The Inspirational Life Story of Walt Disney - The Man Behind “Disneyland” (Biographies of Famous People Series))
“
Disneyland used to have many other companies with employees working at Disneyland, and those companies had their own hiring practices. As for Disneyland itself, the minimum age to be a cast member fluctuated. Sometimes applicants had to be 18 to be considered, sometimes 16 and 17 year-olds could work for Disney.
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Ken Pellman (Cleaning the Kingdom: Insider Tales of Keeping Walt's Dream Spotless)
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Parents: don't be ashamed if your child wants to be a Disneyland Custodian. They know more than most cast members at the park, and get plenty of exercise. It is a good way to learn to talk with people, too, from all over the world. I think one can get many things out of Custodial as one applies oneself and works hard.
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Ken Pellman (Cleaning the Kingdom: Insider Tales of Keeping Walt's Dream Spotless)
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Annually on NYE, Disneyland would usually have fireworks at 9:00 p.m. to coincide with Midnight on the East Coast, where ABC’s New Year’s Eve broadcast was based.
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Ken Pellman (Cleaning the Kingdom: Insider Tales of Keeping Walt's Dream Spotless)
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It is my (Ken’s) opinion that it took over 43 years of operation before there was a guest killed at Disneyland who did absolutely nothing to bring about his own death. Then, less than five years after that first instance, there was a second one.
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Ken Pellman (Cleaning the Kingdom: Insider Tales of Keeping Walt's Dream Spotless)
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Are you wanting to begin an exercise routine or yoga practice? Visit Disneyland? Pay off debts? Whatever your goals include, find an image that represents each dream and post them somewhere. You can create a paper vision board and cut out pictures from magazines or a digital vision board and paste photos on a notes page.
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Stephanie Ewing (The Shower Habit: 10 Steps to Increase Energy, Boost Confidence, and Achieve Your Goals Without Waking Up Earlier (Optimize Your Life Series, #1))
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Your first step to success is to do exactly what Walt did. Nothing. Take a Saturday and sit. Take a Sunday to think. Take a weekend to DREAM. I believe every successful person needs a park bench—that personal place where we can plan, set goals, and allow our imaginations to run wild. Your park bench is any place where you can begin to envision a bigger and better tomorrow.
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Jeffrey A. Barnes (The Wisdom of Walt: Leadership Lessons from the Happiest Place on Earth (Disneyland): Success Strategies for Everyone (from Walt Disney and Disneyland))
“
It is not–I can’t emphasize this enough–that we don’t have it good. Far from it. If anything, kids today are struggling under the burden of too much pampering. According to Jean Twenge, a psychologist at San Diego State University who has conducted detailed research into the attitudes of young adults now and in the past, there has been a sharp rise in self-esteem since the 1980s. The younger generation considers itself smarter, more responsible, and more attractive than ever. “It’s a generation in which every kid has been told, ‘You can be anything you want. You’re special,’” explains Twenge.29 We’ve been brought up on a steady diet of narcissism, but as soon as we’re released into the great big world of unlimited opportunity, more and more of us crash and burn. The world, it turns out, is cold and harsh, rife with competition and unemployment. It’s not a Disneyland where you can wish upon a star and see all your dreams come true, but a rat race in which you have no one but yourself to blame if you don’t make the grade. Not surprisingly, that narcissism conceals an ocean of uncertainty. Twenge also discovered that we have all become a lot more fearful over the last decades. Comparing 269 studies conducted between 1952 and 1993, she concluded that the average child living in early 1990s North America was more anxious than psychiatric patients in the early 1950s.30 According to the World Health Organization, depression has even become the biggest health problem among teens and will be the number-one cause of illness worldwide by 2030.31
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Rutger Bregman (Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World)
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We create Hollywood and Disneyland to carry our projections of greatness. But as a society we are putting ourselves at risk in this process, for a celebrity may not be a true hero. As the great mythologist Joseph Campbell once pointed out, the celebrity lives only for his or her own ego, while the hero acts to redeem society. We have many celebrities but few true heroes these days. Modern Westerners have evolved psychologically to the point where we are placing our gold on living beings rather than dead bones, as was done in medieval times, but it remains to be seen whether we can learn to carry our own gold and find heaven within instead of without.
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Robert A. Johnson (Balancing Heaven and Earth: A Memoir of Visions, Dreams, and Realizations)
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She dreamed of living in Paris,
lush hair, aristocratic beauty,
porcelain skin, rosy cheeks,
silken lingerie, leather sandals,
on the outside – Disneyland,
on the inside – the Louvre,
her loves were revolutions,
her breakups – battles at Waterloo,
she dreamed of living in Paris,
not knowing that Paris
was already living in her.
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Djura Kelj (Mir More Ljubav)
“
She dreamed of living in Paris.
Lush hair, aristocratic beauty,
porcelain skin, rosy cheeks,
silken lingerie, leather sandals.
On the outside – Disneyland,
on the inside – the Louvre.
Her loves were revolutions,
her breakups – battles at Waterloo.
She dreamed of living in Paris,
not knowing that Paris
was already living in her.
”
”
Djura Kelj (Mir More Ljubav)