![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I'll get back to pictures of Lake Compounce momentarily. I just want to give you my humor blog posts for the week. These were:
- Well, Actually, Autocorrect Saved Me, last week's major piece, about know-it-all culture and autocorrect protecting me from my worst impulses.
- Is There Life After Apartment 3-G? Or, somehow, weeks after the strip ended I'm still writing about it.
- Statistics Saturday: Word Count In Animated Peanuts Specials or more precisely in the titles of these specials. If someone has a reliable transcript of the whole specials, though, I've got the PHP scripts to summarize their word count.
- In Support Of Pants-Wearing Animals or, me in danger in the library again. See my Currently Reading: list.
- A Note To My Seven-Year-Old Self, Who Can’t Even Recognize Me and yes, it's pie-related.
- In The Flying Dream, just some stray neuron activity.
- A Follow-Up Note To My Seven-Year-Old Self, Who Still Doesn’t Believe It’s Me and while it seems chronologically implausible when I was seven I hadn't seen Star Wars that I remember.
- On Not Knowing About Disney’s Saint Louis Theme Park because they're selling the plans for it, in case you want to build one yourself. This week's major piece.
And you know about the way you can put this on your Friends page or else on your RSS feed, so let's get back to Connecticut:
The queue for Boulder Dash, at Lake Compounce, as seen from the bridge leading to the launch station. The roller coaster's built into the hillside so it's got a great location in the park.
Boulder Dash returning to the station. The lengthly roller coaster mostly hugs the side of the hills, so that while it has pretty impressive drops it stays nice and close to the ground and the trees and such. Thus it feels even faster than it really is, and it's already fast.
Wildcat, the older wooden roller coaster at Lake Compounce, shortly after leaving the station, in back. The photo's taken from a bridge and queue space that goes over the first section of track here.
Wildcat car having just left the station. Much of the roller coaster is visible in the background.
Wildcat launch station, including one of the little points of operational procedure that impressed us. Note the small green cone marking one of the gates as reserved. Probably it was for guests who needed to use alternate access. Multiple times over the day, though, we saw rides dropping reserved-seating cones.
Trivia: The last ten B-17 bombers on Luzon not destroyed or lost in the first weeks of the Pacific War were withdrawn on the 17th of December, sent to Australia. Source: A History of the Second World War, B H Liddell Hart.
Currently Reading: The Great American Hoax, Alan Abel. About the early-60s hoax Society for Indecency to Naked Animals.
PS: The Set Tour, Part 10: Lots of Spheres, next on this string, a domain that I used in my thesis, although that I didn't actually name explicitly back then.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2015-12-12 10:56 pm (UTC)Big wooden roller coasters aren't being made so much these days. There was a stretch in the late 90s to about 2010 when every park was putting in some monstrously huge wooden roller coaster, and that's when many of the top rides --- Shivering Timbers at Michigan's Adventure, El Toro at Great Adventure, Boulder Dash at Lake Compounce --- were built. But that era seems to have passed.
However, junior wooden roller coasters are still bubbling over. They're smaller ones, of course, but rides like Roar-A-Saurus at Story Book Land (New Hampshire) or the Wooden Warrior at Quassy are outstanding rides, first-rate all around. If wooden roller coasters are going to be smaller things for a while, there are going to be a lot of great small roller coasters.
As I understand the roller coaster industry, the major designers and builders keep splitting up and coming together in a series of companies that build a thick bunch of new roller coasters and then go bankrupt, releasing the staff to go out and reorganize into a new company. The current big name is Gravity Group, built out of the pieces of Custom Coasters International, with a division called Gravitykraft that might be the next big name. If you can get to Tayto Park in Ireland before you head to the United States, they have a pretty nice-looking one named Cú Chulainn that just opened this year.