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So here's what I could do on my mathematics blog even though our rabbit was dying.
- Reading the Comics, July 17, 2018: These Are Comic Strips Edition
- Reading the Comics, July 21, 2018: Infinite Hotels Edition
- Reading the Comics, July 23, 2018: Bad Mathematics Edition
And what everybody wants to know. What's Going On In Mark Trail? Who Told Mark Trail 'Fetish' Was A Word He Could Say? May - July 2018 plot recap.
I have one last trio of pictures for Storybook Land and they would have run Saturday had Penelope's death not scrambled things. Rather than have a weird topic jump between days I'm just moving what had originally been Saturday's essay to Monday. You can work it out.
So after Storybook Land we drove to Ocean City where we figured we would be able to find Gillian's Wonderland Pier. The web site's directions just told us to get off the Parkway and drive toward the Giant Ferris Wheel. The satellite navigator took us to a nondescript spot along the boardwalk plainly near nothing. I picked a direction and drove along that way until I found something.
First view! The day turned very cloudy and overcast and the shore was full of sea-spray, so we were not going well finding Gillian's Wonderland Pier in Ocean City. But we finally saw the Giant Ferris Wheel ... at least ... a good-size Ferris Wheel. And a drop tower! Maybe there'd be roller coasters obvious when we got closer too, right? And this is how we ran across a park we didn't mean to go to, and didn't really know was there, Playland's Castaway Cove.
Playland's Castaway Cove is tiny and for all that has a bunch of rides. It's quite packed. The Xtreme Cyclone swinging-claw ride is one thing, and the big blue roller coaster was their newest, Gale Force. Between the two is this metallic grey coaster that we assumed was a defunct ride being taken down in favor of Gale Force. Not so! It was a new ride also opening that season, although it hadn't quite yet. Wild Waves, it's called, and it would open in September 2017.
Regular old Chance merry-go-round in Playland's Castaway Cove.
OK so there's at least four rides here. I said it was a small, packed park. Up front is track for the miniature railroad; behind it, under the structure, a spinning bumper car ride like we found everywhere that summer. Above the structure is Air Race, with cars that spin on one vertical and one horizontal axis for a perfectly dizzying affair. And behind all that, the Pirates Gold Rush, a knee-banger tiny roller coaster.
Pirates Gold Rush at Playland's Castaway Cove, here at the spot where it has to pass over the miniature railroad.
Gale Force requires a separate ride ticket to ride (or at least then) and it's a pretty substantial ticket as well as piece of pro-ride propaganda. Gives some idea what the ride stats are, too. It has a linear synchronous motor to launch the trains; this can't quite get enough speed the first time through so the ride rocks back and forth, passing through the lift station and the LSM motor three times, once backwards, to get up to speed.
Screening point ahead of the actual ride where you're supposed to leave your keys and anything that might get demagnetized by the ride's induction motor. I'm not sure this is actually necessary although if it gets people to not take their phones out on rides then yes, should do it. Rides always start off with zealous no-loose-articles rules and slacken off in time. By now they probably let riders carry bags of groceries as long as there aren't more than two loose watermelons in them.
Three-coaster shot: Gale Force, the not-yet-opened Wild Waves, and Whirlwind, a spinny little figure-eight coaster that we never saw before this visit but turns out to be everywhere now. It's small, but makes up for that with spinny cars and many, many circuits of the track so the ride is pretty satisfying nevertheless.
Birbs! There was this stand for taking photographs with parrots at the park and the birds seemed to be basically all right with this.
Trivia: Personal reasons forced Mabel S Douglass to withdraw from the movement to open a women's college at Rutgers in January 1915. The College for Women --- eventually named for her --- would be officially opened in September 1918, with Douglass as its first Dean. Source: Rutgers: A Bicentennial History, Richard P McCormick.
Currently Reading: Spacesuit: A History Through Fact and Fiction, Brett Gooden.
