austin_dern

The roller coaster. I'd mentioned that in passing. I also mentioned the carousel at Quassy a couple times. I'll take that first.

The Grand Carousel is housed in a round building from 1927, although the ride itself is a modern Chance-made fiberglass carousel. Quassy's web site says they installed it in 1990. These facts make it sound like they had a Golden Age Of Carousels carousel, sold off in the big carousel craze of the late 80s and replaced with a sadder replica. I can't find evidence of that, though. If it is the backstory then the park apparently managed, like Waldameer Park, the rare trick of selling off its antique carousel and then surviving more than a couple sad years.

Despite being a standard model, though, this is an interesting carousel anyway. It's all in the painting. Most fiberglass carousels go for bright, reflective, sparkling painting. There's good reason to. But Quassy's carousel is more understated, more pastel, less garish. It looks almost more naturalistic, to the extent that word applies to a split-tailed hippocampus. The paint scheme makes the carousel look a bit more dignified than usual. I don't know if this is a deliberately considered look or if the mounts have simply gone so long since painting that the fiberglass has faded. But the wood looks fresh-varnished, and the carousel center certainly bright and solid. There isn't evidence of the park skimping on paint elsewhere in the park. So maybe they just want their carousel to be more interesting than the usual.

And now finally let me talk about the Wooden Warrior. As with Roar-a-Saurus, this is a junior wooden roller coaster. It's not very tall; the Roller Coaster Database lists its greatest height as 35 feet, and greatest drop as 45 feet. The ground isn't perfectly level but I don't think it's quite that far off level. Still, it is a small ride.

It's also a fantastic ride. Again like Roar-a-Saurus, this is a ride that does a lot with its speed, giving a lot of very satisfying drops and bunny hops. It has a good number of twists, as well. It's got a footprint not so convoluted as Roar-a-Saurus has. Wooden Warrior has a layout that looks more like a T. If it isn't the basic footprint of a wooden roller coaster from the Golden Age of Such, it ought to be. It feels timeless.

We had a moderate wait the first time through, when the park was crowded, but it was never really a bad wait. We were able to get several rides on, which only reinforced how great the roller coaster was. The question of which is the better ride, Roar-a-Saurus or Wooden Warrior, is a tough one. If forced to pick, I think I would come down on Wooden Warrior just for having a more traditional layout. They're so similarly delightful that choosing between does have to come to which one better meets inessential aesthetic grounds.

The ride has a plaque, thanking ``the elementary students listed below'' for the naming of ``this Marquee Attraction''. And it names several dozen kids from a fourth-grade class in Middlebury Elementary School and a fifth-grade class at R M T Johnson Elementary. And then it goes on not to explain the naming process, of course. It's easy to imagine that local elementary schools were surveyed to give names, but then, did two independent classes come up with ``Wooden Warrior'' and they both deserved recognition? (I can't believe that two top candidates were merged together, since while ``Warrior'' might do, ``Wooden''? No, nobody submits that as a name, and it doesn't stand out in the pile of candidates.) Also, even if Mrs Zafrin's class voted to submit ``Wooden Warrior'' as a name, did every student vote for that name? What was the opposition name? And then are kids who voted against the name commemorated on the plaque? Or are there names not on the plaque who were in those classes?

Just what kind of ``warrior'' the roller coaster is doesn't get exactly explicitly named, although you don't have to try very hard to figure it out. The logo features a feather-quilled arrow. And the train has a shining metal arrow mounted on its front, just as if it were a ridiculously dangerous 1960s hood ornament. So it skirts around using American Indian iconography without getting at the troublesome parts. (One might complain about the use of ``warrior'' as an icon for an amusement park ride. But aggressive roller coaster names are so embedded in the culture it's almost shocking when a new major coaster isn't aggressive. We've come a long way since a roller coaster might be named Chase Thru The Clouds.)

But they're making room for trouble anyway. Outside the ride is a comic foreground where you and a friend can put your heads atop the bodies of coaster-riding General Custer and I Dunno, Some Warrior Brave Or Something. (The Indian is shown wearing a rides wristband. Custer's is presumably hidden under his cuff.) Well, it's their annoying fight to have sometime, not mine.

The roller coaster is fantastic. We would close out the day here, just as we had with Roar-a-Saurus at Story Land. We did get at least one front-seat ride. And we were among those on the next-to-the-last ride of the night, at 8 pm. The park closes early, almost Michigan's Adventure early.

We'd have taken more hours there, if available. But it'd be ridiculous complaining about this. We had a magnificent day, one of our greatest single-day park experiences ever. The park was beautiful, a great mix of older and newer attractions. The crowds were lively but not too much. The weather warm and sunny without being hot. The roller coaster we most wanted to get to, we did, and found it to be better than we had hoped. This was the best day of the New England Parks Tour.

Trivia: The guidance computer on Minuteman II missiles, in the first half of the 1960s, used over twenty types of integrated circuits. The Apollo Guidance Computer, designed in the same era, used one type, though about five thousand of them. Source: A History of Modern Computing, Paul E Ceruzzi.

Currently Reading: Symmetry In Mechanics: A Gentle, Modern Introduction Stephanie Frank Singer.

PS: Reading the Comics, October 5, 2015: Boxes and Hyperboxes Edition, more comic strips, with some hyperspace.

So let me talk more about interesting stuff at the park. Well, they seem to have a mascot, although I either missed or don't remember his name. He seems to be a frog, though. I can't find his name since they have a Frog Hopper kiddie ride and you see where the search engines will turn up that instead. Well, we saw him giving out high-fives to kids. He was wearing a yellow and red striped shirt, and black shorts, giving him the air of ``probably a soccer player in some southern-European country''. I will assume that's what they were going for.

And they had live entertainment, at the Carousel Theatre. This is located near the carousel, although it's not enclosed or anything. Their particular entertainment was a pair of magicians whom I think were husband and wife. He mentioned having been doing shows at the park for something like ten years running now. Their show, ``The Classics of Magic'', had a sign featuring what looked to me like the CGI version of Harvey Comics devil Hot Stuff, about as unthreatening as you can get.

And it was that sort of magic show: pleasant, goodnatured, unthreatening. (Well, really, who would go to a small amusement park for scary magic shows?) There was some pure terror on display, as the magicians called a couple kids up to do stunts and even say stuff out loud in front of an audience, on purpose, to people. The kids were so visibly relieved when they were allowed to run back off the stage that I felt relieved myself.

They also did the comic gimmick of following telephone directions to do a magic trick, much as the shows at one of Cedar Point's Halloweekends events has done the last few years. This time it was framed as phoning a dial-a-trick number, rather than Googling or asking Siri for a stunt. It's an irrelevant change, except for distracting me with thoughts about the history of this stunt's framing device. Also whether kids today have any idea what dial-a-trick numbers are all about, when they might use Google or ask Siri instead.

The wife did fewer magic tricks and more setup and such. She wasn't dressed all that differently to her husband, though. That is, she wasn't set up in the typical eye-candy sort of role. This felt refreshing.

There's a C P Huntingdon miniature train ride that putters around a wide swath of park and field. If Quassy's web site is to be believed it's the oldest ride they have at the place, as best I can make out. They date it to 1948, at least, a bit older than the Little Dipper and their other Kiddielands package rides. (Well, they date having this train ride to 1948; the web site says ``several models of the miniature train have operated'' there.) This doesn't tour very much of the park, though. Most of it chugs out into the forest, along a path that left me wondering just where the trolley from town used to come from. It makes an orbit that encloses a couple of the squash and volleyball and other ordinary recreational-park type areas of the park. And then it swings over by the Wooden Warrior, the park's major roller coaster. The roller coaster goes over the train at some parts of its path, though we didn't have the timing right to see that. The train does accelerate rather alarmingly going into a tunnel, though. This makes a pretty sedate ride more exciting than you'd expect.

Trivia: Francesco di Marco Datini, c1335 - 1410, was a trader and banker. Some 300 partnership agreements, 500 ledgers, and 150,000 of his letters survive. Source: The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea, John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge.

Currently Reading: Symmetry In Mechanics: A Gentle, Modern Introduction Stephanie Frank Singer.

PS: The Set Tour, Part 3: R^n, a whole collection of sets found as domains often enough.

Quassy Amusement Park hasn't got very many rides, which is part of why we felt comfortable getting there surprisingly after noon. We eased into the park still, not running directly for its Grand Carousel or its junior wooden roller coaster, the Wooden Warrior. Instead we went to the Music Fest, a Himalaya-type ride with psychedelic-rock theming. In that area there's also a helter-skelter that we assume we were too big to ride; from the park's web site apparently we would've been allowed on, had we really wanted to slide. So it goes. We did ride the bumper cars, though, and that I note just because while we were waiting we overheard some folks talking about their love for the park and this sort of summer day and that's always so happy to hear.

We also took the chance to ride the Paratrooper ride. That delighted us just for how wonderfully casual the ride operator was about everything, and for how old-fashioned the ride mechanism was. It was actually controlled by levers, just like you see in old-fashioned pictures of amusement park rides, and while things were in order he was just sitting back on a box, foot pressed onto one of the levers. It was just the way you'd set the scene to portray a park with a relaxed operating attitude.

There's a lot about the park that feels casual and relaxed. There's also a lot that gave me the feeling of Jersey Shore pier amusements. Part of that is the way stuff that's visually striking and in good enough shape has just been left around. Atop the arcade building, for example, is a Humpty Dumpty egg. Why? No obvious reason. There aren't sculptures for other fairy tales or nursery rhymes or such around. It looks as if they just had this around from some earlier, lost project, and figured there was no reason to throw it out as long as it didn't need to be put back together. Inside the arcade is the sign for a Mad Mouse ride. Quassy had a Mad Mouse roller coaster from 1982 to 2010 (and a Wild Mouse from 1960 to 1983, says the Roller Coaster Database, so there were two years where they were positively mouse-rich, if both were operating).

We ate at the Quassy Restaurant, despite the attractions of the Potato Patch and some other spots. This one is on the lakefront, and had vegetarian burgers. I didn't notice til after lunch they had packets of tartar sauce, which would have been preferable on my burger and fries to mayonaise, but, too bad. We did watch the water, though. There's a boat, the Quassy Queen, that does a forty-minute tour of the lake, though we didn't find the time to ride it. They also have paddle boats, rentable by the half-hour. And there's apparently no restrictions on where you can go, in them. No roped-off area or anything, not even a lifeguard whistling at you for puttering off into the distance. We were able to barely make out a couple that had paddled their boat to the great distance, barely visible specks. Good luck to them, trying to reach the Long Island Sound.

The arcade was mostly redemption games, with a shooting gallery and a couple of video games. They did have one pinball machine, but it was South Park. Not my favorite game. I don't like the theme and don't like the gameplay. But we did want to support parks putting pinball machines in arcades, so ... we couldn't put coins in. The arcade games all run on some prepaid card scheme and if there's a way to get just one or two dollars on a card it wasn't obvious. And anyway we couldn't work out whether the South Park card reader was actually working; its miniature screen wasn't working. I did ask one of the attendants about it, and was directed to ask another attendant, who wasn't around.

But there was a windfall anyway. Someone abandoned a pack of two hundred redemption tickets. After making a good-faith effort to find whose they were, we kept them. At the end of the day --- literally; we got back to the arcade as they were closing up and they had to think about whether we could redeem them --- I bought a very cheap Quassy Amusement Park clock with it. It's a little thing with painted-plastic amusement park scenes on it, and a clock that's not actually set so that 12 is up top. It's chintzy and we haven't put in a battery to see if it actually works. But wouldn't using it as a clock really be missing the point of the thing?

Trivia: France banned the import of cotton in 1686. Source: Big Cotton: How A Humble Fiber Created Fortunes, Wrecked Civilizations, and Put America On The Map, Stephen Yafa.

Currently Reading: Moon Bound: Choosing and Preparing NASA's Lunar Astronauts, Colin Burgess.

PS: Reading the Comics, October 1, 2015: Big Questions Edition, some mathematics comics plus a Zeno-type paradox involving basketball for you.

As we'd closed out the Pinball Wizard Arcade all the places to eat nearby were closed, including the Hannaford supermarket. We speculated whether we'd find a Denny's somewhere on the path to the hotel, which was back on the outskirts of Cambridge. We stopped at a Dunkin' Donuts, because after all, there was one at the next block, wherever we were. We got to our hotel, a Red Roof Inn located next to a Dunkin' Donuts, and settled in for the night.

I am not a light sleeper. I am aware of incidents from college when I slept through fireworks in the dorm hall. bunny_hugger is a light sleeper, and has sometimes been woken up by my dreaming about sleeping through fireworks in the dorm hall. So you can imagine what was going on that sometime around 3:30 I woke up to the noise of some squealing people down the hall.

For a few moments I thought it maybe would pass. It was late Saturday, stuff was going on, maybe some room party got a bit raucous, surely it wouldn't go on. It went on. Why? Maybe it was a party. A party given by very oblivious people. I put pants and shirt on, found my room key, and went out to try to figure out what the heck was going on.

At this point I had not the slightest idea what I would do when I found the noise source. The clearest idea I had in mind was that, if it was just a room party that didn't realize there were other people in the hotel, to walk up to it, to as near the center of noise as possible and then declare, ``I thought I heard something''. And improvise from there. But I supposed that starting from harmless comic would give me the best chance to get them to quiet down a couple dozen decibels, while leaving room for me to escalate if that were needed.

It was not a party. It was a group of young women screaming at a group of young men. They were not a happy bunch. I do not know exactly what the point of their contention was. Nor did I care. I decided to walk up without saying anything.

Now I need to put in another point about this. Something which doesn't come across in my writing is that I am a large man. I'm somewhere around six foot three inches. I'm bearded. With thick eyebrows. A friend recently described a picture of me as conveying the image ``Klingon military governor of Organia''. Add to that disheveled hair and a generally worn-out look because it was 3:30 am after a half-week plus of amusement park touring.

So I picked a new strategy. I would walk up to them and not say anything until I had to. Somehow, though, the appearance from nowhere of a large, angry-looking, scary-looking man reshuffled their priorities. They started asking who I was. I didn't answer. They asked what I was there for. I didn't answer. They asked if I was the manager. This surprised me; I hadn't thought of that implication. Still, I didn't answer. The guys fled. The women started apologizing and begging forgiveness. I didn't answer. Then it got weird.

The women who remained started explaining some complicated backstory about the fight that was going on. The phrase ``baby daddy'' was actually thrown in, with no trace of irony or amusement. They explained something about being from Puerto Rico and how if they were thrown out of the hotel they would lose three hundred dollars and that would ruin them. I thought about the days when three hundred dollars would have been a ruinous unexpected expense for me. I didn't answer. One of them asked if I wanted money. Would I take money? She'd give me eighty dollars if I let them stay the night. I didn't answer. A hundred dollars. I didn't answer but wondered what a worse person than me would do in this situation.

The important thing was that after a few minutes of begging me to not throw them out, the women in the room had quieted down and the men they were fighting with were gone. This was as much as I wanted, so I walked back to our room, content, after having done nothing but be present. I explained the situation to bunny_hugger. She was awestruck by my courage. I don't think it was anything. If it took anything it was just a little physical courage, which everybody has. We settled back to sleep.

For about ten minutes. Then the fighting started up again. Possibly my campaign of doing nothing but existing was not the most effective. So I dressed up again and went out to repeat my performance, possibly adding the twist of saying something. There was a guy back at the room, arguing with a different woman, and they saw me coming and asked if I was the manager, or someone sent by the hotel.

The guy ran off quickly. The woman remaining started spinning out some other complicated story which included the accusation that ``he'' had wrecked (her, her sister's, her friend's, whichever) car, and she pointed over the balcony edge to a car that was indeed in the middle of the lot. It didn't seem obviously damaged to me, but how could I tell? I didn't answer. She began to run off and raced right into the cop coming up the stairs.

Now she began explaining all of this yet again. I would have been happy to retire at that point but supposed that since a cop had seen me around the commotion I had best wait to be dismissed as ``a guy down the hall who was trying to sleep''. This took a fair time to get through, so I was away from bunny_hugger long enough she was worried but had also started to fall asleep again.

It transpired that while I was away, bunny_hugger called the front desk to complain about the commotion. They knew about it and explained the police had been called in and that was all they could do. She was satisfied with that and hung up, and does not remember actually saying ``thank you'' or ``good night'', but remember, it was getting near 4 a.m. All that settled we went to sleep.

About twenty minutes later I was woken by the beeping noise of a tow truck that, I assume, took the wrecked(?) car away.

Trivia: In 1908 the British War Office concluded there would be no strategic benefit to attacking German colonies in case of war, and there would be little point in defending British colonies from attack. Source: The Vulnerability of Empire, Charles A Kupchan.

Currently Reading: Roads To Infinity: The Mathematics Of Truth And Proof, John Stillwell.

PS: How September 2015 Treated My Mathematics Blog, which was ``not good enough for me'' and so I get all grumbly about that.

The thing drawing us from Massachusetts back to New Hampshire was the Pinball Wizard Arcade. This is what it sounds like, although the location is tucked inside a strip mall so I didn't see it at first. I was surprised to learn it didn't have a pay-one-price admission; I had imagined something akin to the Silverball Museum. What they have instead is just an arcade. You go in, change money for tokens, and play games with the tokens. The Pinball Wizard Arcade is, in many ways, what the Brighton Arcade had wanted to be. It's got a vast room --- this clearly used to be an anchor store, something the size of a sporting goods place --- with row after row of pinball machines going back to the 70s, and past that, video games going back to the 80s. Yes, there's a Pac-Man eating a bunch of dots on the wall, as decor. Also yes, there's an REO Speedwagon CD among the redemption prizes at the counter.

They've got a lot of machines, some of them true novelties. The most interesting was America's Most Haunted. This is one of the exceedingly few boutique pinball machine projects not to have collapsed in a fiasco of bad money management and fraudulent licensing. The theme is a Scooby-esque set of adventurers poking around haunted houses, abandoned hospitals, that sort of thing, looking to catch ghosts. It feels surprisingly smooth and professional for what's essentially a hobby creation. I obviously have no idea how well the game wears, since we played maybe four rounds of it total, but it was quite nice.

They also had Hercules, the double-sized pinball machine we'd seen at Canobie Lake Park and that Cedar Point has two of. The game, at Cedar Point, is invariably slow and disappointing, with many people wandering off before they get their three balls. Canobie Lake Park's was turned off. Pinball Wizard Arcade's Hercules, though, is in good shape, everything as snappy and responsive as the machine could be. And with that difference the game is ... well, fun is overstating it. But much more enjoyable, with the feel of a mid-70s game only really quite large, and slow. The slowness is still its problem --- one kid playing did abandon his game after two balls --- but I stuck it out and felt fairly satisfied.

Among video games they had Joust 2 and Wacko, both machines that the Brighton Arcade always had but never had working. Joust 2 expands on the Joust premise by sometimes the ostriches can turn into horses and I don't know what you do with that because I can't play video games. They also had Q*Bert Cubes, in which hopping on the cube causes it to rotate on the x- or y-axis depending on which direction you come from. So you have to do a bunch of SO(3) rotations to get the correct color on top of the whole pyramid. Again, I was awful at this.

Wacko I had wanted to see because of its premise: you're an alien in a flying saucer, trying to collect pairs of animals. Two dinosaurs, two gorillas, that sort of thing. The catch is, you have to shoot pairs in succession. If you shoot a dinosaur and a gorilla, they get mixed up: one that's a dinosaur head on a gorilla body, one that's a gorilla head on a dinosaur body. If you happen to scramble the monsters enough that you have, say, two dinosaur-head-gorilla-body creatures, that counts as a pair. Otherwise you have to unscramble them and catch them in order. I wasn't good at this either, because again, video game. But it's a fun thing and I'm surprised it hasn't been adapted into a video game app because it's basically exactly the right scope and whimsy for a time-filler game like that.

They had Mappy, an early 80s video game in which you play a constable mouse foiling burglar cats by jumping on trampolines to get up to their level, then opening doors to stun them with the power of music. Again, 80s video game. Also, that's what you do. I send Mappy to his immediate death when I hop onto a trampoline, it breaks, and I fall through to the subbasement.

Among the pinball machines I was not terrible at were Bad Cats, a late 80s thing with a huge heaping pile of cartoon cat-and-mouse mayhem and mild sexism. Harlem Globetrotters On Tour, so you know exactly when this machine was made. Paragon, which we'd seen at the Michigan Pinball Expo and not since. I passed up the chance to play Popeye Saves The Earth, because they'd just gotten it in at the Brighton Arcade. The Brighton Arcade has since sold off their Popeye along with most everything else. And I came just short of rolling the score on the 1979 Flash, which is the only thing that makes a fantastic game feel disappointing. I had a similar above-my-level game of Scorpion, that did register as the highest score on the table. It was also a suspiciously even 700,000 points, so nobody will believe me even though I took a picture.

Enough bragging. The arcade also had a bunch of machines I'd only ever seen in Pinball Arcade, such as The Champion Pub (which was in the Brighton Arcade for a couple minutes, never working well) and Party Zone and Who Dunnit. I never got what was so fun about Who Dunnit in the arcade version; playing the real thing, though, I started to see what the game was going for.

Among the modern games they had which we didn't play was Wheel Of Fortune, a 2007 game which mightily baffled the players at the Harvest Festival Pinball Tournament I wrote about on Monday. If I'd had a little more experience on that ... well, that probably wouldn't have helped. Wheel is a weird game.

We closed out the arcade. Of course we would; how could we not? We could easily have spent a whole day there.

Trivia: The tenth month of the Babylonian calendar, Ziz, was dubbed Tebetu in the Semitic calendar and Peritios in the Seleucid calendar. Source: Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History, EG Richards.

Currently Reading: Roads To Infinity: The Mathematics Of Truth And Proof, John Stillwell.

PS: How Gibbs derived the Phase Rule, reblogging a bit of thermodynamics stuff.

And ahead of the mathematics posts of the past week, here's some more Santa's Village pictures.

bunny_hugger sitting at one of the park's statues. There's snowmen and the like also in the park. I'm ... not exactly sure what the rabbit has to do with Christmas. Yes, that's a coffee shop in the background.

The Hot Shots Fire Brigade! One of the few completely non-Christmas-themed rides at the park. The whole structure rotates and the platforms go up and down while water squirts at targets in the windows.

Bunny! From the train ride around the back of the park. One of the local rabbits (far left, center) seemed quite at ease with the train full of people chugging along, admittedly thirty feet away. bunny_hugger has since concluded this was likely a snowshoe hare, which she's always wanted to see in the wild, so naturally we would see it in its summer pelage.

Spartan pride! An S shield nailed up deep in the woods and left without explanation. Apparently there's a local team called the Spartans, that happens to use a green S rather like Michigan State's, although come to think of it Michigan State usually puts it as a white S on a green field.

Santa's List! Do you see your name on it? If you do, do you know whether this is Santa's list of good or of bad kids? Shouldn't you have checked that first?

And what's run on my mathematics blog since last Sunday?

• Reading the Comics, September 16, 2015: Celebrity Appearance Edition since Einstein gets a mention, and I find a way to rope Gibbs into things.
• Reading the Comics, September 22, 2015: Rock Star Edition, so called because it mentions Tool.
• The Set Tour, Stage 2: The Real Star, exploring probably the most famous set used as a function's domain and/or range.
• Reading the Comics, September 24, 2015: Yes, I Do So Edition, in which I show off that I can name what Appalachian range Snuffy Smith supposedly lives in. I don't say I'm proud of this.

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Trivia: In 1929 AT&T became the first corporation to have gross revenues of over a billion dollars. Source: Telephone: The First Hundred Years, John Brooks.

Currently Reading: Roads To Infinity: The Mathematics Of Truth And Proof, John Stillwell.

Another ride Canobie Lake Park has that used to be common, and is near extinct, was the Rotor. This is your classic centrifugal ride, standing in a tube and spinning around until you stick to the wall, and then they drop the floor out from under you. I hadn't been on one since Great Adventure in the early 90s. I'd always liked it because, hey, centrifugal force. And a dropping wall. And an observation platform, another thing that's almost extinct in rides. The park has one, called the Turkish Twist and decorated like the Roller Coaster Tycoon concession stand selling Turkish delights. The ride queue didn't take us up to the observation platform and we couldn't figure any way up there. Somehow other people did, though, and we don't know what it was they figured out that we didn't. Here's hoping it keeps spinning.

They have a super-flume ride, the kind that gets you really and truly soaked, called the Boston Tea Party. It's on the lakefront, in a section that's themed to Old New England and that's pretty charming. It was really packed, though, and for all that it was a bright sunny day it wasn't warm enough for us to go on a soaking wet ride like that. But we did, in the Old West themed park, go on their Policy Pond Log Flume. That name, according to a ``facts'' sign in the launch station, ``is derived from the former names of Canobie Lake'', which almost but not quite explains the name. It's a log flume from the early 80s, and most of its time is spent winding through the forest and ground level which makes it feel nicely ... well, like actually riding in a canoe. The flume is not all that soaking and we came through without getting too wet, mercifully, since it was near sunset by the time we were able to ride.

Also in the Old West section is a dark ride, the Mine of Lost Souls. This had an agonizingly long line the first time we went past it and we feared we'd just have to give up on that. But a half-hour or so later, and after some more walking around and doing stuff, we looked again and the line was down to something tolerable. Nice. The ballyhoo for the ride speaks of two boys from Salem discovering gold in a cavern, and disappearing into hidden passageways, enter if you dare, et cetera. People loaded slowly into the trains going into the Mine of Lost Souls and we weren't sure just why. It's not a complicated car, just, hop in, buckle up, and let the bar slide down. For some reason this was slow going.

Something we went on in the middle of the day, unwisely, was the Tiki Maze. The name and bits of its theming are great, but it's just a plexiglass-walled maze. They design the things so that they're hard to get really lost in, but I'd forgotten that it's completely impossible to get lost in one of those things in broad daylight. Had we waited for evening the ride would probably have been better. Wikipedia claims the ride was ``Formerly the Crystal Orbiter, on broken motor-driven platform''. This would explain the circular shape of the outer platform and I imagine if the whole ride were rotating it'd be a little more disorienting and probably a bit better fun at that.

There's a decent number of older-looking rides, mostly kiddie rides, and we spent some good time admiring them and their ancient control boxes and the like. They had classics like a kiddie carousel, yes, and boats and cars that go in endless loops and such. Some of those had clearly new cars on the tracks, but still had running boards featuring 50s-style modernist horses or tigers or hippocampuses or the like, often set against a gold-leaf-patterned background. They also had a kiddie spaceship ride, with the cigar-shaped spaceships featuring the NASA ``meatball'' logo redone with ``CLP'' across them. It was only then that I realized this park and Conneaut Lake Park had the same initials. If I'd been thinking it out I'd have worn my Conneaut Lake Park shirt here. Lesson learned for next time.

Trivia: The New England Confectionary Company (NECCO, of wafer fame) introduced profit-sharing plans to its workers in 1906, and company-sponsored life insurance in 1920. Source: Sweets: A History of Temptation, Tim Richardson.

Currently Reading: Three Weeks In Quebec City: The Meeting That Made Canada, Christopher Moore.

PS: The Set Tour, Stage 2: The Real Star, talking about what's probably the most popular domain for functions.

Canobie Lake Park, obviously, has more rides than just a carousel and four roller coasters. Well, maybe not obviously since it was hard finding time to ride them all. Busy day, as I say. And that's great for them; parks need days that are just packed. But it did mean there were far more things available than we could ride. Which, again, is not a flaw in a park. Just sad to know.

Of what we were able to ride, the most historically significant was the Caterpillar. This is a classic old flat ride that's all but extinct. The cars are arranged in a circle, on a platform with a rise and a fall, much like a Musik Express. The twist that makes it a Caterpillar is that during the ride a canopy loops over the cars and conceals everyone within. Idlewild Park in Ligonier, Pennsylvania, used to have one, but removed it sometime in the years ahead of my and bunny_hugger's first visit; no public information about the ride's status is available. Wikipedia carries the assertion that this Caterpillar used to operate at New Jersey's renowned lost Palisades Amusement Park, but notes there's no citation for that.

It's worth going to. It's a fun ride --- well, the motion is obviously good. And riding it concealed, without being able to see what's ahead, adds to the thrill. There are tales of how, in the ride's heyday of the 30s and 40s, couples would take their moments of being hidden to canoodle. I hate to doubt that our grandparents' generation canoodled; our parents had to come from somewhere. But if the Canobie Lake Park Caterpillar ride is typical, then I can't see how they would even start canoodling without serious injury. Holding, yes, but otherwise ... it's a bit rough.

In the early 30s there was a Dick Tracy sequence where Tracy chases the villain down to the amusement park, and the villain hides on the Caterpillar. Tracy confidently feels his work is done, since he can just wait it out. But the villain sneaks out while the canopy is raised. Again taking this ride as an example, this is a crazy plan. There's not much clearance between the car and the canopy. Getting past that, there's only a few moments the ride is slow enough you could squirm out and not get battered by hitting the ground. But it's a thrilling sequence and it's at least imaginable.

A ride that interested me, but that I think was a kids-only ride and in any case we didn't have time for, was called the Over The Rainbow. It's a balloons-twirling-around ride, and as you might guess is Wizard of Oz themed. What interested me about this is you don't really see many Wizard of Oz-themed amusement park rides, not these days. This seems strange because anything you do mentioning it will draw on the warm feelings everyone has for The Movie, but the actual underlying property is in the public domain. As long as they show silver rather than ruby slippers nobody has to pay anything to anybody. Heck, why aren't there whole Wizard of Oz themed sections of parks? Anyway, the theme, and the gentle-looking nature of the ride, made me think it was some ancient flat ride still in existence somehow. Wikipedia says the ride was installed in the distant days of 2001, though, bought new from Zamperla. This would seem to imply there should be other Over The Rainbow rides out there.

Maybe not, though. The park has only the second Zamperla Kang-A-Bounce ride we've seen. (The first was at Morey's Piers.) This is a great ride, apparently a modern version of the Kangaroo ride that's now just a Kennywood park specialty. The rides moves in circles, with nice big bounces. It's great fun. What threw us was that it wasn't kangaroo-themed. It was instead billed as the Wave Blaster. We didn't know there were alternate themes and, really, why get away from the kangaroo thing on a ride that's about bouncing? Since the ride is nearer to the flume rides and other water-y rides maybe they wanted to keep a theme going there. Or maybe either the park or Zamperla figures big kangaroo-shaped cars are too kiddie a theme for a ride they want adults to get on. No telling, but: parks putting in Kang-A-Bounce rides? Very good thing. Every park should have one.

This Wave Blaster doesn't just rotate forward. It has forward and backward ride cycles. I guess the backward would be harder to reconcile with kangaroo movements but, still. If our day was typical, they give one group of riders a forward cycle, and then the next group of riders gets backwards. So if you can't take backwards rides --- and they are often harder on folks prone to motion sickness --- you have to be aware they're doing this and watch to see what the ride cycle before you does. This seems non-ideal. But then if you're not paying attention at all, you get nicely surprised by your actual ride. And that can be fun.

Trivia: France's Third Republic had no stamps commemorating the nation's history until after World War I, about a quarter century after most European states began using that theme. Source: The Invention Of Tradition, Editors Eric Hobsbawm, Terence Ranger.

Currently Reading: Three Weeks In Quebec City: The Meeting That Made Canada, Christopher Moore.

PS: Reading the Comics, September 22, 2015: Rock Star Edition, getting me nearly up to the present day.

We picked up from the hotel clerk tickets to Canobie Lake Park. We also picked up the correct pronunciation of ``Canobie''. It's said with stress on the first and last syllables, ``can-o-bee'', like you might pick up at Costco to restock a dwindling hive. The clerk explained ``Obi-Wan does not live here''. We'd been saying it wrong until literally days before our trip when bunny_hugger ran across a mention of how the locals don't say it ``kuh-NO-bee'' after all.

Though the hotel is almost literally down the street from the park --- we were under two miles distant --- we didn't quite get there at opening and it was going to be a busy day. Bright, sunny, early August, a Friday; yeah, we'd be taking in lines. Despite that, when we stepped into the park, we had to sit a bit and just admire it. The park's entrance pavilion reminded me of d'Efteling, stone-clad buildings and gabled roofs and oh so many neat, sharp flags catching the wind. It was beautiful to walk into. And then ---

In the Roller Coaster Tycoon line of games, the concession stands are made to look like relentlessly literal images of what they sell. You get burgers from a giant burger-shaped building, soda from a giant cup with rotating straw, that sort of thing. We took that as just a cute convention that spruces up the appeal of the game at the cost of realism until we visited d'Efteling and some other European parks and saw how, like, an ATM might be tucked into a building shaped like a cartoon wall safe. Still, that's European parks, right? Not something that happens in the United States? And then we saw the popcorn vendor, inside a building shaped like a tall popcorn bag, with red and white and blue stripes and a heap of giant kernels on top. The doughnut shop has a big plaster doughnut poking out the top. At the International Food Court there's a giant cup of fries, a scoops of ice cream, a hot dog with all the toppings standing on top of the building. Just as in the video game. We wondered if the game designers actually did draw inspiration from this park. It seems possible.

Canobie Lake Park opened in 1902 or thereabouts. It has a carousel it dates to ``circa 1903'' according to its sign. The National Carousel Association dates it to 1898, though it can only trace its location to 1906. The carousel's been at Canobie Lake Park since then, though. The sign explains the ride has a mix of animals ``carved by the famous artists: Dentzel, Loof, Stein & Goldstein''. (It's Looff.) It's a handsome ride, and the monts look to be in good shape. It's also a two-level carousel, with the outermost rides on a slightly lower platform from the inner ones. The ride has a plaque to the memory of Harold F Nico (?) of Somerville, Massachusetts, ``who enjoyed many wonderful days with his family at the Antique Carousel''. I don't know the significance of this.

Around the carousel though are several penny movie machines. Most of the movies are short comedies, stuff that gets pies thrown at people, although a few were Tom Mix bits. There were some of the penny machines at other attractions in the park too. Somehow, though, we didn't have any pennies, nor were we able to get any over the day. While we kind of expect they don't work, we don't know that they don't. And they are just sitting out there, ready to take change, at least.

On the path from the Antique Carousel to the Yankee Cannonball, their classic old wooden roller coaster, was an arcade and of course we peeked in. They didn't just have a wall labelled Pinball Alley or a handful of machines. They had a real, serious row of machines, nineteen of them. And all set for a quarter a play. Not just older machines, either, although they had those --- Space Invaders and F-14 Tomcat and Whirlwind, for example, or the early-90s Star Wars. They had current, new machines, the kind that can demand 75 cents or a dollar a play, like AC/DC or Spider-Man. Those were also set to a quarter a play. If this weren't enough we would find three more arcades in the park that had pinball machines, and again, all at a quarter a game. If it weren't for the park admission fee this could be the spot for a pinball league.

They had a pinball I didn't realize existed: Shrek. This is just a reskinned version of Family Guy, new props and names given to the modes and all that. But I gave that a try and found ... you know, the Family Guy table maybe isn't actually that bad a game. It's just the theme I'd found impossibly annoying. Shrek had much less of the annoying modes and sound effects and yes I know what I am saying but, really, that's just how it was. So I had a scarily good game, one of those that won't end. This is surely because we knew that we didn't really have time to just mess around playing pinball all day at the park. Pinball folklore is very clear about how having something more important to do produces the best pinball play. So, yes, I ended up on the high score table, although at the #2 position.

One of the other arcades had just a lone pinball machine, and turned off, but what a machine: it had Hercules, the double-sized game made by Atari about 1980. It's a Brobdingnagian game, marketed at amusement parks. Cedar Point has two of them and they always attract attention, and sometimes even people making it through two balls before losing interest because the game is very slow. Anyway, Canobie Lake Park has another, although it wasn't working that day. That arcade was interesting though since it had a small exhibit of local-fauna taxidermy. I'm not clear why. There is a bit of a ``hunting lodge'' theme near that part of the park, but it kind of seems like someone at some point thought, ``well, we've got a dead raccoon and otter and stuff, maybe we can put them by the 90s X-Men machine?'' The arcade also delighted us by having a huge sign for the Water Bubbler. I've heard of that as a New England synonym for water fountain but this was the first time I'd seen it outside of online Other People Call These Things By This Wrong Name lists.

In yet another arcade, one sitting beside the lake and the boat ride which we slowly learned wasn't running they had the 2013 Star Trek. And with nice open doors and the lovely breeze and the game standing beside the doors, looking out onto the water ... well, it was a magnificent setting. What a great place to be, a beautiful park on a beautiful day. I got to High Score Number 4, although on an older version of the game code.

Trivia: At least five hundred varieties of tulips were grown in the Netherlands by 1633. Source: Tulipomania: The Story of the World's Most Coveted Flower And The Extraordinary Passions It Aroused, Mike Dash.

Currently Reading: Hacking Matter: Levitating Chairs, Quantum Mirages, and the Infinite Weirdness of Programmable Atoms, Wil McCarthy.

On leaving Story Land we had a roughly 100-mile drive to our next park. We also had the problem of finding somewhere to eat, since we were busy riding stuff in the last hour before the park closed. I pointed out that we might get something at Dunkin' Donuts, just in time for us to go past it. bunny_hugger seemed disappointed that we did miss it, but I pointed out, there'd be another one along shortly, probably before the turn in the road. She thought I was joking. And there's another of the little local differences things that I still haven't fully appreciated.

See, the closer you get to Rhode Island, the more Dunkin' Donuts there are. In New Hampshire they've achieved the kind of density you got out of jokes about Starbucks circa 2002. Heck --- there were so many there was a Dunkin' Donuts inside Story Land, and that park hasn't got any licensed or franchised food stands besides Dippin Dots. She thought I was somehow being hyperbolic about this. We did get to another Dunkin' Donuts within eight minutes, and got coffee and tea and some snacks. We would pass, literally and without exaggeration, five Dunkin' Donuts before getting on the Interstate, and we'd go past another one in the short ride from the Interstate to our next hotel, a Red Roof Inn in Salem, New Hampshire.

One good thing about the early-closing of parks along the way is that it gave us time in the early evening to do multi-hour drives from city to city. The down side is that we were in small New England towns with not so many places to eat quite so late. We got stuck for where we might get dinner, and finally resorted to a Shaw's supermarket. We got hummus and chips and such, and I thought to get a bottle of Moxie, then realized, why not a 12-can box? (Well, Diet Moxie, but still.) We'd surely drink through that by the end of the New England Parks Tour.

The next evening, similarly stuck for a place to eat, we'd go back to the supermarket. I'd get another 12-can box, because it struck me I'd be in New Jersey another week after that and would need something to drink, after all.

At the hotel we ate, and watched The Final Daily Show With Jon Stewart. Also we learned, from the desk clerk, the most important thing ahead of Friday: how to pronounce the place we were going.

Trivia: In September 1926 George Ohrstrom formed a holding company to acquire the properties for the skyscraper to be built at 40 Wall Street (now dubbed the Trump Building; originally the Bank of Manhattan Trust Company Building). The company was named 36 Wall Street. Source: Higher: A Historic Race to the Sky and the Making of a City, Neal Bascomb.

Currently Reading: Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change From Hawaii To Iraq, Stephen Kinzer.

PS: The Set Tour, Stage 1: Intervals, which I guess is the start of a new series of mathematics posts for me.