Coyote Blog

The other day I got stuck in Orlando for a day and took the opportunity to sit it out at DisneyWorld.  Despite being essentially a walk-up guest, the hotel upgraded me to a beautiful room looking out at the Magic Kingdom and the lake in front of it.

The Magic Kingdom is an interesting public transit case.  It is located miles away, across a lake, from its parking lot and can be quite a distance from many of the Disney hotels.  So most everyone comes to the Magic Kingdom in some sort of mass transit.

The most eye catching is the DisneyWorld monorail.  This version, designed in the late 1980's but fairly similar in outline to the original early-70's version, is clearly beautiful.  When I talk about industrial design, I often use a scale where 1 is the Boston City Hall and 10 is the Disneyworld monorail.  Not only are the trains themselves beautiful, but the spindly monorail beams are clearly better looking than most any other overhead rail arrangement.

But what makes for a good theme park ride does not necessarily make for good public transportation.  Here is why:

1. Monorails like this give up all the efficiency of trains.  Rail is efficient because the rolling friction of a flanged metal wheel on a metal rail is so much lower than, say, a tire on concrete.  But these monorails and most others ride on tires -- there is rolling friction of the tires on the top of the concrete beam as well as with the tires that stabilize the train on the sides of the beam.  These monorails are basically long busses up on a rail.
2. Monorails have lower capacity per car than trains.  For stability reasons on the narrow beam, monorails must be shorter and narrower than most rail trains (even given the world's too-narrow rail gauge standard).  This means for roughly the same car length and weight, they carry fewer passengers.
3. Monorails have the same downsides of trains.  They have capacity restrictions -- specifically they need much longer headways between trains for safety than busses do on the road.  And they are inflexible -- once you spend billions of dollars to put them on one route they are going to stay on that route.

As I sat on the lake, I could see all three modes of transit that Disney uses at the Magic Kingdom.  Both monorails and high capacity double-deck ferries run from the parking lot to the park, and busses run from most of the hotels to a bus depot at the park.  I could be wrong because it was not scientific, but I believe that the ferry boats had a lot more capacity per hour than the monorails -- particularly since Disney had to lengthen the distance between trains several years ago after an accident (yes, they actually have a single loop of track with no switching a couple of miles long and with perfect visibility ahead and they actually had a collision).

More telling is the fact that Disney has essentially abandoned the monorail for all its future expansions.  Yes, they built one to Epcot, but they have reduced service to one every 15 minutes or so and it brings in an absolutely trivial portion of the guests.  With its growing network of parks and hotels and all the possible point to point destination pairs, it relies on busses now almost exclusively for internal transport.

I achieved my goal and completed my first (and last) marathon on Sunday, roughly in the time I expected.  I wasn't going to actually discuss the time (to people who ask my time I usually answer "daytime"), but upon reflection I think it would be good to do so to encourage others who might be slow but considering running a marathon.

I ran the race from first to last almost dead-on 13 minutes a mile.  That is pretty damn slow, even for an amateur, but for me given I was suffering from osteo-arthritis in both knees and pretty bad plantar fasciitis in my right foot, it was about what I expected.  I was more proud that I kept on pace for the whole 26.2 miles -- my second 13 miles was 1 minute faster than my first 13, and my last mile was faster than the first.  This was a big change from half-marathons I have run in the past when I pretty much died in the last 20% of the race.

The real difference was Galloway's run-walk-run method.  I used 3-minute cycles where I would run at about 10-1/2 to 11 minute mile pace for 2 minutes and then walk for 1 minute.  I stuck with the program for the whole race, and as a result I was passing a lot of people in the last few miles who passed me in the first few.  At one low point around mile ten a 13-year-old girl in a wonder woman outfit zoomed past me, but I ran her down around mile 24 and beat her to the finish line.  A very satisfying triumph.

In terms of managing my body problems, there were surprising positives and negatives.  The cortisone shots I had two weeks before the race on my knees worked fabulously and my knees were never an issue.  My plantar fasciitis was mostly kept in check by the arch support I was wearing, though it hurt like bloody hell the next morning when I woke up.  I never did find the perfect solution to my underlapping toe and I had to stop twice to take my shoe off and re-tape my toes.  I did not have the hunger pangs I experienced on earlier long runs -- the carbo loading for several days in advance really helped and I ate two of these on the way and they were a surprisingly good food for the purpose.  The real problem I had in the last 4-5 miles was that my back started to really hurt.  Oh, and I also had to resist temptation as I ran past several frozen margarita stands in the last 2 miles (though at the finish I saw a fair number of folks had stopped and bought a cocktail for the last mile).

That last point brings me to some encouragement for those thinking about doing this but who are intimidated by being too slow.  It took me over 5-1/2 hours to finish and I finished in the top half of all finishers and the top half of all men.  I was something like finisher 9,500 out of 20,000.  People were still crossing the finish line 2 hours after I finished.  Oddly, the only subgroup I did not finish in the top half of  were men 55-60, as there seems to be an odd dynamic in these distance races such that there are not very many older folks, but the ones that are there are very serious and on something like their 50th marathon.

Some of this prevalence of slow runners is due to the fact it is a Disney marathon and you get a certain crowd for RunDisney events, but I wouldn't be surprised if the same kind of numbers did not obtain in races like the PF Changs.  In fact, I can't recommend the Disney races enough.  They are well-organized, low-key, and full of interesting distractions along the way such as characters and bands and of course running through theme parks.  And the medals are way better at Disney than other amateur races, and you get the fun of many runners in costume.  In this race there is even a tradition of having a roller coaster in operation (Expedition Everest) at the halfway point for runners who can jump on the coaster for a ride and then jump back off to finish the race.

Postscript:  The one problem with the Disney races is that they start at 5:30 AM, though my corral seldom gets to the start line until about 6:00.  In this race, the temperature at the start was about 40F, which is super cold for this Arizona boy, and was about 65F at the finish, which means I donated about 4 pieces of clothing along the way as I had to strip as I ran.

About 18 months ago I was diagnosed with osteo-arthritis in both my knees, though of course I had been experiencing some pain before that.  The condition has become increasingly irritating not just because of the knee pain, but because the pain leads to a second condition called a Bakers Cyst (also known as water on the knee) that adds new pains in the back of both my upper and lower legs.

For years my exercise of choice has been running.  I have run in many of the world's cities (except for Bangkok -- only a crazy person would run the streets there) and find the experience synergistic -- the new sights keeps me from being bored in my runs and the running helps me see details of a city I might have missed.  I am not really competitive, but I have run four or five half-marathons and a number of shorter races.

It has become clear I have to give this all up.  So I decided to go out with a bang, and run my first and last marathon, which will be January 7 at Disneyworld (I love the Disney marathons because the vibe is pretty chill, there are lots of fun things to look at as you run through the parks and past characters and bands, and the medals are really nice).  I usually run in costume for the Disney races but I think not for this race -- I will be shedding every pound;  I am considering cutting off the ends of my shoelaces to save weight ;-)

The big event comes in the next few weeks when my doctor is going to shoot me up with cortisone in each knee and drain my Bakers cysts.  From past experience, this will help a ton.  Even without the cortisone I have done a couple of 16-18 mile runs in addition to my daily running of 6-ish miles so I am fairly sure I will make it.

The first question I always get is what time am I shooting for.  Timing for my distance race performances is generally by google calendar.   I did my last half in around 2:30 so extrapolating that I will likely be far behind Oprah's time of 4:29, but I think my ego can survive.

Once the race is over, I have already found my new preferred form of excercise.  The eliptical machine feels good with my knees but I hate excercising indoors.  Biking can be fun but my *ss always falls asleep.  So I bought one of these bad boys and am already having a lot of fun with it.  Super expensive, but hopefully prices will come down if they get popular.

It is hard not to be conflicted about Elon Musk.  On the good side, he is pursuing fabulous and exciting goals  - space travel, high speed transportation, cheap tunnels, ubiquitous electric cars.  Listening to Musk is like riding through Disney's various Tomorrowland visions.  As a consumer, I love him.

As a taxpayer, I am not so thrilled.  Many of his companies (SolarCity and Tesla in particular) seem designed primarily as magnets for government subsidies.

But it is his shareholders I really have to wonder about.  I can't remember anyone in my lifetime who was so good at serving his shareholders Spam and convincing them they were eating filet mignon from a Michelin three star restaurant.  He announces quarter after quarter of failed expectations and greater-than-expected losses and then stands on stage and spins out all new visions and his fan-boys bid the stock to new all-time highs -- in fact to market valuations higher than GM, Ford, Nissan, or Honda.  Tesla's debt priced in the last offering well above what it should have given its rating and risks.   I thought his purchase by Tesla of his near-bankrupt other company Solar City had no strategic logic and was borderline corrupt, but my brother-in-law who is arguably a more successful entrepreneur than I thought it was brilliant, an example of Musk playing chess when everyone else is playing checkers.

So last week Tesla announced a really bad third quarter.  They lost a lot more money than they said they would, and produced a lot fewer of their new Model 3 cars than they promised.  Their manufacturing operations are in disarray and they are burning cash like crazy, such that the billions of funding they just raised will get burned up in just a couple more months.

But Tesla needs to stay hot.  California is considering new vehicle subsidy laws that are hand-crafted to pour money mainly into Tesla's pocket.  Cash is burning fast, and Musk is going to have to go back to the capital markets again, likely before the end of the year.  So out came Musk yesterday to yell

Tesla's main current problem is that they cannot seem to get up to volume production of their main new offering, the Model 3.  The factory appears to be in disarray and out of production and inventory space.  They can't produce enough batteries yet for the cars they are already making.  So what does Musk do?  Announce two entirely new vehicle platforms for tiny niche markets.

A workhorse truck and a new super car are in the works for Tesla, after founder and CEO Elon Musk introduced his company's latest effort to widen the U.S. market for electric vehicles Thursday night. Musk called the Roadster "the fastest production car ever made, period."

Musk unveiled the Roadster toward the end of an event that was supposed to be all about Tesla's new Semi trucks. Taking a page from Apple and other tech companies in using showmanship to wow crowds, Musk surprised the crowd by announcing there was one more thing to add — and the new car rolled out of the truck's trailer.

After touting the utility and efficiency of what he called a game-changing truck, Musk welcomed the Roadster to cheers from those attending the event at the Hawthorne Municipal Airport near Los Angeles.

You have to hand it to Musk -- no other car company could get a good bump in their stock by displaying what essentially are two concept cars with infinitesimal revenue potential.  Expect Tesla to have a bond or stock offering out soon while everyone still has stars in their eyes from these new vehicles and before anyone can refocus on production and profitability issues.

John Scalzi often posts some of his more over-the-top one-star Amazon book reviews as a sort of self therapy.  I have done the same think in the past with our online campground and TripAdviser reviews.  Here is a two star review we received the other day for our Juniper Springs facility in Florida.

I have had problems with employees here in the past telling lies about me to other campers & employees, because my extreme good looks are a threat to them somehow. I am an Actor. The amount of jealousy is ridiculous. I won't repeat any of it here, but the defamation & slander has been pretty extreme. I am camped here now for a planned long stay, & if they come off with that crap again I plan to sue them individually & as a company.

As for the campground itself, I love it. The showers are awesome & the best in the forest. They have bear boxes now to store food, but these seem large enough to hide a couple of people. Can be opened from the inside easily..in an emergency I'd go for it. There are No Electric sites, which makes things difficult. But it is far enough away from civilization to make sleeping at night quiet & peaceful, with an occasional smooth hum of a tractor trailer going by.

The last part of the review was nice but the first paragraph was a total head-scratch.  I have polled the staff and no one has any idea who this person is or what he is referring to.  I usually respond to negative reviews online but have no idea what to write on this one.  I sent a private message to the customer to please give me a bit more detail so I can investigate.

By the way, one of the reasons I think we are successful is that I have systems in  place where nearly every negative review from a variety of sources, including our own surveys, flow right to my inbox.  I read every one, and respond to most.

As a second by the way, the Juniper Springs canoe run is a very special experience if you are ever in the area and like that sort of thing.  It is not for beginners, but it is one of the most beautiful wild areas in Florida.  When the author of the Unofficial Guide to DisneyWorld was asked in the back of his book what his favorite attraction in Florida was, he did not answer Disney or Universal but said the Juniper Springs canoe run.

My daughter and I had a lot of fun putting this together.  The back side is a sort of playhouse, with lots of little references to various Disney animated movies.

How often does Amazon fail to deliver Prime shipments in two days?  I have no idea -- I know it has happened to me sometimes, but they don't publish the metric.  What is the average wait time on the phone with the IRS?  We don't know.  What is the average wait time at a TSA checkpoint?  We don't know.

One thing we most certainly do know, and can know any time on any day, is the current wait time for any Disney ride.  I bring this up because some goofball in the Obama Administration made this absurd statement trying to justify the lack of transparency for VA wait times:

When you go to Disney, do they measure the number of hours you wait in line? Or what’s important? What’s important is, what’s your satisfaction with the experience?” McDonald said Monday during a Christian Science Monitor breakfast with reporters. “And what I would like to move to, eventually, is that kind of measure.”

Bruce McQuain rightly points out the downside of a longer wait for Space Mountain is just a tiny bit lower than the downside of waiting for heart surgery.

But I want to add that this statement is not even close to being factually correct on its face.  Here is an example of a site that has Disney ride wait times in real time, but there are dozens of apps and sites with this info because Disney makes the data public in an API most anyone can access.  (My favorite is Touring Plans, which has built a whole Disney trip planning business on top of Disney published wait time data -- as an aside, if you are a Disney fan or future visitor, you should join).

But I would go further.  I know for a fact that Disney spends a ton of time internally planning and improving ride throughput and capacity entirely with an eye to reducing wait times (and also, by the way, to making design changes that make ride waits more enjoyable with in-line activities).  They have a sophisticated operational research staff working on this all the time, and they are constantly tweaking their Fastpass system which would not even begin to work correctly if they did not understand ride wait times down to the second decimal place.  And by the way, if their management found out that some folks in their organization were fudging line wait time data, I am pretty sure the offenders would not be working there any more (as they are at the VA).

Postscript:  I am still amazed by the fail here.  Anyone who has been to Disney even once will know that all wait times are displayed all over the park on boards, and that at each ride, every few minutes a customer will get an electronic card at the beginning of the ride that precisely times their wait.   Seriously, where do they get folks like this who can blithely utter nonsense as if they know what they are talking about.  The whole premise is screwed up.  Yes, good service companies measure overall satisfaction. This is marginally useful data, but what does one do with it?  To really fix and improve the experience, one also has to measure many important bits of the experience.  Saying that one should pay attention to only one output metric and nothing else would get you laughed out of any quality course I have ever been to.

Update:  Also, I would add that there is a lot of market pressure on the wait time issue pushing Disney to improvement on lines, market pressure that does not exist on the VA (which is one reason they totally lack any accountability).  Disney has its FastPass system for helping guests manage ride waits, but both Universal and Six Flags have their own different systems (Universal has a higher level ticket you can buy that gets you preferred access to all rides, Six Flags Magic Mountain has a pager system where you tell it which ride you want to do next and they page you when your place is ready).

People act as if it is something new and different when actors shoot scenes and 95% of the space on the screen is later filled in by CGI.  This has actually been going on for decades with matte paintings on glass.  Movie scenes were either filmed directly through the glass (there are some great examples in the linked article with Disney artists painting sailing ships on a bay for filming) or reshot later by projecting the original film and reshooting it with the matte art.

Here is a an example before and after the painted matt.  Just like CGI, only CGI can add movement and dynamic elements

I had thought all this stuff was done in post production but apparently Disney at least shot a lot of scenes straight through a matte.  I love this guy, sitting on the beach painting ships on glass so they would be sitting on the bay in the scene.  You can almost imagine the actors tapping their feet waiting for him to be finished.

Much of the beauty of the original Star Wars movie was in its great matte paintings, not only of planets but of the large Death Star interior scenes.

How did Disney buy Star Wars for only $4 billion?  I first saw this question asked by Kevin Drum, though I can't find the link (and I am not going to feel guilty about it after Mother Jones banned me for some still-opaque reason).  But Disney is going to release a new movie every year, and if it is anything like the Marvel franchise, they are going to milk it for a lot of money.  Plus TV tie-ins.  Plus merchandising.  Plus they are rebuilding much of their Hollywood Studios park at DisneyWorld in a Star Wars theme.

The answer is that this is the kind of deal that makes trading in a free market a win-win rather than zero-sum.  Lucas, I think, was played out and had no ability, or no desire, to do what it would take to make the franchise worth $4 billion.  On the flip side Disney is freaking good a milking a franchise for all its worth (there is none better at this) and so $4 billion is starting to appear cheap from their point of view.

By the way, Disney is going to need the profits from Star Wars to fill in the hole ESPN is about to create.  A huge percentage of the rents in the cable business have historically flowed to ESPN, which is able to command per-subscriber fees from cable companies that dwarf any other network. Times are a-changin' though, as pressure increases from consumers to unbundle.  If cable companies won't unbundle, then consumers will do it themselves, cutting the cable and creating their own bundles from streaming offerings.

ESPN is already seeing falling subscriber numbers, and everyone thinks this is just going to accelerate.  ESPN is in a particularly bad position when revenues fall, because most of its costs are locked up under long-term contracts for the acquisition of sports broadcasting rights. It can't easily cut costs to keep up with falling revenues.  It is like a bank that has lent long and borrowed short, and suddenly starts seeing depositors leave.   And this is even before discussing competition, which has exploded -- every major pro sports league has its own network, major college athletic conferences have their own network, and competitors such as Fox and NBC seem to keep adding more channels.

Six of the ten highest paid CEO's run media companies.

Six of the 10 highest-paid CEOs last year worked in the media industry, according to a study carried out by executive compensation data firm Equilar and The Associated Press.

The best-paid chief executive of a large American company was David Zaslav, head of Discovery Communications, the pay-TV channel operator that is home to "Shark Week." His total compensation more than quadrupled to $156.1 million in 2014 after he extended his contract.

Les Moonves, of CBS, held on to second place in the rankings, despite a drop in pay from a year earlier. His pay package totaled $54.4 million.

The remaining four CEOs, from entertainment giants Viacom, Walt Disney, Comcast and Time Warner, have ranked among the nation's highest-paid executives for at least four years, according to the Equilar/AP pay study.

More power to 'em, as long as their shareholders are happy.  But I am tired of these self-same individuals attempting to bring regulatory pressure on the rest of us in the name of high CEO pay.

Bloomberg (via Zero Hedge) had this chart on Disney theme park entrance prices:

A few random thoughts:

• This highlights how hard it is to do inflation statistics correctly.  For example, the ticket being sold in 1971 is completely different from the one being sold in 2015.  The 2015 ticket gets one access without additional charge to all the attractions.  The 1971 ticket required purchase of additional ride tickets (the famous, among Disney fans, A-E tickets).  So this is not an apples to apples comparison.  Further, Disney has huge discounts for multi-day tickets.  The first day may cost $105, but adding a fourth day to a three day ticket costs just a trivial few bucks.  Local residents who come often for a single day get special rates as well.  So the inflation rate here grossly overestimates that actual increase in per person, per trip total spending for access to park attractions
• This is a great case in pricing strategy.  Around 1980, the Bass family bought into a large ownership percentage of Disney.  The story I am about to tell is often credited to their influence, but I am not positive.  Never-the-less, someone had a big "aha!" moment at Disney.  They realized that families were taking trips just to visit DisneyWorld.  These trips cost hundreds, even thousands of dollars.  The families were thus paying hundreds of dollars per person to enjoy Disney, of which Disney was reaping... $9.50 a day.  They had a stupendously valuable product (as far as consumers were concerned) but everyone else in the supply chain was grabbing most of the value they created.  So Disney raised prices, on the theory that if a family were paying over a thousand dollars to get and stay there, they would not object to paying an extra $50 at the gate.  And they were right.

Well, that is kind of over-dramatic.  I will certainly continue to run sometimes.  I really enjoy running in cities where I travel as much as an exploration tool as for exercise.  But my knees are shot and I barely got through the half-marathon last weekend in 3 hours.  We had a great time though and Disney does a great job running these races.  And just about everyone wears costumes, which is fun.   It was worth the pain to do this event one last time with my daughter before she goes off to college.  Plus I now have another really awesome princess medal.

I am off for Disney World to run in the Princess Half-Marathon this weekend.  My knees feel like I have four flat tires and have been driving on the rims for 20 miles, but I am running this last time with my daughter.

We started running this race together a number of years ago and the first time we ran was something of a breakthrough for my daughter -- the experience dedicating herself to a goal and the confidence she gained from achieving it led to many knock-on benefits, so much so that it became the core of her college essay.

That essay began with the story of she and I making our first tutu together.  At the time, I did not even know what tulle was, but we watched a YouTube video about how to make a tutu without sewing and we eventually got it done.   She ran the whole race, as she has ever since, with a tutu and a tiara on.  (By the way, I am always amazed at the niches in the Internet that I never knew existed.  This is the video we watched to make the tutu -- it has 2.4 million views!  We basically followed this process except we used a piece of underwear elastic for the waist band rather than ribbon).  My job is to cut the tulle into strips -- we make them twice as long as she wants the skirt, and then my daughter ties them to a piece of elastic in the middle, so two strands hang down.

The challenge has increasingly become to use different colors than any past tutu.   The last one looked more like a skirt.  This one she wanted to be shorter and puffier, more like a ballet tutu.  It is hard to capture it well in a picture to get the detail but this is the result:

Not to worry, your humble correspondent will be in costume too.  I have some great Darth Vader running gear I will be wearing.  I wore a rebel pilot outfit last time.  Disney really hit on something with these runs -- they have 8-10 different ones now.  The Princess half-marathon is still the most popular and sells out in about 45 minutes.  It was as hard to get a spot in it as it is to get Comicon tickets.  But given the popularity, there are whole web sites specializing in themed and costumed running gear.  I love capitalism.

PS -- I am still amazed she takes on all this extra weight and drag for fashion.  When I have to run this far, I am tempted to cut off the ends of my shoelaces to save weight.

PPS-- Here was the first one, at the finish line (a little worse for wear)

This is a great article about the fraudulent practices people pursue to try to take advantage of rules about service animals that help people with true disabilities to bring their pets with them everywhere.  This kind of crap strikes me as being in the same category as folks who used to hire disabled kids to go to Disneyworld with them so they could skip the lines (a practice, by the way, that led to Disney giving fewer special privileges to handicapped kids because of the abuse).

I will say from personal experience that the pressure on service businesses to succumb to this sort of service animal fraud is immense, especially in places like California where the financial penalties for even tiny well-meaning infractions of bewildering ADA rules are substantial.  My employees once felt they had to allow a woman to bring her horse (!) into the park because she had letters like the ones in this article saying she required the horse for emotional support.

This week I was at a conference where a featured speaker was an executive of the Forest Service named Joe Meade who happens to be blind.  I say "happens to" because Joe is one of the best, and best-loved, executives in that organization and what makes him great has little or nothing to do with his disability.  But I watched him work his way through a hotel with his service dog -- a casino hotel I got lost in about 4 times and I could read the signs -- and the skills that dog had are simply amazing.  Service dogs like that get deference from service businesses for a reason.  It infuriates me that people are trying to counterfeit that kind of credential so they don't have to pay an extra airplane fare for their cat.  And the only way they get away with it is because of our screwed up tort system that leaves service businesses at the mercy of even the most outrageous claims.  Because we businesses have given up on, particularly in places like California, ever getting real justice.

hattip:  Overlawyered.

Don't let Amazon's placement of it in the "craft" section fool you.  E-6000 is the best all-purpose, stick-any-two-arbitrary-things-together adhesive I have ever found.

I made my daughter a Christmas present which was a reproduction of the painting in the Disney Haunted Mansion where the man in the picture slowly turns to a skeleton.  I will post a build report at some time, but I had to anchor a heavy computer monitor to a wood box and an Ikea plastic frame, and E-6000 welded the whole thing together.  I also have used it recently to glue studs to a concrete floor to support a cabinet and to put a rubber weir under my garage door.  It takes a day to cure, and will not go on thin and sometime can be messy, but it makes an awesome bond.   I almost never touch epoxy or  Liquid Nails any more.

Update:  I know Gorilla Glue has its adherents.  The problem is that it expands so much (it kind of foams), it is really hard to control and get good results, at least in my opinion.  Neither of these replace ACC when you need to bond something fast or when you want your fingers stuck together all day.

Having now been to my first Comic-con International conference in San Diego, I have come up with a new official T-shirt for the event.  It will say on the front, "What is this line for?"

That was the question on everyone's lips.  No matter where you went, either in the exhibit hall or in the meeting room area or outside, there were lines everywhere.  There were lines for giveaways.  There were lines to get in rooms.  There were lines for autographs.  There were even lines to get tickets to have a preferential place in a line later.   One line, for the largest theater that had the hottest programming, was over a mile and a quarter long, with people lined up overnight to get in.  There were so many lines it was often unclear what lines were for.  Five people could likely start a line randomly by simply standing in line at some random spot and people would start getting in behind them.

I have decided that the origin of the word Comic-Con is not actually from Comic-Convention but in fact is actually a corruption of COMECON.  It is an organization that has embraced the old Soviet economy with both arms.  It has bent over backwards to absolutely ensure that no allocation of scarce resources will be based on price -- thus the incredibly complicated process for even obtaining a ticket to the event in the first place.  So all goods are free (or in the case of a 4-day ticket, very inexpensive) and allocation of scarce resources is entirely by queue.

A one-day pass to see the exhibit hall and people-watch the Cosplay is well worth the price, both in money and more importantly in time.  My son and I had a great time.  But any attempt to enjoy any of the programming content will require at least 1 hour of line-standing for every 1 hour of program time.  And if the program has any recognizable person's name in it, or if the title includes the words "Star Wars, Star Trek, or Firefly", then you can count on at least 3 hours of waiting for every one hour of programming.

As an example, my son and I showed up 1-1/2 hours early for an afternoon program called something like "Star Wars vs. Firefly."   We were about 50th in a line that eventually ran to about 600 people.  We thought we were in good shape.  Foolish mortals.  It turns out people showed up at 7 and 8 in the morning for the first program of the day in that room, and then never left, solely to get to the 1:30 Star Wars/Firefly program.  None of us in line outside the door at 1:30 got in.

I am not going to argue resource allocation methodologies here -- this is a private event and they are welcome to do it any way they wish.  And since their target audience tends to be young and perhaps under-employed, then I can see how an allocation methodology based on investing one's time rather than money would be appealing to that audience.  Again, a day at the trade show and people watching the Cosplay is worth it.  As for the rest, if you are someone who will wait in line an hour to save 10 cents on gas, you will probably love it.  If you are someone who thought the FastPass system was the greatest thing ever implemented by Disney, they you should likely give the programming a miss.

A few other notes:

• One of the shorter lines was for autographs from Stan Lee, which goes to show how far Comic-Con has evolved from its roots
• Building on the previous observation, I saw only one or two booths on the entire (huge) exhibit floor actually selling vintage comic books
• The Cosplay is everywhere but the best place to see it is just outside the hall where the photographers are taking pictures of folks coming in.  This is one area Comic-Con is really missing an opportunity.  If I were them I would create a red carpet ala the Oscars for Cosplayers to come in and everyone else to watch.   Put in some grandstands and big screens, maybe even with live commentary or voting
• The masquerade is very miss-able.  A costume competition but it is run in a tedious manner and the Cosplay on the exhibit floor is better.
• Fortunately I have a lot of nerds in my clan so I came away with good gifts.  My son got an autographed Summer Glau photo, my daughter an autographed Benedict Cumberbatch photo, and my niece an autograph of the most current Doctor Who (sorry, my first Doctor was Tom Baker and I can't keep track of the new ones).  My son also scored a Disney Princess calendar drawn in that, ahem, fantasy style made famous in publications like Heavy Metal.  It is sure to horrify my wife and daughter, which I assume was half the point.

Well, as promised, I wanted to post our race day picture from the half marathon.  This was done for my daughter's benefit, who set the goal to run a half marathon about 6 months ago and figured the promise of a Disney trip would be incentive to stay on top of her training.

She schlepped that tutu and that tiara for the whole 13.1, walking only at a couple of the last water stops.  This event was 95% women, and attracts a LOT of folks who really don't run the whole thing, so it was a great place for her to begin.  It's also pretty laid back, as there are actually character photo ops every mile, though we skipped those.  I have not seen our time, but we probably did about 2:45.  That's 20 minutes worse than my time five years ago -- it would be nice to say I was holding back to stay with my daughter but in fact she pulled me through the last mile.  Muscles and cardio were fine but the knees and ankles really can't take it any more.  But I proudly wore this bad boy all day.

If you are interested in this sort of thing, it was a great event, going through two of their parks.  The only problem is that it has to take place before the parks are open, so we had to set the wake-up call for 3:15 AM.  Uggh.  The butt-crack of dawn, as my sister calls it.

And yes, I did help make the tutu, with the aid of this video.  It is videos like that that remind me there are whole worlds of which I am virtually unaware.   Note the number of views - 1.4 million, on making a tutu.