.: StrangeBlog :.

Kali and friends at the Mansion's 30th anniversary festivities, 1999.

So I’ve been woefully out of touch with the Haunted Mansion scene lately, partly because I don’t have time and partly because I’m sick to death of the merch-o-rama effect that surrounds every attraction milestone.  I didn’t attend the 40th anniversary festivities that coincided with the D23 Expo back in September, but I did find this cute interactive Haunted Mansion feature at the Disney site.  It features a version of Rolly Crump’s Corridor of Doors wallpaper (for your desktop – basically a larger version of what I offer at Better Haunts & Graveyards), a video clip on the mansion, a stretching portrait gag, little photo galleries, and more.  Oh, and it also features my Disney alterego,  Marc Davis’ April D., morphing from April to June to September to December. 

Go there…

I’m not a news service, but as I learn stuff, I post it. Right now, there are several Haunted Mansion 40th Anniversary merchandise events planned for Disneyland in 2009.   There’s a June pin event, an August cocktail event and product signing with Shag, and a September “Wedding”-themed merch event.

Plan your involvement soon; the September anniversary event begins registering on January 20.  It appears to borrow the general format (and pricing philosophy, puke) of the old Haunted Mansion Holiday dinner weekends (snooze) and plays to the new Constance/black widow bride angle (snooze-puke-choke). It falls on 9/9, a month after the actual anniversary, and on a thursday freaking night to boot.  Boo.

The Josh Agle cocktail events occur on the real 40th anniversary weekend.

More information at DisneyGallery.com.

The big news of the moment:  I’m writing an article on fashion in the Northanger Abbey adaptations for my friend Laurel Ann’s “Go Gothic” festival at Austenprose Blog. It’s set to publish on October 15. If you’re a fan of Jane Austen, you’ll really enjoy her blog!

Now for the boring stuff:

Kali enjoys simplifying her internet life.  Kali also has trouble letting go of past projects that have outstripped their usefulness.  This means that Kali has trouble making decisions as to what to update and what to delete.

I’m in the process of redesigning and otherwise generally cleaning up Better Haunts & Graveyards.  The current design is something like six years old, and it looks it.  Once that’s out of the way, Halloween-tree.com and Livadia.org are going to have their days of reckoning.

Right now, I’m thinking I’ll just merge the Halloween site with Better Haunts; there isn’t enough left to justify its continued independent existence.  As for the Romanov site, I’m torn.  On one hand, it looks old and we just don’t have the time or interest to update it anymore.  Further, all it seems to do in its current limbo state is invite image-ganking bandwidth thieves and freaky Russian spam.  On the other hand, it would sincerely suck to see all of our hard work on the scrapbooks and such go down the crapper.  As usual, I’m the queen of indecision.

In other news, Strawberry Canyon and Desire are closing up shop.  The current plan per Marsha and myself is to open up a new, joint writing workshop with no sim and a broader focus.  I think most of us were bored with the figure skating premise.

When will it debut? Not a clue. Probably sometime before Christmas.