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austin_dern) wrote2024-11-12 12:10 am
It's kinda like a lost and found in a border town
Thank you, dear bunnyhugger.
We finally got to the Merry-Go-Round Museum maybe a quarter after two, giving us not quite two hours to hang out and see the sights. Fortunately we've seen many of them before, but there's always ones we can look at again and feel are new, like this E Joy Morris sea monster that's not quite the one you see reproduced on Chance fiberglass carousels, but is a kin to it. Or looking at the animals they've carved for their own carousel, like the rabbit that's adorable but so tiny that no one over 60 pounds is allowed to ride it. Or just studying again the big Toy Town map for an amusement park (that seems kind of low on specific rides) never built, somewhere in Iowa, that's just imagination-capturing. I also realized that weekend was the 50th anniversary of a National Carousel Roundtable conference held in Flint, one of the key moments in the development of merry-go-round appreciation. I thought it was wonderful we were here on the 50th anniversary of the organizational beginnings and then remembered that the program they have on display shows the October 1974 meeting was their second annual meeting. (I believe it's the one where the Norris family presented what they were able to determine about George W Long's carousel history, though.)
And then there's new things, as there are every year. The one standing out here was a sign from Cedar Point. The rides there used to have custom-made art showing off the ride, usually with a character saying how tall you need to be to ride this ride. The Merry-Go-Round Museum had somehow acquired the sign for Blue Streak, showing a lightning-wielding superhero hovering somewhere above the Space Spiral, which was not actually near Blue Streak, but it's nice and dramatic. They had some miscellaneous other old stuff too --- a Welcome to Cedar Point sign that has to date to around 2000, a kiddie height guide using Peanuts characters (so, from sometime after 2008 or so), a papier mache figure formerly on the Midway Carousel.
Something going on we didn't quite understand: some family had lost a something. We didn't pay detailed attention to the family that was one of the big group having a tour --- and a carousel ride --- as we got in. But after we had thought they'd left, they were back, casting blame at one another in the search for something. I was feeling the need to go over and lend my thing-finding experience but also felt like I needed to not get involved in other people's tense moments. Eventually the father declared that he had found it, everyone was now to assemble at the car as they were leaving. Someone asked him where he found it and he answered, ``Does it matter?'' I am torn between whether this means it was in his pocket or he was lying about having found it and would reveal the lie when they were too far away to drive back.
A surprise we maybe should not have been surprised by was the raffling off of a carousel horse. They'd announced for 2021 that they were doing one last raffle of one last horse, at the end of 2022. Last year, they announced the final raffle had been postponed to the end of 2023. You will be stunned, then, that bunnyhugger bought another six raffle tickets for the horse to be raffled off New Year's Eve, 2024-25. Along the way we got the story of the horse that had been won by some party that didn't pick it up for ... I want to say ten years. (They were from way out of the area --- I want to say California --- and had trouble arranging a time when they could be back in Ohio with means to drive back to California. Even when they did, story goes, they didn't have space for it and so loaned it to a neighbor who did.) We'll see.
Also we saw how the museum had a couple of carousel calendars for past years. I mean really past years, like 2008 or so. They don't have one for 2025, unfortunately. bunnyhugger plans to make her own out of the pictures she's taken this year. Including ones at the Merry-Go-Round Museum, although the skeletons they've set on some of the animals as Halloween theming constrain what she can use. But outthinking constraints is part of what makes art, isn't it?
And now back to Pinball At The Zoo pictures. Will there be any pinball this set of pictures? Or will I focus in on ...
Pixy Prize is one of the redemption or prize games that were on sale --- this one was already sold --- so unfortunately I didn't see it in demonstration. But I got some idea of what might be going on from looking at the pixies on bottom.
So you see those figures with the big heads and open mouths and enormous barber-pole antennas, right? Well, are you ready for ...
Yeah! They have faces on back of their heads too. In fact, they have duplicate bodies on the back, so they can rotate around and always come to a rest looking at the customer.
Just a little long-distance shot from near Pixy Prize at some of the games and people playing them.
One of Stern's rare misfires in recent years was the Led Zeppelin table. Here's a playfield being offered for sale individually and I don't think it moved. Could be wrong, though.
Oh yeah, so, we were no where near threatening to compete in the Pinball At The Zoo main tournament but here's pictures of two of the trophy plaques, things someones not us (specifically, ADB, currently the 45th-highest ranked player in the world and DOM, the 122nd) could hang in their living rooms.
Trivia: The Convention of Mortefontaine, signed the 3rd of October, 1800, at a chateau north of Paris, ended the Quasi-War with France. News of it first arrived in Baltimore the 7th of November, too late to affect the Presidential election. Source: John Adams, David McCullough.
Currently Reading: Comics.