Does any word in any language sound as much like “apricot” without actually being it?

I mean like if you pronounce it the way with a short Ay sound and not the silly way that makes it sound like “ape”. No actually I guess it sounds about the same amount like “Epcot” no matter which way you say it. Which isn’t that much now that I think about it.

Maybe if it was “epricot”.

Okay, from now on everybody has to say “apricot” like it starts with an Eee. That way when people of future generations read this it will make sense. Hello, future generations! If you’re reading this in the future, don’t pay attention to the two paragraphs before this one! Take like an amnesia pill or use a memory erasing ray or whatever it is you have in your far-flung future.

So anyway Epcot’s history is a long and storied history. So storied that like you might as well save time and just call it “historied”. Its historied goes back to the very earliest days of Disney World. See, Walt Disney had already built a theme park called Disneyland back in California and the last thing he wanted to do was build another one just like it. Instead he imagined building a perfectly planned city that would use the latest space ageiest technologies so people would come from all over the world to see.

He called this city “EPCOT”, which stands for “ALL COWS EAT GRASS”.

Old Walt was sure that people would come to live and work and spend money in a city where he owned all the property and controlled every aspect of everyone’s lives, but eventually his board of directors convinced him to put a theme park just like Disneyland there, too.

Mr. Disney never gave up on his futuristic city, though he ended up dying before he saw his dream die, be paved over and another theme park built on top of it. That theme park is called Epcot in honor of the vision it replaced, and the resort it’s part of is called Walt Disney World Resort. Just like a great big tombstone, it bears the name of the person over whose dead body it was built.

Tomorrow: The journey continues. In a parking lot named Journey.

Oh sorry. That’s from my video game pitch.

Anyway so the next level is figuring out what world you want to go see. I mean there’s The Wide World of Sports and there’s Cost Plus World Market (I don’t think many people shopped at Cost, before they merged) and there’s the Omaha World-Herald and there’s World 4: Giant Land but after careful consideration and weighing all the options and seeing a commercial with the Muppets I decided to go see Walt Disney World.

It only made sense. I mean, they’ve got the World Showcase thingy in Epcot and that would let me get a ton of different countries out of the way all at once. That’s just like smart or something.

So tomorrow my journey will begin. My journey of writing about the journey I took last fall. And your journey of reading it. And maybe we’ll listen to some Journey.

See you then.

But then after months of visiting places I realized it would make more sense to write about each of the places one at a time. Especially since I’d already forgot about most of the places I visited.

So I just sort of like came home and started writing about other stuff. I think I might have some stuff to say about the other places, too, though.

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What? Oh no. I didn’t go see it. But everybody else did which means my friend Beth finally has to shut up about how she saw like a rough cut unfinished version months and months and months ago. I mean, seriously Beth. I saw The Spirit and even fewer people have seen that then had seen the early screening of Watchmen, but you don’t see me going around bragging about that all over the place.

Though I heard they’re talking about a sequel so I guess it might be the kind of movie they make any more, at least once.
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Thank God she finally got to the point where she was too pissed off to even look at the screen any more. This was caused by something called “appropriation”.
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