It's a miracle they don't make them anymore

[austin_dern]

And now I mention my mathematics blog could be on your Friends page, and if that doesn't work out for you, it could be on your RSS reader. Or there's just the stuff I posted the last week, which was a fairly tame one:

• Reading the Comics, December 13, 2015: More Nearly Like It Edition as I search for a good break point that involves not having too many or too few comics in one essay.
• Where Are The Unfair Coins? a challenge to my understanding of coin tossing.
• Reading the Comics, December 17, 2015: Caught Up Edition, as I get the backlog of comics with mathematical themes cleared up, temporarily.

And now, the end of Lake Compounce, for us.

Kennywood arrow spotted at the Lake Compounce bumper cars ride. I am curious whether the arrow does correctly point in the direction one would go to get to Lake Compounce's sister park in Pittsburgh, or whether they just use it as a vain effort to direct the flow of traffic. The Lake Compounce bumper cars drivers seemed to get stuck, and confused, a lot, but that might have just been that we were there on a bad day. Still, the ride was stopped for a while as we waited in line. And the drivers needed a lot of direction about getting stuck.

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Wipeout, a Trabant-style ride in front of the Boulder Dash roller coaster, with the train in view. Neat variations on this from the standard Trabant: half the seats face backwards, and the ride accelerates its rotation as it levels out again, so what's normally the sad close of the ride has a little saving bonus.

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Old Wipeout paint and logo visible beneath the current paint. I'm surprised the paint is this bad, and also that the old logo only dates to the 90s. I would have sworn that logo style to be one, maybe two decades older than that.

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Ride operator at the Wildcat roller coaster playing his ruler like a guitar. He was having a great old time and it did energize a slow-moving line at Lake Compounce.

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Lake Compounce's Wildcat roller coaster ride operator Joel Hodgson plots his Mystery Science Theater 3000 remake!

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Main entrance of Lake Compounce in the evening light, just after the park's close.

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The underpass entrance to Lake Compounce in the early night.

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Trivia: Kurosawa Akira's four wartime films were among the 236 ``feudal and militaristic'' movies that the Supreme Command for the Allied Powers ordered destroyed in November 1945. Source: Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, John W Dower.

Currently Reading: Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing, Po Bronson, Ashley Merryman.

Comments

[rapidtrabbit.livejournal.com]

So did you catch my show on MNN2 this past Friday?

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I hate to admit that we couldn't. Our Internet is always marginal for any kind of streaming stuff and trying to watch it online while also keeping open the logmein window needed for work was just too much for it. I'm sorry.

[spaceroo.livejournal.com]

> Old Wipeout paint and logo visible...

Nah. That's the start of a guerrilla ad campaign for Nintendo's latest console, the WiiPEO, the first console to use sensors embedded in your tear ducts to control the game play. The pack-in cartridge will be a PowerPoint spreadsheet detailing Nintendo's overall market share of the console market since the WiiU was released. Cry hard enough and you'll build up enough speed to clear the bar in the pole vault competition and beat Bruce Jenner!

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Oh, that's a solid idea. I've always wanted to be on the leading edge of a marketing campaign!