Walt Disney's beloved steam trains, an original Disneyland attraction dating to 1955, are now powered by french fry oil left over from meals in the park's restaurants. WalletPop's Jason Cochran got exclusive access to learn why the park made the switch.

WalletPop Wire

Reinventing yourself in a tough job market the topic of film RE:Invention

Vera Gibbons Aug 2nd 2010 @ 5:00PM EST Filed Under: Saving Money, Career, Recession

When 38-year old Catherine Goerz got laid off in 2008 and was given just two weeks severance, she found herself taking on odd jobs and struggling to live -- happily -- on 75% less.

How were others doing it? How was anyone surviving? How were they toughing it out? Was anyone finding new opportunities in the worst job market in some 80 years? She decided to find out.

Armed with a hand-held mini-cam, a couple of friends, and a mission -- to fulfill her dream of making a documentary -- Goerz, a former campaign manager and producer for a Bay Area communications company, spent several weeks traveling cross-country, and interviewing America's jobless -- from marketing managers to waitresses.

Continue reading Reinventing yourself in a tough job market the topic of film RE:Invention

Checking out DVDs from the library is free -- until it isn't

Ron Dicker Aug 2nd 2010 @ 4:00PM EST Filed Under: Budgets, Family Money, Technology

Now that Americans borrow more DVDs at the library than they rent at Netflix, according to a survey published in the Consumerist, WalletPop would like to warn you of the steep late fines lurking at your local branch. We're talking amounts that can be expressed in the Dewey Decimal system if you're not careful.

Check this out: The New York Public Library just increased its $1-a-day late DVD fee to a whopping $3 a day. "We want to encourage turnover," spokeswoman Gayle Snible told WalletPop.

New York charges a relatively modest 25 cents-a-day for books. The reason for the disparity isn't because DVDs cost more than books. A hardcover in fact can sometimes cost more. It's because DVDs are more in demand than books, Victoria Galan, spokeswoman for the Miami-Dade Public Library System, explained to WalletPop.

"We look at the popularity of things and that impacts the fee schedule," she said. "DVDs, those are the hot items. The idea is to get them back on the shelf so the other people who are waiting for them can get them."

Continue reading Checking out DVDs from the library is free -- until it isn't

Find deals on what you need for Back to School with Savings.com

Josh Smith Aug 2nd 2010 @ 3:00PM EST Filed Under: Family Money, Shopping, Technology

This year families will spend $600 on preparing for the back to school season according to a recent survey released by the National Retail Foundation. With so much spending going on, the need to find deals is huge, which is where deal and coupon sites come into play, but if you don't want to spend time looking at generic deals that may or may not apply to what your child wants, you need to look at the new "Get Advice" section of Savings.com.

The Savings.com Q & A section, which bills itself as a place to "Ask, Answer & Save" on what Loren Bendele CEO of Savings.com described in a phone interview with WalletPop as a "deal-specific answer product." This deal-specific question and answer tool makes it easy to ask the community of Savings.com users and Savings.com deal experts for advice on buying specific back to school products.

Continue reading Find deals on what you need for Back to School with Savings.com

Recycle Dixon golf balls and get a deal on new ones

Ron Dicker Aug 2nd 2010 @ 1:00PM EST Filed Under: Extracurriculars, Saving Money, Green

The Dixon Earth, said to be the world's first fully recyclable high-performance golf ball, is designed to help players go green, if not hit the green. But amid all the buzz it's generating through celebrity users such as Don Cheadle, one other benefit has been obscured: the ball can save golfers money.

Dixon deducts $1 off a new Dixon Earth dozen for every used Earth ball returned. Given that a box of a dozen Dixon Earth balls costs $39.95 -- about average for a ball in its class -- golfers can slice $12 off each purchase for a total of $27.95 per box. For comparison's sake, popular Titleist balls listed at a major sports chain start at $45.99 for a dozen.

Continue reading Recycle Dixon golf balls and get a deal on new ones

Pinkberry 50% off deal ends August 8

Julia Scott Aug 2nd 2010 @ 12:30PM EST Filed Under: Shopping, Bargain Babe, Restaurant Deals & Coupons

If you haven't already caught the Pinkberry 50% off deal, you only have one more week to get 50% off their delicious watermelon frozen yogurt. Everyday from 5-7 p.m. this particular flavor is half-off. Note, toppings are still full priced. No coupon or coupon code is needed. No minimum purchase. The watermelon flavor is only here for the summer so make sure to try it. It's quite tasty. One coupon per person per day.

Caveats: valid at participating locations only. (I suspect airports are excluded).

Ride along on Disneyland's historic trains, now running on french fry oil

Jason Cochran Aug 2nd 2010 @ 12:00PM EST Filed Under: Food, Technology, Transportation, Travel, Celebs & Money, Video, Green, In the News

Eighteen months ago, a quiet change came to Disneyland in Anaheim, California. Walt Disney's beloved Disneyland Railroad steam trains, childhood favorites that make clockwise runs around his namesake theme park, stopped using diesel fuel. Instead, Disney began running them on a fuel it had plenty of: used french-fry oil.

Continue reading Ride along on Disneyland's historic trains, now running on french fry oil

Broadway's 'West Side Story' cans musicians and uses canned music

Jason Cochran Aug 2nd 2010 @ 11:00AM EST Filed Under: Travel, In the News

A few weeks ago, the orchestra for Broadway's West Side Story was gutted. In a cost-cutting measure, five violinists were told to clean out their lockers, and their parts were replaced by a synthesizer piped in from another room. Overnight, Leonard Bernstein's lush score, widely considered a masterpiece of American performing arts, went partly mechanical, manipulated by an engineer whose job is to trick audiences into thinking they are hearing the real thing.

The top ticket price for West Side Story is $121.50, but for that skyscraping rate, don't think you're getting a full orchestra. Escalating costs and changing musical tastes have downsized theatrical orchestras to the size of small bands, and in some cases, like the recent [title of show], just a pianist. When the current revival of 1957's West Side Story opened 15 months ago with its full string section and amply-staffed pit, it was a throwback to a richer American musical tradition.

But after it passed the 500th-performance mark, producers decided it was time to stretch the profit a little farther and axed live musicians, just as other Broadway long-runners such as Les Misérables have done before. Doing so may keep it open for a while longer, but at what price to American artistic tradition?

Continue reading Broadway's 'West Side Story' cans musicians and uses canned music

Retire? 95-year-old pianist still wows crowds six nights a week

Marc Acito Aug 2nd 2010 @ 10:00AM EST Filed Under: Extracurriculars

Irving Fields has got to be one in a million.

Consider the statistics. Of the 5.7 million Americans over the age of 85, only 33% are men, totaling 3.8 million. Of those, roughly 5% of them still work. That's 190,000 guys over 85 still in the labor force.

But how many of them play the piano professionally six nights a week? At 95?

Irving Fields has been entertaining audiences since 1930, when the 15-year-old won the Fred Allen Radio Amateur Hour and received a week's engagement at the Roxy Theater. By the time he was 18 and a student at the Eastman School of Music, he was playing cruises, where he developed a passion for Latin American music. (Check out this vintage video of him playing "The Mexican Hotfoot.")

Continue reading Retire? 95-year-old pianist still wows crowds six nights a week

Ink, please disappear: Ten tattoos you can stop wasting money on now

Steven Kent Aug 2nd 2010 @ 9:00AM EST Filed Under: Money College, Extracurriculars

I try to tread lightly on the snarky side of cultural criticism, but when I saw that, for some odd reason, several of the week's most popular "Arts & Culture" articles on Digg had to do with tattoos, I just couldn't resist a sort of counterpoint.

Tattoos, it seems, are rapidly falling away as a barrier for college students in their post-graduation job search, at least according to a report by global outplacement consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. A lot of that, at least as far as CG&C can tell, comes from the general pervasiveness of body art among the next generation of the workforce. According to the FDA, 32 percent of Gen Xers and 38 percent of Millenials sport at least one tattoo, with another half of those having from two to five pieces. (Heck, even your beloved childhood LEGO man went in for a full set of sleeves.) Basically, if employers want to screen out people with tattoos, they're cutting themselves off from half the talent pool at this point, which means college students can rest a little easier if they're considering getting inked.

I don't sport any pieces myself, but most of my friends have at least one tattoo, and I appreciate a good piece of body art as much as the next former punk rocker. Still, some of the smartest people I know have fallen prey to some horrendously cliched tattoos, and I see an endless parade of variations on the same body art themes at the indie rock (and occasionally metal) shows that I attend week in, week out. So, to the coming generation of tattooed wonders - please, if you're gonna spend your hard-earned money to get expensive ink done, spare us another tired take on these: 2010's most played-out tattoos.

1. The Heart-On
What's the message here - "Pulmonary Pride?" Or perhaps it's a gesture toward emotional nakedness and seize-the-day grit - in which case, doesn't it belong on the sleeve? Whatever the intent, the anatomically-correct heart-over-your-heart (often rendered in excruciating detail, with random wings) gets my vote for the most unnecessary (and ubiquitous) contemporary tattoo.

2. The Knux
Despite the fact that Robert Mitchum brought knuckle tattoos to their apex of cool back in 1955, they've come back in a huge way in the past several years, and one can only imagine the sum total of mental energy expanded thinking of pithy 8-letter summations of ironic wit. Advice: don't get a tattoo that requires you to clutch your downturned hands together like a burrowing prairie dog so that someone can actually read it.

3. Any Radiohead Tattoo
Radiohead's "evil bear" logo likely started out as a postmodern play on the Dead's classic "dancing bears," but there's a fine line between "a play on" and "the next iteration of." You like Radiohead, you say? You and everyone between 14 and 49. I actually don't automatically hate on band tattoos, but if you're gonna go with Radiohead, you might as well get a tattoo of an oxygen molecule because you like breathing, too.

4. The T Stamp
I try to stay away from easy targets, and far be it from me to call anyone a tr*mp, but a lower back tattoo rarely ends well for anyone involved. As Vince Vaughn memorably opined in Wedding Crashers, "It might as well be a bullseye."

5. The "Sailor Jerry"
I remain firmly convinced that a big part of the tattoo influx comes from the massive groundswell of hipsters getting vaguely nautical-themed, rockabilly-style tattoos all of a sudden. Just checking, though: Didn't we all hate this with a bilious passion five years ago, when it was called "Ed Hardy?" OK. Thought so.

6. The Hip Shooter(s)
There was a time when tattooing...