Over on my humor blog we've reached the end of another MiSTing and who knows what I'll dig out to share next. Also in miscellaneous other stuff I ramble about hair dryers and doughnut celebrations. Just look if you don't believe me:
- MiSTed: FX Down To Mobius, Part 19: News From Ferretara
- I May Be Understimulated and Need Better Things to Think About
- Statistics Saturday: Buying Guide To Hair Dryer Models
- My Pick Is ‘Have Something to Put Furniture Against'
- Statistics May: Only For Real This Time
- What's Going On In Gil Thorp? Is _Gil Thorp_ done with the interlaced plots? March - May 2026
- I Spell It the Long Way So as to Burn Off More Doughnut Calories
- MiSTed: FX Down To Mobius, Part 20: The End
We'll spend today with more of the Merry-Go-Round Museum because there is so much to look at even if you've seen some of it before. A lot of it you have not.
Skeleton just hanging out in one of the chariots. It's looking backwards, it doesn't have the head of a horse.
The inner side of one of the horses --- I think this is one of the horses they built as a duplicate of one they raffled off --- with the light glowing behind.
And here's the inner side of the rabbit that, alas, is too small for ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger to ever ride.
Back to the video panel explainers. An advantage of the rotating screen is that they can show more information about each item and, for example, identify that the British centaur is that of Second Boer War general Joseph Maria Gordon. I do not know why the scare quotes around U.K. in identifying the carver. He was promoted to Major General only after the war; during the conflict he was made a centaur for he was chief staff officer for Overseas Colonial Forces.
Here's General Gordon leading an ostrich.
And here's an old figure that hasn't been restored, or at least not restored in decades.
Now, in front of the M C Illions scenic panel was this array of horses from, turns out, Dorney Park!
Here the panels were very helpful as they rotated through several pieces of the 1901 carousel's history, which Dorney Park used as a special-events carousel until a couple years before the fire that destroyed their 1930s carousel.
The carousel was painted red-white-and-blue for the Bicentennial, a choice which seems hard to make stylish but there you go. I assume the current paint is a reproduction of whatever the pre-bicentennial look was.
The 1901 Dentzel sea horse; look at all that gold fringe there.
And the lion's also from the 1901 Dentzel, I believe. The camel, who can say?
Slightly more up-close picture of the sea horse so you can use it to make your own carousel postage stamp.
Trivia: Gemini 4 carried about seven thousand square inches of AMERCO sponge cloth lining installed along bulkheads, sidewalls, the floor, hatches, console sides, and stowage boxes, with the hope that the material would absorb excess moisture inside the spacecraft, despite some fear that the heat of reentry might make absorbed water boil. It did work, although there was evidence of steam on reentry, not enough to require redesigning the 'wallpaper'. Source: Gemini 4: An Astronaut Steps Into The Void, David J Shayler.
Currently Reading: The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, Roland Allen.
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Date: 2026-06-05 09:48 am (UTC)