80s kids will remember ... that slightly weird thing where, as the Soviet Union's gears finally seized up, that there was this one cosmonaut who was stranded aboard the Space Station Mir. He'd gone up for the usual sort of mission and stayed behind as normal, watching over the station for the next crew and the usual crew rotation. But because of the general dysfunction of the last years of the Soviet Union, he just ended up waiting, with no hint of when things would make it possible for him to come home.
There were a good number of late night monologue jokes about it, although darned if I can remember one. I believe the season-two Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode where Joel meets his Russian counterpart (played, if I remember right, by Mike Nelson) was a riff on this. And as he waited the Soviet Union finally collapsed underneath him; when he finally returned it was to a foreign country, and his fate was one of those little sad things you mention as symbol of the failure of the Soviet Union and the wheezy, worn-out system that could no longer do the things it could months before. It was only actually ten months or so he stayed in space, but it had the bad luck to span an epochal event and seem like a shard of the old world's crackup.
Anyway just ... thinking about those Boeing astronauts, still up there, you know?
But enough of that. How about Kings Island, as we started our Tuesday evening short visit?
First ride at Kings Island was, of course, the antique carousel. I don't remember whether ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger got on one of the estimated 17 lead horses on it, but she was right in front of me here.
This little garden, speaking of the Food and Wine Festival, was renovated since our last visit. It'd been a shabby little smoking area before and, years before that when this was Paramount's Kings Island, a park with a model of the starship Enterprise (movie refit, if I understand right)
Now, though, the garden area is a little historical walk exploring the fifty-plus year history of the park.
Each year got a plaque like this in the ground, mostly mentioning changes in rides and maybe some special event, like The Brady Bunch filming that episode I never saw but am sure was a very Brady Bunch episode.
Here's a very 1970s year, where the new rides are a double Ferris wheel and a Troika, and Even Knievel jumps over stuff.
And there were a couple of billboard-type signs like these with vintage pictures and descriptions. Kings Island started out owned by the same company that owned Hanna-Barbera, which is why all the Scooby-Doo stuff.
Trivia: In December 1898 Samuel Langley accepted a $50,000 grant from the War Department to build a man-carrying airplane. Source: First Flight: The Wright Brothers and the Invention of the Airplane, T A Heppenheimer.
Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 54: Napple or Yapple, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly, Editor Stephanie Noelle. So while this story about Wimpy, Swee'Pea, and an unfrozen caveman deciding by taste test whether covered Yapple pies or open-face Napple pies are better, the vintage Thimble Theater strips from like 1930 are about Popeye facing down Snork who keeps shooting Popeye only for a pre-Spinach Popeye to keep standing back up and, yeah, not all the Segar stories were serious affairs but the contrast is there, you know?
