'Creating a winter wonderland really does take a lot of care and expertise. Artistic attention to detail is crucial to creating Santa's frozen arctic world just five miles north of Bournemouth. For this reason we have bought in many specialists and showmen, including the multi award-winning Hollywood film and tv special fx's experts who made the awesome winter scenes in films such as: Archangel, Gladiators, Vertical Limit, The Day After Tomorrow, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone, Dr Who and more ... With the Snow Business ice experts on board, we can assure you of an absolutely magical scene.
'After your journey through the beautiful Tunnel of Light where you post your christmas wish to the North Pole Post Office, you will enter the incredibly beautiful 'frozen' world of Lapland village, with it's snowy log cabins and fantastic ice rink that Santa brought along for everyone to play on ...
'Inside the real log cabins you will find helper elves busy with interesting Christmas preparations and other activities that you can either join in or learn all about: Toy making, Dolls House making, Rocking, Chair making, Gingerbread decorating, Face Painting, Sled dog running and adventure ... & more ... and then there's the bustling Christmas Market with it's stalls ranging from xmas paper to xmas trees, for the mums and dads to discover ...
'But do remember at some point during your 4-6 hour day to seek out Shamus the Elf, as only he can lead you to Father Christmas, who is waiting to give all the under 12's their top quality personal present.
'As our show is being staged for the first time our website can only begin to hint at the wonder of our winterland to be. Next year's online presentation will be a total treat to view and we really do wish that we could show you just how incredibly spectacular Lapland New Forest will look at night.'-- Lapland New Forest
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'Lapland New Forest park claims to offer families a magical festive experience. According to the scores of disgruntled visitors streaming out of the gates, experience is one word for it. As tempers fray, it seems this little corner of Lapland, which opened on the Dorset-Hampshire border at the weekend, is going from mudbath to bloodbath.
'The two brothers behind the business venture misled its visitors, many of whom had travelled long distances, it was said Victor and Henry Mears advertised the park with a website that depicted images of an ice rink and a bustling snow covered Christmas village. A flyer also claimed to offer the chance to see a polar bear - which turned out to be a model. Yhe ‘magical tunnel of light’ was merely fairy lights strung from trees and the ‘wonderful’ ice rink was broken. The advertised ‘delicious seasonal food’ at the Christmas market was discovered to be two stands offering pork and stuffing baguettes and German sausages. In court, Henry Mears said: "Whatever you do, you will find the public complain about something."
'One visitor, Dawn Saxby-Willis from Ringwood, said: "I was absolutely stunned at how poor we and our children were treated. I took my son to the toilet and he saw 'Santa' having a cigarette break at the side of a Portaloo. Needless to say, the two reindeer - one with a broken antler - were clearly not enjoying their experience. The majority of the huskies were chained up behind a fence whining, others were chained up outside some of the wooden sheds with no-one looking after them.
'One security guard, who obligingly told visitors at the gate they were about to be 'ripped off', quit after being hit on the head by one who didn't appreciate the advice. Adrian Wood, 49, was full of tales from the warzone. "Santa was punched by a furious father who had been waiting in line for four hours," he said. "He had got to the front only to be told he couldn't take a picture of his children and that they weren't allowed to sit on Santa's lap. The family were then told they would have to get in another queue to get their presents. That was the final straw."'-- collaged
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'Emma Craven and Daryl Yarwood left their jobs as Santa’s little helpers at a “Lapland” theme park in Dorset amid fears the stress would make them ill. And Emma said: “When I got there I was thinking 'Oh my God, is this it?' It was a huge muddy field with a few sheds popped in it and a few little Christmassy looking things. Angry people just kept shouting, ‘Is this it’? It was really doing my health in.”
'Frustrated customers attacked three elves and a Father Christmas after forking out £30 a ticket to queue in a muddy field for Lapland New Forest. Dozens of workers at the attraction, which had a closed ice rink and a nativity scene nailed to a billboard, were pulled out for their safety by an employment agency. Trading standards had over 2,000 complaints. The attraction opened during the holiday season in 2008 and was labelled as a "glorified car-boot sale".
'Elf Emma quit the park after she was slapped in the face by an incensed mother. The 30-year-old, from Bournemouth, said it happened as she looked after a queue of punters at the grotty grotto. Emma said: “From the first morning I worked there it was just a barrage of abuse from the moment you got in until the moment you left. “People kept asking me, ‘Is this it’? and telling me what a rip-off it was and how we should be ashamed of ourselves."
'Pal Daryl left his grotto job after just four days — sickened at ordering parents to fork out £10 extra to have their kids photographed with Father Christmas. Daryl, 23, said: “From the first day we were all getting stressed out. There were parents screaming at me and children crying. It was really badly organized. I nearly got lynched. If I didn’t have the mental strength it could have made me ill. I’d definitely have quit if the agency hadn’t pulled us out. It’s not like it was big money. They offered us £5.90 an hour.”'-- collaged
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'Visitors who had paid up to £30 each for tickets to a “Christmas Wonderland” in the New Forest were turned away yesterday by a woman shrieking: “Santa's dead.” This morning a convoy of lorries and horseboxes carrying reindeer, donkeys and huskies left the muddy site after contractors called in the police, claiming they had not been paid. More than 50,000 tickets to the attraction known as Lapland New Forest had been sold in advance. It is not known whether any of those who had paid up to £130 for a family ticket would get their money back.'-- collaged
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'Families have been left stunned, shocked and speechless after two brothers accused of conning people into visiting a Lapland-style theme park had their convictions overturned. Victor and Henry Mears, from Brighton, were jailed for 13 months in March this year and have both now served their sentences. At the original trial the brothers denied eight charges of misleading advertising but they were found guilty on all counts by the jury at Bristol Crown Court.
'Lisa Perry, from Wyke Regis, and 12 members of her family went to the attraction which was based at Matcham’s Leisure Park. She said: “I’m stunned. I can’t believe how they can overturn the conviction on the strength of that. I don’t know what else to say, I’m speechless.” Mrs Perry said that her family had been disappointed with their experience and never got any compensation for the £300 they paid. She said: “You had to be there to see it. I have never been to anything as bad as that.”
'Christine and Eddie Teague, from Dorchester, took their grandchildren to the attraction and said it was ‘nothing like’ what they were expecting.Mrs Teague said: “I think it’s a disgrace. I took my two grandchildren. We waited for hours to see Father Christmas.” She added: “It was nothing like Santa’s Grotto, nothing at all.”'-- collaged
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p.s. Hey. ** MyNeighbourJohnTurtorro, And a good morning to you, MNJT. I'm real good, thanks. You're in the flat and, hence, hooked up, in part to here, awesome! How's being there so far? There being inside, outside, and in general? The new Burial EP is really great, yeah. Totally agree. It was flooding my place this weekend. Xmas spirit, yeah, I think so. Paris gets intensely pretty at Xmas, both deliberately and accidentally, so it's hard not to feel like its magician's assistant or something. And I'm on some Xmas gift hunts. Etc. And I'm putting up posts like the one today. So, yeah, I think so, spirit-wise. Are you Xmas-y in some fashion? ** les mots dans le nom, Hi. Thanks for asking the library to order my book. The only thing Paris is missing, other than some out of town people whose absence empties the place for me, is a snowscape. Enjoy yours for me and for the Parisians like me who wish everything on its floor was white. I want to read that new Reverdy book. I love Reverdy. And that Bataille book. I need to try to get that, thank you. Maybe once I have, I'll do a post on it, if someone else doesn't volunteer first. ** Kyler, Hey. Email, okay, cool. Are you in Florida yet? ** David Ehrenstein, RIP: Peter O'Toole for absolutely sure. What an amazing, daring, heroic, role model of an actor that guy was. Sad, sad, sad. Yeah, Yury mentioned that Lagerfeld thing to me. He's not a fan of KL, so he told me about that with rolling eyes. ** Paul Curran, Hi, Paul. Yeah, let's see, we'll be in Tokyo, well, for one day when we first arrive, but then we'll be there again more lengthily from, I think, the 17th through the 21st. It's a shorter trip than we had hoped 'cos there's a ton of stuff we need to do here, and we go to Antarctica/Patagonia in early February. Anyway, let's hang, and, yes, if you and your kiddo want to do Kidzania, that sounds fantastic. I'll check with Zac, but I think he'll be way on board with that idea. Very cool. ** Sypha, Hi, James, Yeah, porn writing is a great palate cleanser, really gets the writing back down to the very basics or something. Ah, that's very interesting about why and how you do your porn in-between thing. Cool scenarios there. I think the fan fiction sites would eat up that One Direction/Jake Bugg slash. And slash fiction is a form just waiting for its James Joyce or Dickens or whoever to appear. Could be you. ** Bill, The good kind of meetings, nice. Exactly about Jee Young Lee's installations. The Chris Marker show at the Pompidou is pretty great. All of his films, I think. A bunch if not all of his late video projections/installations, including a handful of those insane 'Second Life'-like things he made at the end. And interesting related events a la the Aki Onda intervention. Maybe I can do something on it here, but it's 80% films projected in the theaters, so ... I'll try. Good idea. Ha ha, I thought loveableandnice's text needed its considerable length to convey the full extent of his logic and reserve, but ... It was a overlong-y, yeah. ** Rudyd, Hey! Thanks a lot. And about that poem, yeah, thank you. I do think that is maybe my best poem or up there or something maybe. I understand about the escort texts. You probably know that I'm very drawn to the struggling articulations of personal confusion and unhappiness. Especially when they're written by young guys battling with contexts where people are only interested in objectifying them. So, in those cases, a mediating factor is that the texts they're writing were made specifically to sell their bodies to strangers, so it's kind of a high pressure situation, and it really interests me that they sometimes choose to expose themselves so emotionally in that context, and that the requirement to reduce themselves to sex objects is too uncomfortable for them. Which I guess makes the texts even more unnerving in a way. Yeah, I really dislike objectification of young people. It's kind of a lifelong thing that I've always written about, so it interests me a lot to try to disrupt attempts to be blinded by their good looks, and the escort context is a high-charged place to do that. Some people reading this blog still avoid reading the escort texts and just use the photos to get boners and so on, but I like that they have to deliberately ignore the escorts' interior lives to do that. I think that choice is disturbing in a very interesting way or something. ** Aaron Mirkin, Hi, Aaron! Yeah, it's a great pleasure to have you here, thank you. The trailer is really beautiful. It made me very excited to see the film, so I'm really hoping that I'll be here when the screenings are happening. I'll email you. And I'll keep a close eye on the festival's website. Thanks a lot again. Happy Monday. ** Delilah Hannu, Hello, Delilah! Ha ha, Paul is your dude, eh? There's a number of porn movies out there starring him if you want even more. Merry Christmas to you too! How are you handling or celebrating it? ** Steevee, Good question. Two good questions, actually. Hm, I don't know, but I kneejerk pegged him a Black/Death Metal guy. But maybe he's Old School, i.e. they broke the mold after Sabbath or something. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Great, really glad the launch went so well. The photos make it seem so, for sure. What was that band like, or, what was their sound/thing? How was lunch? ** Keaton, Hi. Wow, that was scandalous. Or something. But text turns scandals into something else. Or fiction does. But God knows if that was fiction. I ... think it was. Anyway, it was a lustrous thing. Thank you, maestro. ** Etc etc etc, Hi. Wayne is your dissertation advisor? Wow, that's cool. Wayne is seriously great, obviously. As a writer and as a fella. Say hi to him for me, if you remember. I haven't talked to Wayne in way too long. Thanks for wanting to get to 'God Jr.'. But that's some intimidating company for it right there, gulp. I like 'EP'. It might be my favorite Houellebecq. And 'Concrete' is really major. A great, great novel. Bernhard is the shit. I think or bet or predict that you'll be happy to have read that one. Well, I hope you get to resurface very soon, and happy holidays and work and reading in the meantime. ** Misanthrope, Thanks, thanks. That NYC, et. al. trip sounds crazed. Get into true crazed-ness of it. That's the only way. Thanks for putting me in touch with LPS's youtube channel. I'll be so there as soon as here is in the rear view, which looks to be almost right about now. ** Okay. There are going to be Xmas-y kinds of posts now and then until the 25th happens, and there's one up above today for your delectation or whatever. See you tomorrow.