And then we'll take it higher

I don't mean to hold you in suspense about the fursuit but I spent all day Tuesday doing stuff and not writing, so you get to spend tonight waiting. Meanwhile, have you been wondering just how much of that fair I could possibly have? Fair enough. I have this much more left and that's that. Tomorrow, guess what? Yeah, either an amusement park or a pinball tournament. Place your bets.

Tornado's a fun-looking ride we did not go on. I think we went on one at Seaside Heights one year, and that's probably plenty.

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Cortina Bob, now, that's the ride we really wanted. It's a Break Dance, a potentially extremely wild spinny ride, and was the thing we most hoped to ride.

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See? We got our tickets all ready and all. Incidentally this, and not the Himalaya, is what that sign a few days ago for the 'Rok N Roll' was. The fair did not have a Himalaya, I find, and while I don't have a shot making clear just what ride got the wrong label --- the Rok N Roll is an extremely different ride that we absolutely would have got on were it there --- picture context suggests it was the Cortina Bob after all.

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Yo dawg, I heard you like spheres, so I put a sphere on your sphere.

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Getting set for the ride. It was as satisfying and dizzying as we could have hoped for.

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And to close out, a shot from the base of the ride, peeking underneath so far as lighting will allow. I'm always amazed how much empty space there is under platform rides like this.

Trivia: In 2014 Japan became a net importer of television sets and laptop computers, for the first time (for televisions) in four decades. Source: Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World's Superpowers, Simon Winchester.

Currently Reading: Come Fly With Us: NASA's Payload Specialist Program, Melvin Croft and John Youskauskas. So this is great, Croft and Youskauskas tracked down the most likely origin of the story that shuttle commanders padlocked the airlock door when payload specialists were on board. And also a much more plausible explanation for it, if it happened, than ``we were worried a depressed payload specialist might open the door''. (The specific payload specialist identified as most likely to be the origin did get very depressed when the experimental apparatus he had worked on for five years failed, which would dishearten anybody. But he also worked on the machine and got it up and running before the end of the flight.)

So the shuttle's airlock door had a handle right next to the toilet, and after wiping up with a towel it's extremely hard to resist the urge to hang it up somewhere, and the handle was the only convenient hanging spot nearby, so ... and while it should be hard to grab a towel and accidentally open the lock, you don't want 'should' to be your only defense. (Thing that I'm still not clear about is where the padlock came from. The idea it was a surreptitious extra layer of physical safety that shuttle commanders passed on to one another makes a lot of sense, and supposing it then somehow got attached to the legendary depressed payload specialist also makes sense.)