Dining at Disneyland: Quick Service restaurants

Posting pictures of food and meals online has become a bit of a cliche slam against social media. “I don’t want to know what people are eating,” whine the snobs. Yeah? Well, maybe I don’t want to see a zillion photos of your kids, or of your vacation, or your memes. There are only a few experiences that everyone shares with everyone else: eating, pooping, and dying. Of those three, I know which I’d rather see photos of. So, following on from last week’s blog about Eat Like Walt, this week and (probably) next, I’m going to talk about the foods we enjoyed on our recent trip to Disneyland.

Eat Like Walt: The Wonderful World of Disney Food

While my wife and I love visiting the Disney Parks, we haven’t been to Disneyland for about a year and a half. We’ll be correcting that shortly, and to prepare for the trip, I read a great book that my brother gave me for Christmas: Eat Like Walt: The Wonderful World of Disney Food by Marcy Carriker Smothers.

Winner, Winner, Chicken... Sandwich: McDonald's Classic Chicken Sandwich

(Just a quick blog this week while I get back into the swing of things.)

I love fried chicken sandwiches. It’s a go-to comfort food for me. The first one I ever ate would have been a McDonald’s chicken sandwich from back in the 80s, when they were introduced. So when I heard McDonald’s had introduced a new item called the Classic Chicken Sandwich, I had to try it.

12 Blogs of Christmas Day Twelve: The Silent Night of the Batman

For my twelfth and final Blog of Christmas, I’m going back to an old favorite: “The Silent Night of the Batman” from February, 1970’s Batman 219, by Mike Friedrich, Neal Adams, and Dick Giordano.

12 Blogs of Christmas Day Eleven: Klaus by Grant Morrison and Dan Mora

Welcome to Day Eleven of my 12 Blogs of Christmas! Today, we’re looking at a comic of more recent vintage: Grant Morrison and Dan Mora’s Klaus! This premiered as a seven-issue miniseries a few years ago (collected into a nice book), followed by two annual Christmas specials the last two years. According to interviews that I’ve read, the plan is to do one more single-issue special next year, because the three will make a nice-sized book. Then, Morrison and Mora plan to follow that up with another longer miniseries. Whatever the plan, I’m on board, because I’ve come to love this series.

12 Blogs of Christmas Day Ten: Paul Dini's Jingle Belle

On today’s Tenth Blog of Christmas, we take a look at Paul Dini’s Jingle Belle. I first became aware of Paul Dini’s work through the Batman animated series, which he script-edited. I loved his episodes, and it was always a treat when he contributed to DC’s Batman Adventures, the comic based on the show. However, it was even more of a treat when his own character—Jingle Belle, Santa’s rebellious teenage daughter—began appearing in stories of her own. 

(Apologies for the poor scanning quality. I don't own an electronic version of this book, and it's really pretty thick and hard to scan easily.)

12 Blogs of Christmas Day Nine: Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (The Comic)

I can’t say for sure what my first Christmas-related comic was. It might have been a big, fat Walt Disney Christmas collection. Or it might just as easily have been a big, treasury-sized edition of Sheldon Mayer’s Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer stories, collected in DC Comics’ Limited Collector’s Edition C-42. Disney Christmas comics are still coming out today from IDW, whereas the Rudolph stories live on mostly in my memories. So I’m going to talk about the Rudolph comics.

12 Blogs of Christmas Day Eight: The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus by L. Frank Baum

Today’s blog features another Christmas novel: The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus by L. Frank Baum. Baum is probably best known for the Oz series, which I love. The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus displays the same far-reaching imagination as those books. I suppose, in its own way, it’s as all over the place as Hoffman’s Nutcracker and Masefield’s Box of Delights, which shows what I’m looking for in a Christmas story. (I also love Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, though, which has a laser-like focus, so there you go. When you think I’m going to zig, I zag.)