Saturday, 16 July 2011

Electric Fan

Tomorrow is Disneyland’s 56th anniversary. July 17 fell on a Sunday that year, too; a day when everything that could go wrong did. Three times the expected number of guests showed up. Vendors ran out of food. A gas leak shut down Fantasyland. A plumber’s strike left much of the park without drinking fountains. Temperatures over 100 degrees melted the new asphalt, and ladies’ high heels sank in. An overloaded Mark Twain Riverboat sank in The Rivers of America. Coincidentally, the very first air conditioner was patented on July 17, 1902. Disneyland didn’t get its first air conditioner until 1963, when the Enchanted Tiki Room opened. And then it was to cool the Audio-Animatronics, not the guests. My house in England, like most homes and businesses here, has no air conditioning. My neighbors’ attitude towards A/C is, “If you had it, you’d get us
ed to it. Then you’d NEED it, right?”

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