Latest news with #Mark Twain
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Climate
- Yahoo
City by the Bay? More like City by the Brrr! San Francisco is having its coldest summer in decades
Time to cue that famed quote, often falsely attributed to Mark Twain: "The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco." It's a cliche, sure. But this year it rings true. It really has been quite chilly in the City by the Bay, which is experiencing its coldest summer in decades, with no significant warm-up in sight and daytime highs topping out in the mid-60s. In downtown San Francisco, the average temperature in July has been 59.3 degrees, about one degree below normal, Matt Mehle, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Monterey, said Saturday. The average temperature in San Jose in July has been 67.4 degrees, about two degrees below normal, he said. And in Oakland, as of Saturday, the temperature had reached 75 degrees or higher just one time in July, compared with three times in February. "It's not record-breaking — but at this point, we're looking anywhere from 20 to 30 years since we've had this cold of a summer," said Mehle, noting that the area last saw similar weather patterns in the late 1990s. Mehle said a seasonal high-pressure system that typically brings warmer weather is somewhat misplaced this year, sitting farther west than normal. This summer, he said, a low-pressure system has been parked over the Pacific Northwest and California, leading to unrelenting cloud cover and cooler temperatures. Read more: Trump cuts to California National Weather Service leave 'critical' holes: 'It's unheard of' The "misplacement" of the high-pressure system, he added, has contributed to increased upwelling, a process by which strong winds bring deep, cold ocean water closer to the surface. When the wind blows over this colder water toward land, it brings the temperatures down. "The coastal upwelling has been really notable right outside the San Francisco Bay and west of Point Reyes," Mehle said. In the coming days, the drizzly gray weather along the coast is not expected to change much, said Mehle, who drove to work in Monterey on Saturday with his windshield wipers swishing. "We're basically locked in," he said of the weather conditions. Even in San Francisco, where countless summer tourists have unexpectedly shelled out money for sweatshirts and scarves, the chill has been the talk of the town. Nudist Pete Sferra, who keeps a journal describing how many times he walks the city in the buff, told The San Francisco Standard this week that he has "actually been enjoying quite a few nude strolls this year." But even he would not go out "if it's freezing." Walnut Creek resident Lisa Shedd, 60, told The Mercury News: "I certainly love the temperate weather. I'm not a fan of the really hot. I don't know if it means something bad or it means something good ... but I know I'm enjoying it." Karl the Fog — the anthropomorphized San Francisco fog with hundreds of thousands of followers on social media — joked on Instagram that the forecast for Thursday was "partly cloudy, winds coming in from the west, and a high chance of Trump being in the Epstein files." Farther north, this summer has brought oppressive inland heat and dangerous lightning storms. In Orleans — a tiny northeastern Humboldt County town near the site of the massive, barely-contained Butler fire in the Six Rivers and Klamath national forests— temperatures had been above 100 degrees seven times this month as of Saturday, according to the National Weather Service. Read more: At least four firefighters injured while battling Northern California wildfires In Redding, the temperature had hit 100 degrees or higher 11 times this month, topping out at 109 on July 11. Mild summer temperatures in Los Angeles, where the downtown high has averaged about 82 degrees in July, also have been satirized. This week, the popular @americanaatbrandmemes social media accounts posted a much-shared meme showing a man walking toward his house, saying: "Summer in LA has been pretty mild!" Just inside the door, unseen by him, a woman and two children are holding knives, ready to pounce. Their names are August, September and October. In the Bay Area, Mehle warned that "while we started off colder, that doesn't mean that summer is over." The hottest temperature ever recorded in downtown San Francisco, he noted, was 106, on Sept. 1, 2017. "We're sitting here under drizzle, clouds, in the cold," Mehle said. "It's the end of July. But summer is not over when you look at our climatology. Some people want slightly warmer temperatures — but you have to be careful what you wish for." Sign up for Essential California for news, features and recommendations from the L.A. Times and beyond in your inbox six days a week. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
The Guardian
19-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Disneyland at 70: artists on the park's five best rides – and why they still captivate
A visit to Disneyland can be an exhausting experience. The line for a ride can be hours long; there are hordes of overstimulated children and the sheer quantity of gift shops is overwhelming. When the park first opened, on 17 July 1955, an adult ticket cost $1 and kids were 50 cents: now a single day's entry for one person can easily run $200 or more. Despite all the kitsch and cartoon capitalism, though, Disneyland still delivers moments of actual magic, and that's largely due to the inventiveness of its theme park rides. Disneyland's most beloved attractions are not simply rollercoasters or carousels – they're enduring works of immersive art. Teams of visionary designers and fabricators have collaborated to make and remake these rides over the decades: some popular rides from the park's opening in 1955, such as the Jungle Cruise and the Mark Twain Riverboat, are still in operation, while the park's newest ride, inspired by Tiana, Disney's first Black princess, opened just months ago. Alongside its beloved mid-century relics, such as Sleeping Beauty's Castle, Disneyland has constructed new 'lands' to woo new fandoms, including a replica of Batuu, the smuggler's outpost on the Outer Rim of the Star Wars galaxy, which features new tech and more interactive Star Wars rides. Disneyland's new work and its seven-decade creative legacy continues to inspire some of today's leading experience design and immersive theater practitioners. 'You could take any single medium from any of these rides and it would most obviously be art – whether it's sculpture, scenic painting, the sound design, the storytelling,' argues Vince Kadlubek, a co-founder of Meow Wolf, an American art collective that has built interactive art experiences in five cities, including Las Vegas, Nevada, and Santa Fe, New Mexico. But the fact that many of Disney's rides have been designed with children in mind means their creative merit and ambition is often discounted. 'Why is fun not part of art?' Kadlubek asked. 'Why is joy and play not a part of art? Felix Barrett, the artistic director of Punchdrunk, a UK-based immersive theater company responsible for transformative hits like Sleep No More, agreed. A Disney ride 'is a complete hybrid of all the disciplines, and will deploy everything simultaneously', Barrett said. And with an amusement park ride 'you're feeling alive in a way you very rarely are when you experience single-discipline art, because you're physically present'. Even the long wait times for Disneyland rides have been turned into opportunities for creative innovation, Barrett noted. Disney's 'mastery of queue design', particularly on newer rides, is an inspiration: 'It's not just about the ride, it's about the anticipation building up to that ride.' The park turned 70 this week, and to mark the occasion we talked to artists, designers and historians about five of Disneyland's greatest artistic masterpieces, and why these rides continue to inspire new generations of storytellers. It's a Small World is a placid ride, without big thrills or surprises: visitors sit in small boats and glide past arrangements of animatronic figures dressed as children from cultures around the world. The ride's tinkling theme song plays overhead. But six decades after it first premiered as part of the 1964 World's Fair, the ride still has long lines. The mid-century aesthetic of the ride's building, scenes and characters, is mesmerizing in its detail. Mary Blair, the concept artist for Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan, designed the look of the ride and chose its bold colors; Rolly Crump designed its gleaming tower and the Sherman brothers, who wrote many of Disney's hits, composed its signature song, with major feedback from Walt Disney himself. The rides' themes of youthful innocence and longing for global cooperation still resonate, said Bethanee Bemis, who curated an exhibit at the Smithsonian and wrote a book on the reflection of American history in Disney's parks. 'All children share the universal language of play,' Bemis said. Today, some of the cultural symbols chosen in the 1960s may read as racial or ethnic stereotypes: there is a snake charmer in one scene, and crocodiles and hyenas in an African tableau. Disneyland has tried to strike a balance between preserving the ride as a nostalgic time capsule and meeting more contemporary expectations about cultural representation, Bemis said. Some of its most successful updates have been adding new touches of cultural authenticity, like including traditional parol lanterns during the Christmas season for Filipino visitors. Long before it inspired the early 2000s film franchise, Pirates of the Caribbean was a standalone ride – one that put visitors in a boat and sent them on a seafaring journey. The ride is the last one that Walt Disney worked on himself – and it's ambitious, both in the quality of its audio-animatronic pirate figures and its narrative sweep – not to mention the engineering challenge of digging the tunnels underground necessary to build the ride, Bemis said. The experience begins gently, with riders drifting through the dusk of a bayou and listening to a banjo play. Then the boats descend into darkness, and with a sudden drop, emerge into the dangerous world of the pirates where cannonballs fly overhead, ships glide past cities on fire and pirate crews fight and carouse onshore. While the ride has been updated with details from the more recent film franchise – such as animatronic figures made to look like Jack Sparrow, Johnny Depp's character in the films – what makes it work is the attention to the ride's fundamentals, designers said, from the pirate costumes that the ride attendants wear, to the temperature at different phases of the ride: humid and warm in the bayou, and then chilly when riders plummet into the skeleton-filled 'Davey Jones' locker' under the sea. 'Somehow, they have manipulated the environment to set mood and tone through temperature and humidity control,' said Noah Nelson, the publisher of No Proscenium, a publication that covers the US immersive experience design industry. He called the technique 'super effective'. 'Every single aspect of these rides has been designed with the most care and attention. I don't think we go inside a lot of places like that these days,' said Jeff Stark, who teaches a course on design for narrative space at New York University. 'The craftsmanship that you encounter inside of Disney – the level of thought, of preparation – matches what it is like to go inside a cathedral. The amount of care that was put into Pirates of the Caribbean is far more than the care that was put into the church that I grew up going to.' The Haunted Mansion begins with a group initiation in the dark tower room of an old Victorian house. The tower appears to grow to uncanny heights, as the oil paintings of ancient dignitaries on the walls expand to reveal their deaths. 'We have 999 happy haunts, but there's room for a thousandth,' a deep voice asks. 'Any volunteers?' The ghostly figures and spooky tricks of Disneyland's Haunted Mansion were created in the 1960s, and they're decidedly low-tech, made with old-fashioned smoke-and-mirror devices like Pepper's Ghost. That only makes the ride more appealing, said Kathryn Yu, a Los Angeles-based game designer. 'In a world that's increasingly digital, it is charming to see these physical effects in person.' As candles flicker, visitors are led through the dark halls to the tombstone-shaped 'doom buggies' that will whisk them through one haunted scene after another: a ghostly banquet hall, a seance, a graveyard. Many Disneyland's first 'imagineers' came from backgrounds in animation, 'so they really understood cinematography, and the perspective of the audience as a camera', Yu said. In The Haunted Mansion, as in the Pirates ride, the designers packed each spooky vignette with 'character development, backstory, an emotional connection to one of the ghosts'. One of the famous moments in the Haunted Mansion is when the 'doom buggies' swing backwards before descending into the graveyard, putting viewers on suddenly their backs, staring upwards at skeletal branches, as if they themselves are being lowered into a grave. In creating Punchdrunk's latest experience, Viola's Room, a gothic mystery now playing in New York, the British team repeatedly referenced Disney rides, Barrett said, including discussing how to create theatrical surprises that would affect viewers' bodies in the same way as a sudden drop in a roller coaster. (One tactic they're trying is asking visitors to go through the experience barefoot.) The 2006 cartoon movie Cars, a toddler favorite, might not seem like the most inspirational source material for an immersive work of art. But Radiator Springs Racers, Disneyland's Cars-inspired ride, is massive in its ambition: it's nothing short of a full recreation of the red rock spires of the American south-west, complete with native plants and the replica neon-lined main street of a small desert town. (At a reported $200m, it was also the most expensive Disneyland ride at the time it was built). If you visit Zion national park in Utah or Monument Valley in Arizona after seeing Radiator Springs Racers, Bemis, the Smithsonian curator, said, 'You feel like you've already seen the real thing.' The ride taps deeply into the American nostalgia for Historic Route 66 in the 1950s, Bemis said, an era of nostalgia that came too late for Walt Disney himself to appreciate, but that strikes a chord with the park's other tributes to small-town American life. 'It's really stunning work,' said Kadlubek, the Meow Wolf artist. While the ride ends with a shriek-inducing car race and includes plenty of interaction with fast-talking cartoon automobiles, it begins with a more contemplative cruise through the faux desert landscape. 'There's this really beautiful romanticism to it,' Kadlubek said. The most popular new ride in Disneyland's new Star Wars-themed area 'surpasses everything that's been attempted before' in experience design, Kadlubek argued, calling it 'ambitious to a pretty absurd degree'. The ride is set in a newly built area of the park, Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge, that allows movie fans to visit a replica of the battered frontier planet of Batuu. There are bars, restaurants, a giant version of the Millennium Falcon and Storm Troopers who stalk the streets, occasionally interrogating visitors. Several designers who are Star Wars fans said the atmosphere feels eerily like being inside the films: Nelson said he's sometimes content just to sit in the replica Docking Bay 7, listening to audio of space ships streaming overhead, and drinking a cup of 'Caf,' as coffee is known in the Star Wars universe. 'My first time stepping into it, I felt like I came home,' he said. Rise of the Resistance tells an elaborate story that begins in the waiting line, where visitors are treated as new recruits to the resistance against the villainous First Order. After an early mission goes awry, they are taken captive. Costumed actors playing members of the First Order mock them while marching them off to an interrogation cell: members of the resistance have to break them out of prison, then lead them on a wild escape journey. The process of moving the visitors into the experience, and even getting them into the 'transports' they ride in, is deeply embedded in narrative. 'It goes from being a 3-minute ride to this 20-minute long saga. They really reinvented what we would expect from a ride,' Stark said. Under pressure from Harry Potter world at Universal Studios, Stark said, Disney introduced newer ride technology in Rise of the Resistance, leaning heavily on trackless ride vehicles, which are programmed to move the visitors through space without physical rails, creating new opportunities for ride tricks and surprises. But like the best early rides, what makes Rise of the Resistance thrilling is the accumulation of tiny details, Stark said, like the moment when 'the sparks from Kylo Ren's lightsaber are showering around you, and you feel like you're in this moment of threat'.
