![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I'll probably start on Motor City Furry Con come Friday. Today, busy but also TCM was showing My Fair Lady, which is the best sort of musical to watch because there's enough earwormy songs that they overload you and cancel each other out and leave your head clear.
Anyway it's got me thinking about Henry Higgins's entire deal. He's big on the idea that the English should speak English correctly. He's familiar with all the many varieties of dialect and accent and word choice but the whole plot kicks off with the idea that he can teach anyone to crush their distinctiveness out. But he's also motivated by the idea that this puts all English speakers on an even footing, that speaking Movie Received Pronunciation is a way to demolish the classicism that divides people.
And that's the dichotomy of a standard, isn't it? A standard is freedom; it will work equally for everyone. But a standard is imprisonment; everyone must fit themselves to it. Why can't a thing only have the good parts?
Let me continue the parade of Six Flags America's Grammatically Almost Right historical posters.
So after a spot of trouble the park closed and reopened and got its fourth wrong it's out of five.
Yes, Mind Eraser was the name of Professor Screamore's SkyWinder and the wild thing is it had that name before Six Flags bought the place. I assume the Crazy Horse Saloon is what became the SteamPub. And six panels in they still have only four wrong-it'ses. The -'s are a little dubious but I think we can allow that for the purpose of this text.
Then in 1998 their owners bought Six Flags and we get two error-free panels in a row!
Pausing for a moment here of a map of the park from the days of Coyote Creek. Sometime in the 90s.
And then the totally different look the park had in 1997 as seen in a reproduction of the park guide for the year.
There were a couple little bits of ride pieces; I imagine this was taken off the Pirates Flight.
Concept art for the entrance, which is pretty close to what the entrance looked like when we were there. They mostly changed the approach to the entrance to add metal detectors.
No it's errors on this eighth panel, but ``rollers coasters'' is an unforced error. I assume some style guide required them to put JOKER and TWO-FACE in all caps but that needless space in TWO- FACE is another flop. So that's a count of five bad panels.
Superman brings us to nine panels, only five of them with problems.
2001 saw the introduction of Batwing, a dangling-participle coaster, that we went to the park three days in a row hoping to see open, without success. But we heard later that the final day we were there it had a rare moment of working, so, shame. We missed it. Also, it's sloppy to talk about the end of the early-2000's coaster wars without mentioning the beginning or their existence or anything. Six problem panels out of ten. (Having written that, I'm not sure this really is dangling. It feels awkward to me, and I don't have any confidence that the author of these knows what they're doing, and resolving a thing without introducing it is a problem, so I'll ding it.)
2005 saw the return of our old friend the wrong it's. Seven problem problems out of eleven.
2012 adds another wrong it's, and whiffs on the spelling of Apocalypse. The recent renaming I suppose explains why it was the only roller coaster with specific merchandise but, really, how did The Wild One not get anything? Eight problem panels out of twelve.
Trivia: Sarajevo's original budget for the 1984 Olympic Games was about $160 million. A referendum for higher taxes to pay for construction was supported by 96 percent of the voters. Source: Encyclopedia of the Modern Olympic Movement, Editors John E Findling, Kimberly D Pelle. The book doesn't say if that was 1984 US dollars or the book-publication-2004 dollars. It notes that about that time Yugoslavia saw inflation of about 50 percent so one imagines any budget figures are really just ``bunches of money''.
Currently Reading: The Red Planet: A Natural History of Mars, Simon Morden.
