Dig the seagull fly across the sky

[austin_dern]

As we wandered about the other pier -- Funtown Pier -- we saw probably a better diversity of rides, although it would have been hard to have had more fun at that one than at Casino Pier. As we didn't get around to buying new tickets too we spent more time looking at the rides and logically deconstructing them, as for example the Arctic Circle Himalaya -- here, ``Arctic Circle'' is the name of the ride, and ``Himalaya'' is its genre. (Well, maybe not. Apparently it's called a ``Himalaya'' only by some manufacturers, and the same idea is a ``Music'' or ``Musik Express'' or a ``Silver Streak'' from other manufacturers.) The cars roll around the light display and the decor is inspired by polar bears and glaciers and penguins, which implies that the penguins are foreign talent.

There are also several Ferris Wheels, which I point out as a bit of pride since my graduate school, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, produced the person who invented the modern Ferris Wheel, George Washington Ferris. I grant that the name sounds like one you would make up if you had no idea that there was a specific inventor or what his name might be. You can practically hear every panic-struck cartoon child giving that name as a bluff. And we speculated about the meaning of a couple of tall towers, only to be horrified to learn they were part of the Sky Coaster. In this nightmarish ride, the passengers are strapped into a harness, the harness strapped to wires, and the harness swung from maybe a hundred feet up, down to precariously close to the ticket booth, and back up again, and only gradually lowered when, we assume, the ride operators' demands are met.

Other acrophobic-terror rides are the Tower of Fear (that may be tautological), and the Slingshot. I had been talking again about the Reverse Bungee only to discover that Funtown Pier had its own Reverse Bungee, here called Slingshot. Theirs is only a two-seater, rather than Singapore's three-seater, and I don't know if you can get a video CD of the experience, but it brought what spaceroo and I had ridden very dramatically home. It looked scarier here than the similar thing had by the Singapore River.

Trivia: In the wake of France's occupation of the Ruhr in 1923 and major flooding along the Siene, Pierre de Coubertin discreetly arranged for the 1924 Olympics to be relocated from Paris to Los Angeles in case of a general European war or financial collapse. Source: Encyclopedia of the Modern Olympic Movement, Editors John E Findling, Kimberly D Pelle.

Currently Reading: The Arms of Krupp, 1587-1968, William Manchester. Gads. It was depressing even given that I knew I was going in reading about the leading German arms manufacturer for the Second World War.

Comments

[spaceroo.livejournal.com]

but it brought what [info]spaceroo and I had ridden very dramatically home. It looked scarier here than the similar thing had by the Singapore River.

Last week my wife and I went to the local Great America park in Santa Clara for the first time. (I'd just never got around to it before, and this was an opportunity to go for free thanks to a work function.)

Something I realized after riding a few things is that it seems to be really difficult to judge exactly how "scary" a ride actually will be when you're looking at it from the ground. Possibly the most violent and disconcerting thing we rode that day was the "Psycho Mouse", which from the outside looks both small and slow but in actual fact subjects the rider to grueling (bordering on painful) horizontal gee forces on a track *plenty far* above the ground to scare the liver out of you. (I guess now that I've read up on "wild mouse" rides I know that making you feel like you're going to fly out and plummet to your doom is the whole point.)

Thinking back... for me possibly the "scariest" part of the Singapore bungee came after the fact. It's funny, but I hadn't *really* taken in the spectacle of the thing going off until after we'd done it ourselves. Later on when we were still at the waterfront I made a point of watching it from sufficient distance to see the whole thing at once. It was fairly horrifying to see *just how high above the towers* the little roll cage we'd been strapped into actually gets at the top of the shot, and how fast it gets there. It's sort of the opposite of a Wild Mouse really, since as exciting as the Bungee was it just *may* look worse then the ride actually feels. If I'd watched a shot as closely as I did later before we rode it I might of changed my mind about wanting to go. Thus I'm glad I didn't. ;^)

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that appears to be the main point of the wild mouse sort of ride. The one on the Casino Pier was really good since it added the fear that you might drop into the ocean. (It's not that close to the edge of the pier, although the Star Jet or Jet Star or what have you is on the edge.)

As I recall the Reverse Bungee only went up to about one and a half times the height of the towers, but the towers were pretty high up. My scariest moment was on the second drop, when the cage had rolled forward so that we were facing the ground directly while accelerating.

I want to say the sky-coaster thing was more terrifying-looking, given how little harness there was around the riders as they're dropped, but it's not like the Reverse Bungee cage was a hamster ball either.

I spent a lot of time trying to get a good shot of the Reverse Bungee in mid-flight, and I have managed to get a couple at night, although the cord isn't quite as bright a blue as would make the picture ideal.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

Wild mouse cars always have their front wheels set very far back so that the nose of the car goes well over the edge on the hairpin turns.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure if the axles of the wild mouse we kept looking at actually did compress together or if they only looked like it. It looked tight, anyway.