Denise's sister, who happens to work for Disney, made mention of a rumor that's been persisting on the internet for a few years. The basic jist of this rumor is that Disney's famously large turkey legs available in the Magic Kingdom are not turkey but rather are emu legs.

The debate, little as there is, seems to center on two types of arguements.
- Agree with the rumor, simply on the basis that legs that large can't be turkey. Have YOU ever seen a turkey leg that big! This is quite clearly a logical falacy of distraction from ignorance.
- Disagree with the rumor, but cannot point to anything concrete that would discredit the rumor. I checked with snopes, my defacto reference for debunking urban legends, and they had nothing on this particular subject.

I tend to fall into the pro-turkey leg camp of thinking. For a number of reasons, none of them certain.
1) emu is a red meat
2) emu is still a niche market, so the thought of Disney producing that volume of product seems prohibitavly expensive.
3) The public relations headache when(not if) it is finally discovered that Disney sold emu legs under the name of turkey would be expensive and unnecessary.

So now I sit and wonder how to solve the mystery of the Disney "turkey" leg. Any thoughts?

I've got a three day weekend with my family. I took today off work, and went to Disney with Mike and Denise. Denises friend Monica joined us, and we spent a beautiful afternoon at the Magic Kingdom.

The day started simple enough. I let Denise drive with Monica in their car while I took Mike by myself in our van. They had fun chitchatting, and I had fun not listening to it. We checked into our room at Old Key Wetst, and took the bus to Magic Kingdom. Monica managed to forget her camera on her sons first visit to Disney, so I stepped up and took a bunch of photos for her.

We ate lunch at the Starlight Diner, where I got to experience a breakdown in the Disney foodservice system. My ticket was lost, people backed up, all sorts of hungry chaos. In the end, I got my lunch for free. Given Disneys food price, this turned out to be a good use of time. I ended up not spending $25, and since I was in line 30 minutes, this worked out to be a $50/hr lunch.

Other fun was had on Tom Sawyers Island. I think this island epitomized Disneys vision of family entertainment. Everyone can play. Kids as little as Mike can explore while parents like myself can explore along with them. Nobody is left behind. Contrast this with The Hulk ride at Universal. Must be 8 or older to ride, and it's too intense for many parents. Most of a family is excluded from this ride.

Otherwise, Mike was a trooper. He walked and rode the park from noon until 8pm. No complaining, no whining, just a shift from happy to tired around 8pm. We watched the Spectromagic light parade, loaded into the bus, took a bath, went to bed, all without complaint. Goodness I hope he can stay this complacent for a few more years.

I made mint cookies similar to the ones the Girl Scouts sell, except mine were fresh, and did not involve the use of transfat from partially-hydrogenated oils. They were fun to make, great to eat, and would be a hit to make with kids if I had one a little older. You can bet we'll make these again. This made a rather large batch, we'll be enjoying them for the next few weeks.

I posted the recipe in the Lists section. Look under Recipes for Girl Scout inspired mint cookies.

In honor of Oscar, or perhaps in spite of the event, I spent this weekend watching a lot of movies. One of the great sideeffects of Oscar week is that the movie channels AMC TCM? BRAVO, and others run themes specials on previous Oscar winners. I've now got a DVR full of movies, commercial free, waiting to go.

This weekend I watched the following:

My Fair Lady: I've seen this many times before, and Denise and I can both agree on this picture. It ended up winning every oscar except Best Actress, because the studio was not willing to take a chance on Julie Andrews, who then went on to win that award instead for Mary Poppins. Go figure.

West Side Story: This is a freaky adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. This may have been okay in on the stage, but it looks too wooden and scripted on film. Skip this and see the Leonardo DiCaprio remake from 1996 instead.

One Crazy Summer / Summer Rental: Two movies about summer vacations. Two rather contrasting approaches. OCS is a zany rush of unrealistic gags, body humor, and John Cusack chasing after Demi Moore. It's okay, but mostly in a druggie humor sort of way.

Summer Rental, on the other hand, was a much more personal movie. It felt more grounded in reality, more human. Rather than a college spring break, it was the adults on vacation. John Candy did a great job of showing us an exasperated parent just trying to have a vacation on the beach, only to be foiled by many things. Realistic thing, but things all the same.

In the end, both movies ended up settling their problems with the bad guy by racing them in sail boats. Go figure.

Field of Dreams. Feel good movie for men. It's the masculine equivalent of a chick-flick. I guess you could call it a dude-flick, but without the explosions. Any movie that addresses a mans relation to his dad without resorting to guns would fall into this new category I've invented. Anyway, it's a great movie, and highly deserving of the praise heaped upon in in the past.

Marathon training is still going well. I've been running now for 4 weeks. I've broken training into two phases. The first phase is a regular program to increase my speed and constitution. I run 3 times a week. The first and third run are 30 minutes long, on teh treadmill at the gym. The second run is 45 minutes long. Each week I increase the speed by 1/10 MPH. I started at 4.6 MPH, and this last week I ran all three runs at 4.9 MPH. The best part to me was that I was able to run them with relative ease. I didn't have to struggle to keep pace, didn't have to mentally push myself too hard. It was an agressive run, but not hard mentally. Tomorrow I run the speed up to 5.0 MPH. A 12-minute mile. I'm looking forward to this.

The second phase will follow exactly the schedule laid out in The Non-Runners Marathon Trainer It's a four month program that ends with the marathon itself. I'll begin this program in September, and this will lead right into the Disney Marathon in january.