My family and I recently took a vacation trip of a lifetime to Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida.

We did visit many parks in Orlando, including Magic Kingdom, Epcot, Hollywood Studios and the Animal Kingdom.

As you might imagine, we took a lot of pictures while we visited the various parks and resorts.

Cassie took many beautiful photos. They turned out wonderfully. Gorgeous sights and scenery suitable for all ages.

You don’t get to see those here.

You see, I took some pictures too.

Mine, you DO get to see.

I hereby present to you a Big Bear Butts view of the Marvelous Butts of Disney.

Let’s start off with those two rascally chipmunks, Chip and Dale. As you can see, these two were difficult to capture in the wild, although I tried several different angles, they defended their butts from direct viewing with skill and artistry. In the end, good solid profiles was the best I could arrange. I salute my opponents, and wish them well.

 

We will follow that gentle start with a look at the posteriors of those lovable toys from Toy Story. You’d think these would have been difficult, but I managed to get them all nailed to the wall. Oh yes, I got them, my pretties and their little horse, too.

 

Now I think it’s time to move over to the heroic side of Disney, with a few of my favorites from The Incredibles. Mrs Incredible was justifiably proud of her butt, but Frozone definitely stole the show with his butt shaking in the parade. He had all the moves, and I had a front row seat.

 

Now, rather than continue with specific themes, I’m going to assault your vision with butt after butt until you must stop and cry, ‘Enough!’

 

Whew! That was a lot of butts. Lumiere in particular was a pain in the… well, it was hard to get a crack at his… oh, heck, let’s just say the picture ain’t the greatest.

We ain’t done yet, though! I may be biased, but I saved the best butts for last.

I hereby present, in living color, the wonderful Big Bear Butts of Disney! Oh yeah, I went there.

I am particularly proud of the Baloo bear butt picture. I had to go deep into the jungle of The Animal Kingdom to go through the bushes and get behind that bear. Baloo was one heck of a difficult target to attack from the rear, JUST as you would expect from a highly skilled bear. In the end, this here Big Bear Butt got him, well, in the end.

I’ve got just a few last words on this project, I hope you’ll bear with me a moment.

First, this wouldn’t have been possible without the willing, nay EAGER assistance of my 9 year old son, Alex. He went that extra mile to keep on the lookout for butt shot opportunities, and yes, it turns out he is a crack shot indeed. He is directly responsible for there being any shot of Chip and Dale, and he actually called to my attention the wonderful opportunity to catch Eeyore in a vulnerable moment.

Cassie also contributed mightily to this project, indeed I’d say her perfect capture of the Lots O Huggin Bear was nothing short of spectacular.

Finally, I’d like to say that, while Alex went to great lengths to aid me in capturing the Butts of the Disney Princesses, going so far as to approach from one side for autographs so I could take pictures from the rear, in the end I could not in good conscience include them here.

In my opinion, it is one thing to take pictures in theme parks of anonymous actors in full body costumes and place them in a humourous suggestively-themed article. They are there for their pictures to be taken, and there is no way to identify the actor or actress within the costume. It’s something else entirely to take pictures of people who are merely wearing makeup and dressed in nice clothes, even if that makeup and those clothes are intended to resemble a famous character. They are still identifiable people, and portraying real people in any way other than respectfully wasn’t where I wanted to go with this.

So, no you don’t get my pictures of the butts of Snow White, Cindarella, Belle, Ariel, Mary Poppins or Alice.

But… they do exist. And isn’t the knowledge of their existing enough?

I think so.

Have a wonderful week, my friends, and enjoy imagining the kind of searches that will be bringing new readers to my door.

You ever hear someone say that people are people all over, and talk about how our parents or grandparents got up to the exact same things we all seem to think we invented? But you don’t believe them. These are OLD PEOPLE, and heck, they must have been born old and dull, right? Just like the modern generation invented drugs, alcohol, gambling, tattoos, rebellious secret languages and wild sex.

Right.

Okay, my sarcasm is being noted, but you’re still not buying the premise.

How about this.

Youtube or social media used to rant in the community about the boss you hate or the job you’ve got that sucks.

We invented social media, right? Our generation owns that. It’s our invention, those old fogies our parents weren’t smart enough or cool enough or radically crazy enough to shout their frustration across the entire geographical area for all time like we do. They may have invented those other things, but we’re the ones that took them and ran with them. They just didn’t have the imagination.

Right?

Ahem. Bullshit.

Check this out. :)

Warning… turn speakers on, and NSFW!!!

Oh yeah. Damn, am I pissed.

Welcome aboard the good ship Bear, we’ve got a high head of steam built up, all ahead full, next stop, the island of angry, scantily-clad bacon-eating bear men. 

I only said that last bit for the benefit of the search engine. It’s part of the blogging mini-game – what kind of traffic can we attract through innuendo or double entendre THIS week? WHAT?!? You’re a blogger and you’re not playing the mini-game? Uh oh.

Seriously though. This has been driving me bugshit for years, and it’s finally sent me RIGHT over the edge.

Look, I’m going to show you something. It may be something you have seen before.

This is a graphical representation of what is commonly called a “DVD disc”, which is stupidly redundant. A digital video disc disc? Really?

I’ve seen ‘em. Hopefully, you have too.

Now, I don’t know how much YOU understand about how these work.

From my recent experiences, I think this covers MOST of you out there;

Time to bust your bubble.

Here is the secret, ancient truth behind the DVD;

IT’S NOT MAGIC, DUMBASS!!

Here is a simple procedure I’d like you to try at home.

Step 1 – Pick up a DVD disc and hold it in your hands.

Step 2 – Examine the disc. Discover that its form resembles a plane. No, not a fucking airplane. I mean that it’s got TWO SIDES.

Step 3 – Turn the disc over in your hands. See that it does, in fact, have two discrete sides. For the advanced user you can also discern an edge along the circumference, but let’s not get stupid here. We’re looking for data-bearing strata.

Step 4 – Look carefully at each side of the plane. One side will be shiny across the surface, and if you look very closely, you will see that rather than being perfectly smooth, the surface is actually grooved. At this point I would reference wax records and the needles that followed the groove, but that would date me as being really fucking old, since most of you probably don’t know what a record is, what a needle is, what needle fuzz is, what an RPM is, what ANALOG even means, which is all fine because it’s completely irrelevant to the discussion and is only mentioned because I AM that old and I can’t keep one single thought in my head without wandering all over the place getting lost in pointless digressions that detract from the original point which was OMIGOD wtf am I doing stop this stop it stop it move on holy shit are you even kidding me right now.

Step 5 – The side opposite your shiny grooved side should have some writing on it. If it has writing on it, anywhere on the surface of the disc but not if it is super shiny and has writing only on the inner rim, that side of the disc is the label side. That side can be as scratched and scored as you’d like, it doesn’t matter for shit. Knock yourself out.

Step 6 – If both sides have identical shiny grooved sides, DON’T PANIC! Some of the earliest DVDs were printed with a different version of the same movie, one version on each side. Usually widescreen on one side, and pan and scan on the other. In that case, if you look vewwy vewwy closely, you’ll see that there is writing on the inner ring on each side, sometimes saying something like “Tango and Cash Side A – Widescreen”. Now, don’t overthink this. If you can see “Tango and Cash Side A – Widescreen” facing you, then that means the other side of the disc ACTUALLY HAS THAT VERSION OF THE MOVIE.

Step 7- Embrace the idea that you hold in your hands a plane with two sides, and if you are looking at the label or a generously marked or labeled surface, then the content the label refers to is on the other side, the side that is facing away from you.

Step 8 – Look at the shiny side again. Imagine for a moment that the shiny side is the screen of your TV or monitor. You will be seeing your movie shown on that screen. Now, if the shiny is perfectly shiny, you will see a good image on the screen. If there are dots, hairs, smears, pits, cracks, holes, writing, paint, grease, scratches, warping, or BIG FUCKING CHUNKS MISSING, then it will be very difficult to see a clear image on the bleak lunar surface of your disc.

DO YOU GET IT?

You do not need to know more than that. You don’t need to hear about tracking lasers, and drive mechanisms, and dots and dashes and binary logic and Digital to Analog converters or ANY of that shit.

All you need to know is, shiny side smooth and pretty good, shiny side all scratched, broken and pitted is BAD.

So please, please, someone explain to me WHY THE FUCK DOES EVERY DVD I RENT, BORROW OR CHECK OUT FROM THE LIBRARY LOOK LIKE IT’S BEEN USED TO POLISH YOUR SANDPAPER COLLECTION, WITH OCCASIONAL USE AS A SUPPORTING PLATE TO HAMMER NAILS ON?!?!

This ain’t just today, this week or this month. For years now, if I get a movie from Blockbuster, from Netflix, from Redbox or the public library, every single one of them looks like they sideline as coasters at the national frisbee finals, said frisbee competition being held at a gravel pit where the players CAN’T CATCH SHIT.

NOT GOOD

What the fuck do you people DO with these things? It’s not a magic disc you stick in the player, and a movie comes out. There is, like, technology and shit in there! And let me be blunt, most DVD technology is still early days technology, where it’s a euphemism for “lots of delicate moving parts at high speed”.

I don’t get it. I’ve got DVDs I bought before there were even DVD players, back when you could get Blade Runner on DVD, and you couldn’t even get the player yet for less than $500. Don’t get me wrong, Blade Runner is the shit, and I mean the good shit not that wack shit that came from your cousin’s basement hydroponics Brew and Grow kit, but $500 to watch Blade Runner is not good either. I’ve got ancient DVDs, and they don’t loko like this.

we’re talking a time so long ago, that I bought a brand spanking new Playstation 2 to use as a DVD player, because the damn thing cost the same amount of money as the other DVD players on the market, so why the hell not? Maybe I’ll even buy a game for it some day. Now load up Empire Records and get me some popcorn.

I own DVDs from DVD technology pre-history, and do you know, I open the case and pull the things out, CAREFULLY holding them on the edges because you don’t touch the surface where the movie shit is, and the things are still shiny! SHINY!

And yet, I grab a movie that was released on DVD two weeks ago fro Redbox, and the thing looks like a buckshot mallard.

It came to a head last night, when I went to watch The Incredible Hulk.

I tried to watch it on DVD last November, but the disc had cracks on it so I returned it with notification, and then I think I chose a Harry Potter film as a replacement.

Well, I got it again from Netflix last night, determined to watch it, and this time I go to put it in all excited, got my Captain and Coke, got my easy chair, house is quiet, earphones work so I can blast the sound… the disc looks like it was, and I am not fucking joking, hit with finishing nails driven by a ball peen hammer.

I even turned the disc over, you could clearly see the impressions the nails made on the label side. That’s right, they went all the way through. Are you shitting me?

So, after yelling at Netflix on the phone, Cassie came to the rescue. Local library had TWO copies of the movie on the shelf, and were open until 9 PM.

Awright!

Off I go to the library, where I grab the first copy, open the case, check the disk… and see that while it may be about the Incredible Hulk, it looks like the aftermath of a land war in China.

I grab the second copy, and look, fearing the worst. At this point, I don’t even want to know how much worse it could get. It looks almost brand new, just a couple gentle scratches. Well…. more than a few, and some weren’t all that gentle. But it’s the only game in town.

I take that movie home, I watch all the way through to the end, and right when the Hulk and the Abomination are getting into it and the chopper is down and Betty Ross is about to go up in navgas flames, BOOM! Digital hash, white noise, the thing hits a perfect storm of scratches that end the show.

Are you kidding me?

People, let me explain something.

If you keep treating these things like total crap, and seriously, I don’t understand how you do it unless you hand rental discs to your 2 year old as a toy to distract them LITERALLY with “Ooh, shiny!”, then prices will go up, libraries will cut back on DVD budgets, and we will be left to shout from the heavens…

THIS IS WHY WE CAN’T HAVE NICE THINGS!

When everything is going great, it’s easy to be positive and keep going.

But how are you at staying focused and positive when things get difficult? When it takes effort?

Do you have the determination to keep going, to recognize that it’s go time, and to push ever harder?

When the raid wipes for the 157th time on Heroic Ragnaros, do you pull the plug and fake a power outage, or do you repair, refresh, swear and then step up to go again, determined to damn well put your very best effort in this time. Yes, you thought you did that last time, but you can do better.

You WILL do better.

Bacon. The power to get things done.

Do you have the bacon in YOU?

I have here some alternative lyrics for the classic song, “The Gambler”, and I’m going to share them here with you. Right now. Any second now. No really, look down there. Those are lyrics. Stop reading this and look, damnit!

This was written by Sidhebane, and I hope you enjoy it. I thought it was just the thing to kick off the week with a smile.

The Death Knight (by Sidhebane, inspired by Kenny Rogers and BBB)

On a cold winter’s evening, on a tram bound for Stormwind,
I met up with a Death Knight, we were both too tired to queue.
So we took turns a-staring through the portals at the lake-bed
Until his head turned to me, said “I’d like to talk to you”

He said “Son, I’ve made a living out of reading monsters’ stances,
And knowing what their tricks were by the way they held their swords.
And if you don’t mind me saying, I can see you’re low on chances.
If you lend me some hitpoints, I might lend you some words.”

So I handed him my potion, and he swigged it in one motion,
Then he bummed a Healthstone, and chowed down on that too
And the night seemed frozen solid, as his armor frosted over
Said “If you’re going to be the tank, boy, the mobs will look to you.

You gotta know how to fight ‘em, know when to kite ‘em,
Know when to pop your shields, know when to run.
You don’t loot no corpses if there’s bad guys up and able,
There’ll be time enough for looting when the fight is done.”

Every tank should know, that the secret to survivin’,
is knowin’ what to blow away and knowin’ what to sheep.
‘Cause each PUG has a whiner, and each PUG has a bruiser,
And the best that you can hope for’s that your healer’s not asleep.

And as he finished talking, his armor came defrosted.
His shoulders seemed to slump and his ghoul keeled over dead,
And right there in the darkness, the Death Knight he cast Deathgate,
And still his final words, they seemed to echo in my head

“You gotta know how to fight ‘em, know when to kite ‘em,
Know when to pop your shields, know when to run.
You don’t loot no corpses if there’s bad guys up and able,
There’ll be time enough for looting when the fight is done.”