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This week in my humor blog? Of course there's a Beetle Bailey squirrel update, as that's becoming one of my calling cards. There's my joy at forgetting something inconsequential from the 1980s G.I.Joe cartoon. There's Olive Oyl's return from the grave. And LLMs make their assault on Big Epistemology a personal fight by picking a quarrel with me over the future of Fred Basset. All this and more, waiting for you here:
- MiSTed: Altered Destiny, Part 3
- Guy Who Draws _Beetle Bailey_ In Squirrel Game Of Cat And Mouse With Me
- Statistics Saturday: Fun, By Decade
- It really looks like _Fred Basset_ has ended
- Mainframe. His name was Mainframe.
- What's Going On In Olive and Popeye? Who is Patcheye and why should we care? June - September 2023
- A Type of Person I Never Would Have Imagined Before
- MiSTed: Altered Destiny, Part 4
Now back to our big day at California's Great America for the pictures:
There's this nice little covered bridge over a river near Planet Snoopy. As you can see, the covered section's not quite wide enough to cover the whole of the actual bridge, which offers ... I'm not sure what benefit, besides making the section that has to be covered a little bit less. At least the benches underneath are nicely shaded, though.
And look who's greeting people at the entrance to Planet Snoopy! We failed to get hugs from either Charlie Brown or Franklin for some reason.
And here's Snoopy's Space Race, which is actually an okay match of character to theme given Snoopy's long use as a mark of accomplishment in NASA programs.
I love the rhombus-bedecked egg, which hasn't got a lot to do with Snoopy or anything but has a really solid 60s/70s style to it.
The Lucy's Crabbie Cabbies roller coaster --- one that we were too tall to ride, and would likely have regretted had we ridden --- may not seem on theme for Planet Snoopy. So it is. Fun odd fact: Cedar Fair has two lines of Peanuts-themed attractions at its parks, Camp Snoopy for the bigger-deal parks and Planet Snoopy for the lesser-deal ones. (Cedar Point itself has both, plus another un-licensed kiddie area.) So that and the food situation were striking indications of where California's Great America ranked in the Cedar Fair organization even before the chain decided to close the park.
Character Carousel may not seem to have much. Ah, but back in the days when Taft/Paramount owned the park, this had Hanna-Barbera characters on it.
And there's your dancing Snoopy, at the limits of Planet Snoopy, ready for your attention.
The newest themed area, NorCal County Fair, wasn't even finished when we visited! The last of the attractions would get up and running last month. It's hopeful, I think, that the park is still refreshing areas and putting in a couple new attractions when they can expect only five-to-ten years to profit from it.
Tiki Twirl was one of the rides closed for our visit, and I believe most of the summer. The sign in the lower right says when it opened in 2006 it was named Survivor: The Ride (``The tribe has spoken''), which reminds you this was a Paramount park back then, and gives a faint trace of sense to the Polynesian theme.
A sign explaining the mythology of the Tiki Twirl ride. I would love to know what word had to be replaced by 'separating' there.
Something fun is coming! Know what it would be? That would be the Pacific Gliders flat ride, a Zamperla WindstarZ. It's a Paratrooper-like ride with the element that riders can choose whether to circle high or low.
Larry the Singing Chicken, a decoration after Marvin Yagoda's heart, was clucking out different songs as we passed. We so hoped he would break into the 1812 Overture, but no luck.
Trivia: George Burns and Gracie Allen's first radio performances were on BBC radio stations, doing short bits from their 1929 vaudeville tour of the United Kingdom. Source: On The Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio, John Dunning. (Allen had some microphone fright, which she never overcame.)
Currently Reading: The World In A Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization, Vince Reiser.
