Wild Elephants and Cursed Eateries: Chaos and Calamity from India to Barabooooooo....

Your showbiz scrambler features foundering tycoons, a 4-star Canadian Fiasco, Wild elephants on a tear, Cursed Kitchens and Creepy Organ Music ... And Away We Goooooooooooo! ...

Disney Fights To Save More Disappearing Magic: ... Down there in the Magic Kingdom, the also-ran next-door California Adventure was a fizzle from the get-go. Burbank big shots plan to sink another 1.1 billion into the paltry park to make it more, well, more Disney. Adventure cost a billion to build; another million for post-opening extras that still failed to lure the Mickey Mouse masses ...Bad first impressions are hellishly hard to overcome ....


Canadian Circus Bites the Sawdust: First reported by Circusnews.com, up at Niagara Falls, Ontario, the collapse of another new-wave big top humbles fallible producers. Cirque X, parent of Cirque Niagara which staged a show named Avaia, now in bankruptcy and nearly 7 million in debt. Ouch du Soleil! Opened in may last year in a 60,000 square-foot tent in Rapidsview Park. First year tix sales boffo at 5 million; not so this year, down to 2.7 mil. Producers claim relentless raves all the way greeted the parade of imported Cossack riders, acrobats and the like from Mr. Putin’s ominously reascending Russia. Anybody out there ever heard of Avaia? They’re blaming the flop on plunging tourist trade. Reasons, we always need them ...

Wild Elephants Terrify Towners: 100 --- count 'em, 100 --- Indian bulls in a party mood swam to a river island in northeast India and rampaged about, knocking down homes like toothpick huts, feasting on sugar cane and terrifying helpless villagers. Clyde Beatty, a world whirling out of control needs you, your whip and chair!

"Retrieved" Animals Tossed Off Bridge; Here's another act you won't see at any circus, anytime soon: Cats and dogs seized by “animal control workers” (what a moronic oxymoron) and hurled off a bridge into a watery abyss below. This from Barceloneta in sunny Puerto Rico. City hired an outfit named Animal Control Solution to rid housing projects of mutes and puffers barred from the premises. Each retrieved animal earned its killer a nifty $60, another $100 for a drop off at a shelter that evidently remains animal free. “Irresponsible, inhuman and shameful,” says the mayor. And what say ye, PETA? Oh, that’s right, just as long as they aren’t spared for spangles and spotlights, death in any form is a noble end. Did anybody ever show PETA what the world is like under the ocean?

Creepy Eateries Cry Out for
Brit Make Overs: Restaurants from Hell supply the laughing and laughable angle for yet another reality tv tease called Kitchen Nightmares. Chef Gordon Ramsey takes charge of inept cooks and servers, teaching them how to replace warmed over garbage with haute cuisine. The episode I saw at the Old Stone Mill around PA (surely, no restaurant could be this bad?) showcased owner Dean’s fear of failure, taken on by our interventionist chef, who proceeded to convert the hapless cookhouse from spooky purveyor of kinky dishes to standard steak house. Fun, farcical and fake all the way.

Baraboooooo oooo oooo! At the force-darkened Al Ringing Theatre tomorrow night, keyboard virtuoso Bob Dewel will pump terrifying tones (“crashing organ music”) into the theatre where adults can stumble around in the dark through a spooky Halloween walk. Also on the thrill bill: Al Ringling’s will to be read aloud by somebody from one of the boxes on high. How Gothic ... How creaky. Doc Dewel concedes, “Pretty amateur stuff.” Heck and oooooo, so are a lot of the best Halloween movies. The Al Ringling almost looks haunted without special effects. Ooops, sorry, Doc ... No, please, don't curse me with root canal nightmares for saying that!...

And that’s a Baraboo ooo ooo wrap ... ooo oooooo ...