Let me see if I can say something interesting about the Gilmore Car Museum even if it means using a Sunday slot to do it.
So the car museum is bigger and apparently wealthier than ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger and I imagined. Like, it's not just a building, or even a collection of garages. It's a little mock village, with roads and cross roads, and buildings (apart from the main building) meant to evoke the style of specific automobile dealers of specific times. Some have plaques out front saying what the specific inspiration was. Some are literally transplants, including the diner, one of those streamlined chrome mass-produced railway-car diners like you see in old cartoons. This one had been somewhere in Connecticut, I think it was, before relocating here. Going to this diner for lunch was almost the first thing bunnyhugger's father wanted to do and we went along with it, making our first meal in an actual restaurant since the pandemic began. A part of me wondered if the repeated questions about going to the museum were all his way of getting us to eat in a restaurant with him. Probably not, but ... you know, we'd eat somewhere with outdoor seating in reasonable ease.
The cars in the museum skewed toward the wealthy person's, in case you wanted to see more 1910s Bentleys and 1920s Rolls Royces than you expected. They were also kept in sparkling shape; while the signs saying to please not touch had no force and most of the cars don't have protective ropes to guard them, we did see staffers going around wiping tiny smudges off. There were some curiosities, though, including a variety of tiny cars --- one and two-seater things, three-wheeler cars that look like they'd always kill you on the roads --- that were also very easy to photograph. And one of the Tucker cars, famous from that bio-pic movie your electronic teacher was very excited about in 1988. And a lot of motorcycles, in their own building.
Also of general interest: some discussion of the experience Black people had with cars, including reproduction pages of a Green Book. We naturally looked up Lansing and discovered the place was worse than we expected; the only safe places we could find were what looked to be a couple of private homes, mostly on the west side.
The most interesting item --- and the last building we explored --- was devoted to automobile mascots or, as normal people call them, hood ornaments. Which makes more sense than what I was imagining since besides the Exxon Tiger can you think of any? Really? But the number and variety of hood ornaments was fascinating, particularly in the earliest days when they were all post-manufacture things and so could be more idiosyncratic. Many were like you'd expect, representations of fast-looking animals or the like. Some were more abstract figures. Some were outright political: one from the late 1910s depicted conquering the Hun (by way of national figures, so not as gruesome as you might expect from bayonet-drawn stabbing, but still).
Also in oddities, they somehow acquired the prop car and prop car set used for Disney's forgotten 1967 fantasy-comedy The Gnome-Mobile. This includes a double-sized set for the interior of the movie's Rolls-Royce Phantom II (also on display). And plaques explaining that these are supposedly the only Disney Movie Props that haven't stayed in the control of Disney Studios. This might be so but I kind of imagine things being pretty loose at Disney Master Command between, oh, let's say Walt's death and Trenchcoat. There is something weird and delightful about something as simple and goofy as ``a car's backseat, only double size'' and it was fun pointing it out to people who were looking over the actual car and not understanding the real thing to see was the 'room' behind them.
It will not surprise you that bunnyhugger and I ended up more interested in the museum than we expected, or that we were lingering at exhibits when her father was walking on to the next thing. We did close the place out, and I'd say I'm glad to have gone once. My father was envious when he heard about this, though, so it's possible if he gets to Michigan for a long enough stay we might need to go there again.
A place that would meet no resistance from us in seeing again? The Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. Here's pictures. Only a normal dose, since you got all this text above today.
On-carousel footage! Not during the ride, I believe, just as we were getting ready to start. There's another of the band organs in the background, center of the picture.
Looking back over my shoulder to see the center of the carousel and, in the background center-left, another of the band organs.
And there's the view from the ride out to the boardwalk.
Just off the ride and getting a last look. In the background, upper center, you can see the clown mouth that's there for folks to toss rings into. In the upper right you can just make out the wooden arm with rings to grab.
Tile plaque embedded in the wall outside the door with the carousel's National Historic Landmark dedication.
And back outside again, to see the Giant Dipper and, before that, sme not-yet-historic gargoyles.
Trivia: In the years after 1805 Harvard became a center of Unitarianism, and Princeton of orthodox Calvinism. Yale promoted a modified Calvinism, allowing room for human agency. Source: Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson, David S Reynolds. Reynolds doesn't say how it was modified (it wasn't his main point), but I suppose the theologians had a clever argument.
Currently Reading: Various comic books.
PS: Reviewing _Popeye and Son_, Episode 4: Don't Give Up The Picnic as I continue to give the series more attention than it's had in 35 years.
