Intro

There are some really great old-school Disneyland blogs out there. I well-remember the day I emerged from the darkness last August to discover Stuff from the Park, Gorillas Don't Blog, and Davelandblog all on the same day! While I do have some neat older photos taken by others and more modern photographs taken by myself, this will not be a photo blog. And while I do have some ephemera stretching back decades, this will not be a vintage paper blog. My stock-in-trade is information. I have recently been coming across the arcane, the bizarre, the trivial, the interesting and everything in between and wanted a place to share such stories of Disneyland.

The blog name is "Disneyland Nomenclature," but don't worry that my sole focus will be the tediousness of approved names or the correct terminology for a location or show. (House of the Future? House of Tomorrow? Monsanto Chemical House of the Future? Monsanto Home of the Future? Monsanto House of the Future? Monsanto's House of the Future? Monsanto's House of Tomorrow??) Rather, I really want to talk about the myriad details of Disneyland. I'm neither omniscient nor particularly old and thus claim no dominion over every bit of Disneyland history. It is my hope that you fans will find it interesting and entice you to share your own stories and bits of Disneyland lore (I'm looking at you Mike Cozart!).

So, what will you find on this blog? There will be stories. There will be trivia. To liven things up, I will also include photos and other documents from time to time. The Disneyland Resort is the organizing focus, from inception to the present day. As with many others, the old days hold particular appeal to me, but I have my own experiences and memories from visiting modern Disneyland that I'd like to share, too.

I must give great thanks to the photo blogs I already mentioned. My interest in Disneyland had lain dormant since my "retirement" from the Disneyland Resort in 2003. After spending so much time learning about Disneyland, I began to feel that the rewards I was getting from finding out new information didn't match up with the effort I expended doing so. And then I found loads of extraordinary photos and information presented daily by several different people! It rekindled in me a long-held desire to do a comprehensive reference work on Disneyland.

Together with Kevin Yee (with whom I have authored two Disneyland trivia books), I am engaged in research on the first part of that collection, a Disneyland encyclopedia. We are targeting the first copies to go on sale in July 2010 at the NFFC Convention. There will be more posts on the research effort in the future, including the construction of a Disneyland thesaurus/index language that is helping to keep all of our research straight.

I look forward to sharing what I know. Thursday I will have a post on the Baltimore mansion upon which the exterior of Disneyland's Haunted Mansion is based, which to my knowledge has never before been identified by name.