Still not really up to starting the Motor City story but a little exasperating moment today as we got back to normal.
After several instances of having the mail held and them just ... not ... delivering the held mail at the end, I've started checking the box that I want them to keep the mail at the post office where I will pick it up. So this afternoon after work I drove from the office to the post office, gave them my name and address, and stood back to wait and hear how this went wrong.
The clerk --- the same one I had to ask last week why the post office hates us when they just lost a priority mail envelope ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger had sent from there (it was delivered two days later without ever being scanned at any point ever) --- disappeared for somewhere between ten minutes and all the time in the world before coming back to say there wasn't any mail for us there. Not a bit.
I pointed out that the Informed Delivery e-mail had pictures of stuff we were supposed to be getting, Friday and Saturday and today. And they had dropped a package off on our doorstep Friday, when they were supposed to be holding letters and packages for me to pick up. He couldn't explain where our mail had gone and I just gave up and went outside and yelled at the building. I figured to go home and print out both the receipt from my mail hold request and every single Informed Delivery e-mail so they could know just what to look for.
Of course, it was all dropped off in our mailbox at home, along with a letter for two houses down that we keep getting mail for because the letter carrier apparently can't tell our numbers apart.
I do not know why the post office wants me angry with them but fine, they've got it.
Venture with me now into Steam Town, at Six Flags America.
What could be more steampunk than carp who're harassed by people tossing coins in the fountain? Yes, carp with top hats and those geared monocles harassed by people tossing farthings in.
The artificial waterfall uses the same technology our backyard pond does, only theirs is bigger. Same problem with the rocks not covering the plastic cover though.
We didn't go in to the Filaments Steampub, but considered it. I kind of like the name.
But here's the roller coaster we went there to ride, Professor Screamore's SkyWinder.
Do you recognize it? ... Because it's another installation of the same track we know as Thunderhawk at Michigan's Adventure, Flight Deck at Canada's Wonderland, Infusion at Blackpool Pleasure Beach, and Mind Eraser and a half-dozen Six Flags parks.
The climb up to the station took you right up to the woods, though.
On the station was this defunct(?) zeppelin prop.
Here's the operator's station and a couple people wondering why I'm photographing them.
The place had a big cafeteria where we got some pop and rested from the sun (and, later, from a shower) and it had a wall with a lot of posters to explain the park's history.
So yes, the park started out as a project of Ross Perot and ABC, and it strikes me as very close to the drive-through safari that made Great Adventure, in New Jersey, which also opened in 1974.
By 1982 and 1983 the park had reached the point they weren't able to tell the difference between ``its'' and ``it's''. But just wait!
Four panels in and three of them have used the wrong it's, which does great things to leave you confident they're giving an accurate history of the park. The coaster's original incarnation at Paragon Park does appear to have been the tallest in the world at its opening, which adds to our tally of coasters that were world's tallest coasters at the time they opened (this, Montaña Rusa, Top Thrill Dragster/Top Thrill 2, Kingda Ka, and in the category of wooden coasters Mean Streak and, for bunnyhugger, American Eagle and Son of Beast) since Wikipedia considers the category established in 1917. (I think records of earlier coasters are too incomplete to say what was the tallest before this.)
Trivia: Italy raised money for building the complex for the 1956 Cortina d'Ampezzo Winter Games in part by the football pool Toto Calcio; a fifth of the revenue from these bets on Italian soccer matches went directly to the Italian Olympic Committee. Source: Encyclopedia of the Modern Olympic Movement, Editors John E Findling, Kimberly D Pelle.
Currently Reading: The Red Planet: A Natural History of Mars, Simon Morden.
